The Spiral Staircase

MONSTER OF THE WEEK -- Pinhead

Today our featured monster is Pinhead from Hellraiser, a series of movies Clive Barker wrote and directed based on his spooky little novella The Hellbound Heart.

Pinhead is a member of a race of otherworldy beings called Cenobites.  These beings are summoned by humans who have solved a puzzle cube formed of interlocking geometric shapes.   The cube, generally purchased at an obscure Moroccan bazaar, makes sounds like a music box as it unfolds, opening a gateway into the Cenobites' dimension.  If you ever come into possession of such a cube, DO NOT OPEN IT. 

The Cenobites are seekers of peak experience, and the kind of people who summon them are jaded hedonists who are tired with all the sensations this world has to offer.  Cenobites aren't evil per se (Pinhead says they are "angels to some and demons to others") but are amoral, concerned only about their sadomasochistic experiments.  In their quest for greater and greater intensity of experience, they pretty much torture to death anyone who is dumb enough to summon them by opening the puzzle box (see above re. not opening box). 

The structure of the Hellraiser story is instructive for a writer, because it has two separate antagonists, depraved Uncle Jack, who once summoned the Cenobites and is now trying to free himself from them and the Cenobites themselves, whom the ingenue Kristy mistakenly summons while trying to free herself from Uncle Jack.  Two antagonists are better than one, and it makes for a gripping plot.

I was inspired to check out Pinhead and his friends after seeing the incredible Francis Bacon retrospective at the Met.  Bacon's figures of popes and businessmen imprisoned by thin, glimmering lines and eaten up from within by their own power and appetite evoked Barker's world quite strongly. 

Here's Pope Innocent X:

We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream, and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.

- F. Bacon

Bacon was gay, as is Clive Barker, a fact that seems important to both men's aesthetics somehow.  One of the prime sources of horror in Barker's world (and I'm thinking also of the stories in Books of Blood) is women's sexual power, an insight I doubt any straight male writer would have, at least not in the same way.  The NYT critic touches on the importance of Bacon's sexuality to his work in her review. 

Bacon seems like he would have been a cool dude to hang out with.  He was a drinking buddy of Tom Baker of Dr. Who fame. 

Champagne for my real friends; Real pain for my sham friends.

- F. Bacon (attributed)

He lived a bon vivant lifestyle, surrounded by a close circle of friends and lovers.  His longtime companion George Dyer was a petty thief -- the two met when Bacon caught Dyer robbing his apartment.  The most moving piece in the exhibition to me was a triptych depicting the hotel where Dyer killed himself (incredibly, on the night before Bacon's first major solo retrospective). 

Dyer was deep in the throes of alcoholism and drug addiction by then, but he still had the organization to plan and execute his suicide on the eve of the biggest day of his lover's career.  Contemplate how deeply passive aggressive that is -- a dance of control and pain worthy of Pinhead and his friends.  Sometimes we don't have to open a puzzle box to summon monsters.

Rest in peace, Merce Cunningham

A giant has passed.

Photo: CHARLES E ROTKIN/CORBIS

Daniel Pinkwater on Walter Cronkite

Like most Pinkwater protagonists, the eleven-year-old hero of the surreal and wonderful Lizard Music is a bit of a misfit.  Here is his description of his favorite television star:

Then I got ready to watch the Walter Cronkite show.  Walter Cronkite is my favorite television star.  That’s another reason I haven’t got many friends at school.  Most of the kids like these rock groups like “The Vermin” and “The Scum” and some of these dumb singers who smile all the time and have aluminum foil glued to their jeans.  The kids who like those guys think I’m some kind of freak because I’m a Walter Cronkite fan. 

Anyway, Walter Cronkite isn’t on very much in the summer because that’s when he takes his vacation and Roger Mudd fills in for him.  I watch the show anyway, because if something really big were to happen, Walter would come straight from his vacation to take over.  Another thing I like about when Roger Mudd does the show is the possibility that Walter will die (not that I wish him any harm) on his vacation, and a news flash will come in while Roger Mudd is on the air.  Or he wouldn’t have to die – he could be trapped underwater in a Volkswagen bus with only enough air for two hours, and Roger Mudd could describe the rescue attempts.  Then the Navy divers would get Walter out, and he would say, “That’s the way it is,” and sort of salute into the camera, and the news program would fade out into the coffee ads.  Or it might be good if he did die after all, just after the Navy divers got him out of the sunken bus.  Then he could say, “That’s the way it is,” as his last words.  There are a lot of possibilities to the Walter Cronkite show.  I used to try to get some of the other kids interested in it, and maybe even set up a Walter Cronkite fan club, but they didn’t even take it seriously, and I got a reputation as a crazy.

