My Queendom for a Muse

I had a dream a while back in which I was allowed to marry two men, as long as they were both named Gary. Since I already had one of those, for my second Gary, I chose of the Oldman variety. So many fantastic roles over the years, both good and bad guys. My subconscious obviously felt Gary Oldman was a good choice to travel the rutted road me and GareBear were already stumbling down. As far as I know, it’s worked out well; neither I nor my subconscious has been served with divorce papers as of this writing.

So, yeah, I’m basically married to Sirius Black*.

This therefore means I’m married to a (Gare)bear and a dog. Figure THAT one out, therapist. Also maybe someone should tell Gary Oldman’s actual wife that she shouldn’t sue my subconscious, although it would be a landmark case. Truly.

Which leads into today’s rambling stream of detritus: During a recent Zoom session with my Thursday Writing Hobbits, I made mention of one of My Boyfriends™, to which a lovely young writer (unintentionally) named after a kick-ass video game heroine gasped and covered her mouth with her hand and proclaimed, “Wait—you’re married!”

“Yes. Yes, I am.” I’m a polygamist, actually. Two Garys, one Young, one Oldman. I didn’t include that part. I can’t afford to refund this kid’s course fee or pay for her therapy once our workshop has concluded.

“But you can’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend if you’re married.”

Tell that to my ex-husband. He seemed fine with having a girlfriend while we were married. “It’s not that kind of boyfriend.”

“Oh.” Young Ms. Croft thought about what I’d said. “But does your husband know that you have a boyfriend?”

“Boyfriends. Plural.”

Another gasp. More students covered their aghast mouths with tiny, ink-stained hands.

“And yes, GareBear knows.”

“But—doesn’t he mind?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve not packed my bags to go anywhere. He knows I married him.”

I’m honestly surprised no parents have called yet. However, in my defense, I DID explain what I meant, and I WILL explain again so that you too may benefit from this sage advice and also concurrently feed your own need for boyfriends, aka Muses. As Michael Scott would say, that’s called a win-WIN-win situation. (Office fans, I see you.)

Muses are not new. I did not invent them. The Greeks did—nine of them, in fact, imagined a super long time ago, way before Netflix and IMDB and a million different ways the internet allows us to stalk celebrities and movie stars. Muses in the olden days of Homer’s Greece had lyrical names like Calliope and Thalia, Clio and Ourania. These deified Muses each had a different specialty, but their one united goal was this:

INSPIRE THE ARTISTS.

So, like my boy Shakespeare borrowed from numerous sources whilst writing such hits as Romeo and Juliet, I borrow from Homer and set my stage with Muses. Lots of them. Also I use actors as my Muses because I very much wanted to be a movie star but that didn’t work out because I am in fact a terrible actor and though I worked extra jobs including as a cocktail waitress at a Mexican restaurant where this creepy chiropractor and his buddies used to grab my butt when I’d take their orders but I did it to save for the eventual move to Los Angeles where my new friend GareBear got me an audition for a bit part on a Power Rangers episode except I had to work that day at my new Los Angeles office job to pay the rent so I couldn’t go and also I don’t know anything about being a Power Ranger so the acting thing obviously did not work out and that was NOT great because back then I was still young and cute and gravity hadn’t settled in yet so yeah that was a total waste of a decade but I now have this recurring dream/nightmare that one day I will be on Jimmy Fallon or maybe Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, probably Kimmel because he’s in LA and that’s a way shorter plane ride than Fallon who is in NYC and I really, REALLY do not like flying because I have control issues and I am very much NOT in control of an airplane so anyway, I have this dream/nightmare that I’ll be on with one of the Jimmys and they’ll be like

OH YOUR LATEST BOOK IS A RAGING SUCCESS

and I’ll be like OH THANKS YEAH IT’S PRETTY GOOD I’M SUPER FAMOUS NOW

and they’ll be like WE HAVE A SURPRISE FOR YOU WE FOUND SOME LOST FOOTAGE FROM WHEN YOU WERE TRYING TO BE AN ACTOR

and I’ll try not to barf up the In-N-Out I inhaled during the limo ride over to the studio because that’s rude and gross when you’ve waited your entire life to be Someone Important™ and also a total waste of In-N-Out but yeah I’ll play it cool and be like

OH HA HA HA RUN THE FOOTAGE

and you guys will totally see why I didn’t make it as an actress and also my face looks shit on camera, no joke, this is not me being vain, I just don’t have that kind of face that the camera loves and instead the camera’s like YEAH MAYBE NO and the camera doesn’t even feel bad about making me feel bad because cameras aren’t sentient per se but they know what they want and I promise you it is not my face.

