Make Your Case!

In this month's survey on my site, I thought of as many romantic heroes as I could. But if I left your favorite off, tell me who it is and why he should be included.

By the way, if you haven't read this month's newsletter, click here. There's a great interview with copy editor Judy Steer. And you can win a classic romantic movie DVD box set. Click here to enter.

Gwyn
www.cready.com

Another Night with Bruce

Saw Springsteen tonight. Like the most constant friend, I can always count on Bruce. He reeled me in at eighteen and has had me ever since. Interestingly, he is not one of the men that scuttle around my brain when I'm channeling a hero. Not sure why. You'd think that any man I once put in a work bio wrote "She's the One" about me would be pretty high on the fantasy list, but for me, it's all about the music. And the poetry. All of it makes me think, most of it makes me dance, but there a few lines that make me absolutely soar. "Smokestacks reaching like the arms of God/into the beautiful sky of soot and clay" from "Youngstown" is one. "This life, this life and then the next/I finger the hem of your dress/My universe at rest," another. "'Neath the giant Exxon sign that brings this fair city light," one more.



As a writer I'm totally in awe of songwriters. Not only do they have to know how to make music--to me, a miracle in itself--they have to know how to make poetry and they have to be able put the two together in a way that transcends both art forms, all in under three minutes.



Anyway, everytime I think Bruce can't keep doing it, he does. Records that try to change the world. Concerts that make me dance till I'm sore and sing till I'm hoarse. When Bruce yells, "Is anyone alive out there tonight," dammit, everyone is. For two and a half hours, everyone is. Which is about all we can ask of any artist, I think.

Gwyn
www.cready.com

P.S. Okay, I'm no Annie Leibovitz, but the pics do showcase the really cool zoom app for the otherwise zoomless iPhone. I was actually seated out in the parking lot.

Girl Movies, Round One

Another long dry spell on the blog. Sorry, beavering away.

But I was pissed off enough this week to take a breather and post. I was reading a review of the Twilight DVD in Entertainment Weekly by Chris Nashawaty. Now, I haven't read the Stephanie Meyers novels, though a number of my friends have and certainly millions of other people as well. I did see the movie with my fourteen-year-old daughter and was surprised to find I enjoyed it. Surprised because I expected a movie about vampires, which I have little interest in, but instead got a pretty authentic movie about longing, which I understand.

But the thing that made me so mad was the attitude with which Nashwaty approached the film. "It's like the Lost Boys, if the Lost Boys were rewritten by a ninth grader who dots her i's with hearts," he wrote. "Pattinson's Edward stares soulfully at Bella. Bella stares longingly back at Edward. Ugh. Who knows, maybe this is the sort of Harlequin hooey that young girls are looking for."

As a matter of fact, Chris--and I'm pretty sure I don't need to call Entertainment Weekly to figure out you're the Christopher sort of Chris, not the Christine kind--this is what young girls are looking for. And the fact that you disparage it is part of the reason young girls grow up thinking their needs are somehow less important than those of their boyfriends, husbands or fathers and why Hollywood can't string together enough hits to keep the sixty seven movie theaters remaining in America filled.

The first rule of reviewing is to review for what the artist intended. If the writer set off to write a travelogue, don't skewer him or her for forgetting to include action sequences. And the second rule of reviewing is to respect the audience. Young girls, like teenage boys, have certain themes and genres they're going to like, and there's nothing wrong if you're an artist with using insight about your target to make a critic-proof creation. We have a phrase for that in the artist world. It's called "a big effing success." Fast & Furious may have sucked, but it wasn't because it pandered to teenage boys. And Twilight may not be your cup of tea, Chris, but maybe you should consider being honest about the fact you only drink Red Bull.

Gwyn Cready
www.cready.com

Title, Title, Who's Got the Title?

I need your help, folks. Book #3 needs a title. Stripped Bare is the working title, but I know Pocket Books is going to be wanting something less erotic. Just post your ideas here, and every posted suggestion earns a signed bookmark for the poster (email me your mailing address at gwyn@cready.com.)

Here's the basic story line and a couple of pictures to inspire you.




In Stripped Bare, Seventeenth-century painter Peter Lely comes back to life to settle the hash of Ava Stratford, the author of The Girl With a Coral Earring, whose series of sexy, tell-all biographies is driving the dead art world nuts. Lely earned fame and wealth as the royal portraitist to Charles II, but his reputation was made in the lush, intimate paintings he made of the women of the court, whose half-lidded eyes and barely secured dressing room gowns suggest he won their admiration if not considerably more. The last thing he wants is to have his secrets unearthed by the upstart Stratford, whose stories are a mixture of scholarly research, undercover journalism and "make it up if you don't know it" plot lines. Sticking one's finger in the paint pot of history, however, has its price, and Ava soon finds the only way to finish her book is to drop her guard as well as her gown and pose for Peter. But who is posing for whom? The question is never easy to answer.

What Springsteen Means to Me

There's been a long line of men I've had crushes on--from Mister Rogers to David Cassidy to the boy who punched me in the arm all through fifth grade to Johnny Carson to James Garner to Billy Joel to Michael Kitchen to Colin Firth to Jason Statham. But I don't think any have lasted as long as my crush on Bruce Springsteen and deservedly so. I first saw Bruce in the summer of 1980, the summer after my freshman year in college, in the film No Nukes. He was amazing, a fireball of energy and sound and emotion, singing about Mary's waving dress and Mary down by the river. I'd gone into the theater to see Carly Simon, whose music I loved, and left another Springsteen convert.