Hearing Secret Harmonies

I'm sad.  After about six months of reading, I'm about to crack open the twelfth and final book of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.  The books have gotten better as they went along, not just because I got more into it, but also, I suspect, because the process of writing them must have taught Powell a lot.   He published the first in 1951, and continued to pop out a book every two years or so until the final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, appeared in 1975.  They follow the life of Nick Jenkins, a mildly successful British writer, through school, WW2, and the world.

Somebody was telling me about a poem about number theory that contains the line "Twelve is like a chandelier."  

 

Twelve is divisible by all the important numbers.  It is also, Ethan points out, the basis for the blues.  There are four seasons of Nick Jenkins's life, each of which is a trilogy.  The first three books are a tiny bit boring, dealing with Nick's schooling and early development.  Summer warms up, as Nick knocks around pre-war London with his best friends Barnby and Moreland.  The series peaks with the WW2 trilogy, which shows the boredom and silliness of Nick's war experience.  The tenth and eleventh book have been delicious, Powell's comic powers at their peak. 

Knowing what you do best and sticking to it is something I admire.  I've been noticing what Powell chooses to leave out of the books.  There is barely any mention of family life, Nick's wife one of the minor characters in the books, the genders and ages of their children barely mentioned. There is a great deal of satire about political machinations in London society, but there's no actual treatment of politics or history.  People die during the war, but there's no mention of the Holocaust, no battle scenes.  

"The author is the protagonist's witness," Donald Westlake once told my husband.  But we're not qualified to testify about everything. 

In general, Powell is smart enough to avoid his blind spots.  He knows what he was put on earth to witness and sticks to it: the way mythological imagery guides our lives; the dominance hierarchies of the literary world; society gossip; old hotels; the etymology of family names; the tyranny of narcissism; the lurking iceberg of sex; and the music of time, largely manifested through the entrances and exits of friends from our lives, a tune which is too faint for us to hear when we are young but grows increasingly intense as we age.

My Dad died while I was reading these books.  Donald Westlake died, too.  He was the one who recommended them to us, a recommendation I took very seriously, since Westlake was probably the best writer I'll ever get to know personally, and since the books were so very different from Westlake's own work.  When a fine pastry chef recommends a barbeque place, you drop everything and go. 

Don's advice about the series was "Start with book four."  

He said that Powell was dangerous for a writer, because you would be tempted to imitate his rambling, semicolon-filled sentences.  He said he loved this description of the Ufford Hotel, from the beginning of book 3, The Acceptance World.  Dig the rhythm, especially of the last sentence.

Not only the battleship grey colour, but also something at once angular and topheavy about the block's configuration as a whole, suggested a large vessel moored in the street.  Even within, at least on the ground floor, the Ufford conveyed some reminder of life at sea, though certainly of no luxuriously equipped liner; at best one of those superannuated schooners of Conrad's novels, perhaps decorated years before as a rich man's yacht, now tarnished by the years and reduced to ignoble uses like traffic in tourists, pilgrims, or even illegal immigrants; pervaded -- to borrow an appropriately Conradian mannerism -- with uneasy memories of the strife of men.  That was the feeling the Ufford gave, riding at anchor on the sluggish Bayswater tide.

It was hard to get Westlake to talk about what you wanted him to talk about.  After a few glasses of wine, Ethan and I would try to double team him and get him to answer questions about craft, but Don was cagey, and who can blame him.  He wrote over 100 books under various pseudonyms.  I think the more you write the less you like to talk about it.  Anything we needed to know, really, was already there in his books.

A few years ago, my dad sat me down and asked me, sort of formally, "Is there anything you want to know about our family and its history?  I want you to ask me now, while we have the chance."  He said that he wished his own father had given him this same opportunity.

I felt embarrassed because I couldn't think of a single thing to ask.  Now I will have to pick up what I can by rereading and remembering, since he and Don are gone, in Mrs. Erdleigh's words "looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies."