Thankfully, there are OTHER faces the camera DOES love, and these fine specimens are, in fact, My Boyfriends™.

And before you get twisted and scream at me for being sexist, I also have a list of My Girlfriends™. I am an Equal Opportunity Muse Enthusiast, an EOME, if you will. (You can borrow that if you want.)

Flip to the Dedication page of my latest book—called Scheme in the US and The Undoing in Canada (although you can’t flip to a real page in the Canadian edition because my publisher informed me two months before release date that they would not be releasing a hardcover edition since the first book sold for crap and—let’s say it together—PUBLISHING IS A BUSINESS—and sure, I have a great big, gnarly, snarly chip on my shoulder about All Things Publishing but I was basically born with that chip so that’s a topic for another conversation and also THANK YOU to the 12 people who bought my latest book. You guys rock).

ANYWAY: My Dedication page in Scheme looks like this:

These are my darling Muses. All movie stars. Every book I write has its own very cool, English-style pub full of Muses, sitting around, sipping a nice lager or an elegant cosmo or a steaming cup of their favourite tea or, in Dwayne’s case, probably a nip of his new tequila, and they’re all having a lively chat about my Very Amazing Books, probably with an English accent because I have a thing for those British sounds, although, from this list, I would gladly listen to non-Brit Oscar read from the phone book, or to Dwayne as he talked about his muscles**, or to Irish-American Saoirse as she told me about her childhood in Dublin, or to Jessica as she said just about anything***.

Muses. Better than cookies.

And then there’s Mark Strong. How much time have you got?

Muse No. 1.

Just to note RE: Muse No. 2, Henry Cavill, not pictured here, but DUH, he’s SUPERMAN. Need I say more? Also, he WAS envisioned as Ryan Fielding in Must Love Otters (under my Eliza Gordon pen name), as was Taylor Kitsch, and the original Muse for that story, not a movie star at all, but former Canucks hockey player, number 17, the darling Ryan Kesler. See my Pinterest board for more. Also for otters, which are AWWWESOME.

Then there’s Love Just Clicks (another Eliza Gordon) written with Sam Heughan (Outlander) as Head Muse and I wasn’t even bloody subtle about it—the main love interest is named SAM. Dear Dwayne, With Love, another Eliza Gordon title—yup, Dwayne, for sure (and YES, the publisher’s legal team got permission from Dwayne’s legal team so don’t go writing books about famous people without legal counsel or you will get your writerly buns sued), but also the book features Aidan Turner (Kili from The Hobbit, probably more familiar to you as Ross Poldark). Muses. Pretty, pretty, pretty Muses.

Gratuitous ab shot of Aidan Turner on Poldark via IMDb. You’re welcome.

But why, Jenn? What is wrong with your brain, other than everything? Muses make the characters in my stories come alive on the page. Not just come alive but literally MOVE through the story. (I think I used literally correctly there. Maybe. I’m sure you’ll tell me if I didn’t.) Mark Strong has lived in my head as my Very Favourite Good Bad Guy, Lucian Dagan Dmitri, since 2009, when I first saw him as Hani in the 2008 Leo DeCaprio/Russell Crowe CIA/terrorism flick, Body of Lies, and I was like

OH MY GOD HOLD MY POPCORN BUT DON’T EAT IT BECAUSE YOU HAVE YOUR OWN AND I DON’T WANT YOUR GERMS ON MY KERNELS BUT WHO IS THAT DELIGHTFUL PHENOM FLOATING IN FRONT OF MINE EYES ON THE SCREEN HE IS A WONDER AND A SCHOLAR AND I MUST KNOW HIM.

Mr. Strong has lived in my head, given full breath and shape and voice to Lucian, not because I’m a creepy stalker chick (I’m not, actually) but because LUCIAN, my character, IS REAL TO ME. I don’t want to meet Mark Strong; it’s enough that I have Lucian whispering dastardly thoughts in my ear. (Which he still does. A sign his story is indeed not over.)

