Interests 65 through 68

And we’re back with more interests:

65. Bell towers that chime out the hour

66. General tidiness

67. Autumn leaves (falling down like pieces into place)

68. Layered dialogue

Readers have spoken! It’s time to reveal the running list of things I would add to Interest #24 END OF THE DAY, as copied from my notes doc:

What I would add to EOTD:

1.     Missed opportunity for Benj to call Milo a dupe.

2.     What if Milo made moon water as an offering?

3.     The physical he’d have to pass to film

4.     Could have had a moment with the phrase “Hang hat on a character”

Let’s break ’em down.

1.     This puuuuuuun. A dupe! Is a makeup term for a product that’s the same as another, but in different packaging (and often cheaper). EOTD is a TWIN-SWAP romance. Makeup artist Benj packages Milo into his twin brother Jackson. A DUPE. This pun haunts me. Even if I worry that it is too mean given some reader response to Benj (no one likes a mad woman). With the structure of this book, the timeline of about a week, I can understand how the ratio of her anger to her forgiveness didn’t work for everyone and her lobbing another perfect zinger at Milo would not have made her more likeable. . . but being “likeable” isn’t a woman’s highest calling. Perfect zingers are, so: call this the pun that got away.

2.     HEAR ME OUT: What if Milo had tried making Benj moon water (imagine him googling how!) to replace the moon water he drank and he gave it to her in Paris (carting it around for a month?) like a confused, lovesick Lloyd Dobler holding a boombox playing this is me trying? I like it. I really like it. Please update your head canons accordingly.

3.     I learned recently that Milo would have had to pass a physical exam to film again. Could have included that as a grounding detail to counterbalance the bananas-level of the plot.

4.     EOTD was generally a book chock-full of Interest #68, layered dialogue, and I believe “hang a hat” would have satisfied something within me, the same as Benj’s “No notes.”

Admittedly, these are quite small things, but, as illustrated by the nature of this newsletter, I find great joy in minutiae, the little bits that make everything better.

Next time, if you want, I can write up one of those body of work timelines everybody’s been posting—a deep dive from my earliest poetry to my latest WIP (“women in STEM/on DRUGS”)—or I can share how far I got in the draft of the Cormac/Aya project (and why I abandoned it)—we can call that “bonus material” from Interest #23 ALL THE BEST NIGHTS. Let me know/I’ll put a poll on Instagram because it’s the only way I know how to make a poll.

Here’s a super horny Whitman for your time: “I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself, I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.”

Sir.

Hanna