The Military Philosophers

I just finished reading this magnificent book, which is book nine in Anthony Powell's twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time and concludes the trilogy of novels recounting the narrator's experiences during World War 2.  By book nine, Nick Jenkins has been promoted to major in the British army, and he is in charge of a keeping a motley crew of military attaches from various Allied countries happy. 

What makes his portrait of war so powerful is that Powell focuses not on the grand or heroic but on the quotidian.  In this way, he reminds me of another favorite author of mine, WG Sebald, who talks about the tragedies of WW2 through analyzing the logistics of transporting Jews over the railway or disposing of their shoes. 

Powell is a comic writer, though, and he hones in on the ironic in all its delicious manifestations.  Major Jenkins is a cog in the vast corporate machinery of the British army.  Most of the time he is bored or confused.  There is plenty of death, but it never fails to surprise the reader when it comes.  This is a testament to Powell's genius as an author and to his understanding of the nature of The Kindly Ones.

On women in the army:

Very young, she was one of those girls with a dead white complexion and black hair, the only colouring capable of rising above the boundlessly unbecoming hue of khaki.  Instead of the usual ATS tunic imposed by some higher authority anxious that the Corps should look, if not as masculine as possible, at least as Sapphic, she had managed to provide herself, as some did, with soldier's battledress, paradoxically more adapted to the female figure.  It had to be admitted that occassional intrusion at 'official level' of an attractove woman was something rather different from, more exciting than, the intermittant pretty secretary or waitress of peacetime, perhaps more subtly captivating from a sense that you and she belonged to the same complicated organism, in this case the Army.

On generals:

There could be no doubt, so I was finally forced to decide, that the longer one dealt with them, the more one developed the habit of treating generals like members of the opposite sex; specifically, like ladies no longer young, who therefore deserve extra courtesy and attention; indeed, whose every whim must be given thought.  This was particularly applicable if one were out in the open with a general.

'Come on, sir, you have the last sandwich,' one would say, or 'Sit on my mackintosh, sir, the grass is quite wet.'

And the final scene in the novel, when Nick goes to a huge exhibition center in London to collect the free clothes ("the demobilization suit") given to all British soldiers at the conclusion of the war.  Coming as it does after three ironic novels about the war, this is the perfect, anticlimactic final image:

Rank on rank, as far as the eye could scan, hung flannel trousers and tweed coats, drab mackintoshes and grey suits with a white line running through the material.  If this were not a shop, what was it?  Perhaps the last scene of the play in which one had been performing, set in an outfitter's, where you 'acted' buying the clothes, put them on, then left the theatre to give up the Stage and find something else to do.  Or were those weird unnerving shapes on the coat-hangers anonymous cohorts of that 'exceedingly great army,' who would need no demob suits, but had come to watch the lucky ones?. . .

Was this promise of a better world?  Perhaps one had reached that already and this was a celestial haberdasher's.  The place was not even at all crowded.  Most of the customers, if that was what they ought to be called, looked about forty, demobilization groups taking precedence on points gained by age, length of service, time spent overseas and so on.  We wandered round like men in a dream.

Fun with Youtube

Currently checking out this double feature:

Flight of the Conchords

versus

R Kelly/ Usher

Also can't stop watching:

Auto-tune the news  (Thanks to John for this link)

Finally, I'm in love with the second act climax from Neil Gaiman's Mirrormask.  The heroine has been captured by the dark queen, who sends her to her new bedroom to change for dinner...

In Memory of Mike Deming

God bless Mike Deming, who died at age 62 from a blood clot in the lungs following a bad fall.  A very nice man from the Oklahoma City Police Department called us this morning and told us.  We were in a hotel room in Philly after a gig – the exact same way the news came about Ethan’s mom’s death. 

My father was born Millard Grove Deming in Caracas, Venezuela.  The exotic birthplace was due to his father’s employment as a geologist for an oil company. 

My dad’s dad was a brilliant alcoholic, who once accidentally ran my father over with a car, breaking his arm.  My dad’s mom is a tenacious farmer’s daughter, who struggled to raise her three sons alone – my father the eldest – and was the first in her family to get a college education.  She was a boys’ P.E. teacher during WW2, all the male teachers having gone off to war. 