(Also that is a lie. If Mark Strong were in town working on a film and was like HEY JENN DO YOU WANT TO HANG OUT AND TALK ABOUT SHAKESPEARE OR SUPERMAN, I’d be like SURE MARK HANG ON LET ME GET A FACE-LIFT AND A PERSONALITY TRANSPLANT SO I DON’T SCARE YOU BUT HERE TALK TO MY HUSBANDS, GAREBEAR AND GARY OLDMAN, THE LATTER OF WHOM YOU KNOW FROM TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY SO YEAH I’LL BE RIGHT BACK.)

FYI, dear scribes? Your characters should be this real to you too. If they are not, start over.

As soon as the character Xavier Darrow walked onto the page during the approximately one million years I spent rewriting Sleight, it was Oscar Isaac. He breezed in like he owned the joint, those darling black curls getting in his eyes as he argued with Delia, Genevieve’s mother. It was nothing short of magical. MAGICAL, I tell you.

And Genevieve, who started out as Gemma in the 2011 self-pubbed version of Sleight until I realized a few years into rewrites that, like, five other books had the main character named Gemma, including a series from Libba Bray and she is WAY more famous than me so I changed my MC’s name in honor of my first real editor, Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, who is *awesome* and no, you can’t have her because she’s mine so BACK OFF—Sleight’s Genevieve has been Saoirse Ronan since day one.

Yeah, now Saoirse’s a grown-up and was just super awesome as my lifelong idol Josephine March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (which you MUST SEE), but that’s the great thing about Muses: they don’t age. Teenage Saoirse lived in my head while I wrote the scenes where Gen’s hanging upside from her ankle, playing her violin (which, BTW, is a thing circus performers can actually do), when she rushes into the dirt and begs her dying mom to not actually die (spoiler: she dies), when she’s caring for the circus matriarch Gertrude and Gert’s feisty baby Houdini who eats everything his trunk can reach, when she first meets the intimidating Lucian Dmitri and his handsome young son, Henry, who eventually becomes Genevieve’s love interest … It was Saoirse who breathed life into those scenes.

When I killed a darling from the 2011 version, a character named Irwin, the manuscript had a mentor-shaped hole in it, and all of a sudden, this hulking mountain of a man named Baby walked in—and it was Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I can’t help it. It just happens. My subconscious wants what it wants. And it wants talent, beauty, pain, happiness, passion, fire, terror … it wants everything.

Because a good character is a REAL PERSON. Again, if your characters are interesting like soggy cardboard is interesting, start over.

The Muse bit doesn’t even stop at faces. My characters often have names that are reflections of people I admire. Genevieve Flannery? Beyond being named after my first real editor, her last name is a hat tip to Flannery O’Connor, one of my favourite writers. Like I said above, sometimes I’m not even subtle about it. In Dear Dwayne, With Love, the love interest’s name is Marco Turner. Piece that one together. A current WIP? Main character is named after Shakespeare’s perceived rival, Christopher Marlowe; another character in another story is named after my favourite TV show persona, the badass Carrie Mathison (thank you, Homeland, for eight incredible seasons!).

Muses are everywhere. You just have to let them walk onto your stage and listen to what they have to say. Yeah, I’m probably crazy as hell, but this is a good kind of crazy. It seemed to work out okay for Homer.

So next time you’re talking to me or you see in my social media that I’ve mentioned one of My Boyfriends™, don’t freak out and text my long-suffering husbands that I am packing a bag and buying a ticket to run off and stalk Mark or Oscar or Henry or Dwayne or Aidan or Jessica across the continents. They know … which is why they hid my passport.

Not me. I wish. This is genevieve … or at least how she lives in my head when she’s not saving the world. <3

*And Sid Vicious. And Commissioner Gordon. And Winston Churchill (ewww).

**Yeah, I wrote him a whole book. I JUST NEEDED ONE TWEET, DWAYNE. ONE. LITTLE. LIFE-CHANGING. TWEET.

***Binge the following Jessica films: Zero Dark Thirty, Miss Sloane, Molly’s Game, The Martian. NO ONE does brilliant and beautiful like she does. No one. Thanks, Delia. I mean, Jessica.