By that fall, I had all his four albums and was waiting with great anticipation for The River. When I arrived home for Thanksgiving, I was shocked to discover he was performing in Pittsburgh the same weekend. With my dad's agreement, my sister called scalpers on the sly to score me two seventh row tickets as an early Christmas gift--even now, the best seats I've ever had for any concert, Springsteen or otherwise--and off I went, with a full-sized cassette recorder strapped to my chest.

Nothing, not the twenty-odd Springsteen concerts I've seen since, has ever equalled that show. It was the impact of the first. Emile Durkheim in his book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, talks about effervescence, the special energy that some members of a group experience during religious rituals, a feeling which gives rise to the belief in a greater power. I'm not a religious person--certainly not a person of organized religion--but there, in that concert hall, when Bruce held out the microphone and twenty thousand people sang "Show a little faith, there's magic in the night," I felt effervescence for the very first time. I understood.




And it's never changed with me and Bruce. A year after that first concert, I had my first date with my husband at another Springsteen concert. Three years after that first concert, I waited in the alcove of the church in my wedding dress while a string quartet played "Jungleland." Five years after the concert, I met Bruce after a fantastic show in Soldier Field in Chicago during the Born in the USA Tour. He was unfailingly gracious, wore a beret and smelled like Ben-Gay. Eight years after the concert, I stood, pregnant with my son, watching Bruce fall in love with Patti Scialfa during the Tunnel of Love Tour. Eighteen years after the concert, I took my son to his first concert--Bruce Springsteen--and a year after that, at my sister's memorial service, the minister read from the lyrics of "Atlantic City." "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back." Twenty-two years after the concert, Bruce helped lift me and many others out of our post 9/11 shock with The Rising.



Twenty-seven years after the concert, my son bought a Tunnel of Love t-shirt he found in a vintage shop, one that lists the Pittsburgh show which he attended in the womb. In late 2007, I sat in the same concert hall I'd sat in twenty-seven years before and listened to Bruce talk about his own teenage children. Twenty-nine years after that first concert, Bruce helped us usher in a new president, singing a song one would have never imagined fitting both a post-apocalyptic nightmare and the bright dawn of a new age.



Nothing, nothing could have been more fitting for me than to have Bruce play for the Steelers, the team of my father, in that amazing game on February 1. A friend of mine from college commented on Facebook during the game that he was trying to remember what Bruce was like twenty-nine years ago. I suggested he was seeing what Bruce was like twenty-nine years ago. Of course, I'm pretty loyal. But I think Bruce has earned it.

A Milestone January

I'm sitting by the fire, with my dog curled up in my lap and one of my cats at my feet, watching a light snow fall on Pittsburgh. It's pretty darned nice, which is saying a lot for January. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a January basher. I'm a January birthday gal, as a matter of fact, born on the seventeenth. If I was an outdoor sports enthusiast, which I am most definitively not--at my age I try to stay as far away from frictionless sports as possible--I suppose I might even love January. It can be stunningly beautiful.

But it isn't great to have a birthday in January. For one thing, it's a little too close to Christmas for maximum gift infusion. For another, there's always the chance whatever you plan for your birthday will have to be cancelled because of a storm. On the other hand, at least as a kid, there was always the chance school would be cancelled, which was kind of cool.

I think if January was a person, she would be Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief. Cool, slim, blonde, decked out in gems and possessing a devastating wit--just like me, except for the cool, slim, blonde and decked out in gems part. In fact, Betty, the don't-mess-with-me wife of Don Draper on Mad Man, is probably the most Grace Kelly-like in TV or movies today, and the name of the actress who plays her is January Jones, whose birthday is--ta da--January fifth.




This January is a very special one for me. I've decided to ditch the corporate world forever, and my last day is the day before my birthday. Nice present, eh? I suspected I would become a full-time working writer at some point, but my boss at my new day job was being such a jerk that I, in a very satisfying Office-Space-like moment, handed in my resignation. So that point, which was to happen at some vague but much-anticipated moment in the future, has arrived.



Scary? A little. Exciting? A lot. My friends are cheering me on, which is a great joy. My husband--a god among men--is thrilled. He hates to see me unhappy, loves to see me write and I think it was all he could do to keep silent as I came home every day in the last couple of months. But it's a big change for a Capricorn like me. Capricorns are very risk averse. We keep our head down and trudge forward with blinders on, following the path that's been set out for us. I guess what I have to accept is that this is the path that's been set out for me. That's why the company I loved and worked for for twenty-two years moved my division to New Jersey last summer. That's why my son found a fantastic first job on my last official day of work. That's why between my Capricorn-style saving for the last few decades and the separation package from my long-time employer I have the freedom not to have to worry so much. That's why on the worst day of the new job, I had dinner scheduled with my friend, the graphic artist, who said, "You're a writer. You need to write." Which is why, despite making a great new friend at the new job, a musician/marketer who makes me giggle so much at my new job I practically wet my pants, the charms of the new boss made the choice a no-brainer.

So here I am, heading into the most interesting January ever. Blinders off, my friends. It's a Brave New World.

Gwyn
www.cready.com

Post Your Favorite Plot in Six Words and Win a Signed Bookmark

I was just reading about a book in which the author has asked people to summarize their life in just six words. Interesting, eh? How would you summarize your life in just six words? It really makes you boil things down to the core essence.

I'd like to challenge you to summarize your favorite plot in six words. For example, my favorite would be, "Past meets present. Boom! Fireworks ensue."

The first twenty-five people to post their favorite by clicking on the little peach-colored "COMMENTS" below will get a signed Gwyn Cready bookmark (email me privately at gwyn@cready.com with your mailing address after you post.) You could summarize the plot of a single book, or the plot of a subgenre you like--teen vampire, Agatha Christie, coming of age--whatever suits your fancy. If your submission is a single title, mention the title at the end of your post.

Gwyn Cready
gwyn@cready.com
www.cready.com