My dad had a clear, logical way of seeing the world.  He also had the most beautiful handwriting I have ever seen.  He worked as a City Planner for Oklahoma City and almost never missed a day of work.  He was quiet, had a sarcastic sense of humor, and loved good food.  He was a big, handsome man with small eyes that looked a little squinty, just like mine.  We shared a love for the study of religion, and some of our best conversations were about the Bible.

My parents met when my mother was working behind the counter of The Now and Then Shop, the store that her father opened after he lost his job in the garment industry in Cleveland.  At the time, it hadn’t yet become a head shop.  My dad was more of a hippie back then – he was a CO during the Vietnam War – and I think it shows something about his open-mindedness that he married a Jew.  But it was not a successful marriage beyond producing me and my brother Dan.  My parents divorced when I was two years old and my mother was pregnant with my brother.  My mother moved from Texas, where I was born, back north to be near her family in suburban Philadelphia.

I only saw my dad every three years or so growing up, and that was hard.  It made it difficult to have easy interactions.  Every time I saw Dad, I felt like I had to prove myself.  I was a precocious, unruly kid who became an angry, intellectual teenager.  I always felt like my feminism and outspokenness was not to his taste.  When I shaved my head in college, I think he took it as a personal affront.

Early on, he remarried a wonderful woman named Donna, who eased the awkwardness by being effusive and kind.  Donna comes from a cattle ranching family, and when I visited we would sometimes go together to the stockyards and watch the cattle being hawked by the fast-talking auctioneers.  I’m sad for Donna having to go it alone now.  She made my father’s life very happy.

At some point I realized that my dad also felt like he always had to prove himself to me.  This was a deep moment for me.  I’d always seen things from my mother’s point of view.  But at some point I realized how tough it must have been for him to doggedly maintain even the limited amount of contact he had with us.  She had left him and taken us halfway across the country, but he still called, he still sent gifts on holidays, he always remembered birthdays.

The turning point came when I graduated from college.  I confronted my father with the fact that I always felt judged by him – he had made a lot of sarcastic remarks about Brown and my degree that weekend – and I was shocked by how much he took this in.  He apologized, and he told me that it hurt so much to see me, because it reminded him of how he hadn’t been around.  He said he thought he responded with jokes to ease the pain. 

My father always surprised me by being able to move forward emotionally in our relationship.  I think this came from his spiritual practice.  I wish I had had the courage to move it forward more.  I have the feeling that, as far as I was willing to push it, Dad would have done his best to meet me there.

The last time he and Donna came to visit, we had a big dinner party and Dave King came over with his family.  It was Easter, so we had an egg hunt, and in the midst of retrieving various eggs, Dave’s adorable toddler Otis knocked over our enormous, steel-framed standing mirror.  It crashed to the floor in a truly spectacular explosion. My dad – while the rest of us were still frozen in shock – stood up to his full six feet, took two huge steps across the living room, and lifted Otis up out of the shattered glass, unscathed.  Otis realized what had happened and began to cry.  Dad passed him right off to Laura King, then sat back down silently.   That’s what he was like.  His cardinal virtue was selfless effort, just making things happen without demanding credit.  He made me happen, and he made my brother happen.  That is a debt I will never repay.

Robert McKee Story Seminar, Act 3

The last day of our three-day seminar ended with a six-hour screening of Casablanca, which McKee stopped every few seconds to elucidate elements of story.  This was an incredible experience.  At the end of the class, we all gave him a standing ovation. 

Not everyone felt so happy.

Overheard in the bathroom while I was sequestered in a stall (and if being in a three-day seminar from 9AM to 8:30 PM every day teaches you one thing, it is to be unashamed about stinking up a public bathroom):

DISGRUNTLED GIRL: The people I feel really sorry for are the ones who came from far away.  I mean, the guy next to me came from DC.  He was so mad.  He paid like $1000 for hotel and airfare, and he could have gotten the whole thing just from reading the book!  I mean, it's the same exact thing, same stories, same examples as in the book. 

OTHER DISGRUNTLED GIRL: Plus he's just so mean.

They're not wrong.  It is the same stuff as in the book.  But, really, who cares?  This seminar was essentially the same thing to me as going to a dharma talk.  Every Buddhist teacher I have ever studied with tells the same anecdotes over and over again.  But the message in both cases is so deep and abstract that the more you hear it, the more you recognize yourself in it. 

Who knows what McKee is really like; as he himself says, when it comes to character, nothing is as it seems.  Ram Dass, speaking on the topic of corrupt gurus, said something along the lines of, "These men are spiritual masters, and the spiritual level of the self is totally different than the personality level.  Most gurus have awful personalities and problems relating to people.  But that is not what they are in our lives for.  They are in our lives to lead us toward enlightenment.  Would you leave a great mechanic if you found out he was sleeping with some of his customers?  Not if you really care about getting your car fixed."

Also, I think that if McKee is a jerk, it has something to do with the tragic loneliness of the teacher, who trots out his old stories and plays it again, over and over, without ever getting back what he gives.  Even though we gave him a standing ovation and $550 each, he can't ever know how deeply his gift has been received. 

As I was getting out of the elevator after one of the lunch breaks, a woman turned to me and asked if I had seen the article in the New York Times about the four women screenwriters who are best friends.  (The article is actually appallingly sexist and silly.)  She then made a sour face and said, "We're too late."  I said, "Don't say that!  We're right on time!" 

Whenever a big group of writers gets together, it brings out our fangs.  We are so solitary, and it's hard not to feel the pinch of competition.  But I believe in abundance.  Which brings me to the thing that, ultimately, I like most about McKee.  He wants you to be your best, to create immortal works of art, even if that means that you surpass him.  This is called Sympathetic Joy, and it is considered the most difficult to cultivate of the four cardinal virtues in Buddhism, harder than lovingkindness, compassion, or equanimity. 

On the train home, in one of those weird coincidences I have experienced every day of this seminar, I ran into my friend Lise.  She was the one who had recommended the course to me to begin with. 

In any temporal art, we must save the best for last.  After dinner, Ethan and I rented Casablanca, and I watched it all over again with him, stopping every few minutes so I could tell him everything I had learned.  Then he played As Time Goes By, just for me.  And tomorrow, he's playing it again.

Robert McKee Story Seminar, Act 2

As we come into the middle of our seminar, plots complicate and deepen.  Perhaps it is my imagination, but McKee seemed meaner and grouchier than on the first day, yelling at anyone (thank God not me) who spoke out of turn and going on even more tangential rants about politics.  I tried to call out answers to some of the questions he asked but always got them wrong.  My butt ached from sitting in the hard chair, it was difficult to keep my eyes open, and I watched with concern as McKee consumed psychotic quantities of coffee and diet Coke.  The middle is always the hardest part.

On the subway to the seminar in the morning, I got a car with this George Eliot quote:

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence."

I got my book signed during the lunch break, and I had a bunch of questions I wanted to ask, so I picked what I thought was the most important one: "What do you think are the best books written about comedy?"  (He had previously mentioned how there are "lots of great books out there on comedy.")  But McKee refused to answer what he obviously considered a stupid question.  He just sort of growled and said, "There's lots of them.  It's impossible to even start naming them.  Grr.  Take my comedy seminar."   This was a drag. 

He signs each book, "Write the Truth."  This was cool.

Some choice nuggets from the day:

"Government funding and the auteur theory destroyed European film."

"All stories are quests.  If you want to know what your protagonist's object of desire is, just ask yourself: What object, if given to the protagonist, would bring the story to a halt?"

"Your protagonist can only be as fascinating and intellectually stimulating as the forces of opposition arrayed against him."

"The cousins of the art of writing are music and dance, because they are also temporal arts, things which unfold in time.  Our goal in these arts is to take someone through time without them being aware that time is passing.  In all art like this, you must save the best for last."

"The greatest crimes are not committed by criminals.  They are committed by governments."

"What evil wants is to reverse nature.  It is natural to beg for your life.  Evil would like you to beg for death."

"Convert exposition to ammunition."

I again sat next to the young kid who coincidentally lives on my block.  The woman on the other side of me coincidentally works with my best friend from childhood. 

Coincidences, according to McKee, are events without meaning.  Life itself is also without meaning, he says.  We give it meaning through the stories we tell.

Somewhere in one of the fun Buck poetic retellings of the Hindu epics, there's this great bit about a swan.  He says that when you pour some milk into a pond full of water the swan can drink just the milk out of the pond and leave the water behind.  That's my goal for this last day: To take the best and leave the rest.

Robert McKee Story Seminar, Act 1

Yesterday from 9 AM to 8:30 PM, I sat in a weird conference room in the Hotel Pennsylvania with a few hundred other writers and show biz types to listen to screenwriting guru Robert McKee lecture about what makes a well-told screenplay.  Not that I necessarily want to write screenplays, but who knows.  All the principals can pretty much be applied to the novel as well, although in the novel we get to see into the heads of characters, which changes things, and also I think POV is a much more important issue in novel writing.  McKee's book "Story" was loaned to me by the agent who is packaging the two pseudonymous porn novels I've been hired to write.  I never gave it back but sent the guy a replacement copy via Amazon, because it was proving so helpful with the revision of my second children's novel.

"Story" is really the only book I've ever read about writing that was useful, and I'm not counting cheerleader-type books like "Bird by Bird" and "One Continuous Mistake" which are also very helpful in terms of repeating to you the one thing you can't ever hear enough of as a writer, which is "Keep going!  You can do it!"

The only drawback of McKee's method is a tendency toward formula or dogma, and I was sort of expecting him to come off as a bit narcissistic in person, but this was the biggest and most pleasant surprise of the day.  He is in fact a great champion of the artist.  He's foulmouthed, funny, and lefty yet un-PC.  He went on an amusing, Rex Stout-ish rampage against the words "network" and "utilize" and a less amusing rampage against the expression "physically challenged."  I am a firm believer in calling people what they want to be called, but I share his rage against euphemism. 

Basically, this dude is tremendously personally reassuring, in the way seeing anyone who is farther along on the artistic path is always reassuring.  There's this thing in the Anne Rice vampire novels where the older a vampire gets, the more powerful they get and the more their body resembles stone.  In one scene, a young vampire reaches out and softly touches the back of an older vampire's hand, just to feel the solidity of it.  I understand now why everyone takes McKee's seminar, many people multiple times.  It isn't an intellectual experience, as reading the book was.  It's more like darshan.

Some great insights, and I paraphrase:

"Talent is the ability to see connections between things that only you can see.  Literary talent is the ability to manipulate language into something higher and more perfect.  Storytelling talent is the ability to manipulate life into something higher and more perfect."

"There are many truths -- left-wing, right-wing -- but we know when we are in the presence of truth.  We know how to tell truth apart from bullshit.  The biggest truths are the bitter ones."

"Cliche comes from not knowing your material well enough.  So does writer's block.  You never know your material well enough without research, even if your work is autobiographical.  Do enough research and the work will almost write itself."

"You'd better know the conventions of your genre, because your audience will."

"Most protagonists do not change; they are simply revealed.  The pressure of life strips away surface layers of characterization to reveal who they really are."

I was seated between two adorable boys in their early twenties.  The one on my right worked for Nova on PBS, and the one on my left was a bartender and aspiring writer/director/actor.  The w/d/a and I turned out to live about three houses away from each other.

On the lunch break I received a rejection on my second children's novel, which I consider the best thing I've ever done and which nobody seems to get.  The publisher had had the ms for a really long time, and it's always hard to have to wait so long just to hear no.  After getting this email, I was very tempted to go to the bar across the street and just begin doing tequila shots, but I made myself go back in the room.  

Then McKee started talking about protagonists of the classic narrative and the way they need to have tremendous power of will in pursuit of their goals.  (This was another part where I had to remind myself of what a different form the novel is, lending itself much more easily to the transparent/passive protagonist -- the Anthony Powell novels, which I have just hit the sweet spot on in the magnificent eighth book The Soldier's Art, feature a protagonist who is almost will-less, nothing more than a nexus of connection.) 

McKee then stopped talking about protagonists and said, "It takes ten years to even start to be a success at writing, and in that ten years you will probably write ten failed projects, and if you are going to get upset about that and expect everything to sell then get the f out of the room because you're an f-ing diletante."  Then he said that if we as writers are so dogged in pursuit of our goals, how could we make out main characters any less so, and if our main characters are so full of will power, how could we be any less so, and this sort of made me want to cry, because the main character of my second novel is such a beautiful kid and all he wants to do is play his viola, and he is based of course on my wonderful husband, who had a martini waiting for me when I got home.  The artists I admire most, people like Ethan and Donald Westlake, are people who just put down their heads and keep working, taking the praise and blame with a grain of salt.  And anyway, if I fail as a children's author, there is always porn to fall back on.