THE THOUGHT PROCESS

Here’s the problem with having a contest in which the only task is to finish the sentence, “MJ should send me Suite Scarlett because . . .” I read all of the entries. Three times. And there are a lot of them. And they are all really good. I learned that a lot of you have never won ANYTHING, EVER. I found out that Scarlett has been creeping off her card and following quite a number of you. Just look at some of the reasons that came in!

catherine said...
Oh, and I also wasn't able to participate in the Amazon challenge because I was away at my grandmother's house, which smells like cabbage and broken internet.

MJ: Does your grandmother live in my old high school? It sounds like she might. My high school REEKED of cabbage. It was the sisters’ #1 favorite side dish at dinner. Their favorite main dish was yelling at me to pull up my knee socks.

italianeyes83 said...
MJ should send me a copy of Suite Scarlett b/c
my only sister just ran off to Italy and I don't know when she's coming back.

MJ: If she sends you 13 blue envelopes, let me know . . . because I think she’s in my book.

norah said...
MJ should send me Suite Scarlett because I Googled "Maureen Johnson" and discovered that MJ the author no longer has any Google gainers! In fact info on, about or by Maureen takes up the entire first page except for one hit somewhere in the middle that is about the girl from Rent.

MJ: Ha ha! Take that, Johnson! You may still have a tango, but I rule your Google world!

jen said...
MJ should send me Suite Scarlett because I am fighting the good fight against the oceans. Last time I went to the beach I didn't go in the water once, I just stood and gave that pool of evil my most steely glare.

MJ: YES! YES, YES, YES!

How am I supposed to choose? Why do I have so few copies? Am I going to have to take my personal copy and come to your houses and read it to you? It’s an idea, but frankly, this would not be so good for you, as you never know when or in what state I will arrive. You will just hear the clank of my ladder hitting your bedroom windowsill, and there I will be, book in hand. I’d be worse than J.K. (Well, that may be overstating it a bit.)

At least I planned for this eventuality, and I recruited a crack team to help me, which included John Green and Oscar Gingersnort. They assisted me in the effort of reading and going through the anguish of choosing one winner.

After much consideration and hand-wringing, this was the chosen entry. It appealed to the judges because it was all about bringing Cheer to others, and because the winner had been shafted in the Amazon Challenge (which, as promised, provided bonus points):

laurenzo said...
You know why I should receive Suite Scarlett? 

Because I want it. Really, really badly.

I have never won a contest of any sort EVER in my short, pathetic little life, but maybe that's only because I'm hardly into it yet. My life, I mean. Regardless, I shall use that important point to lure you into giving me a copy of your precious novel. 

Secondly, I did not get much for Christmas (a truckload of pajamas and some chocolate), because my family gave most of our Christmas money to St. Jude's hospital, in order to help Spread The Cheer to kids who were in more need of it than I was. And Suite Scarlett would be the ultimate belated Christmas present. Much more rewarding than trivial items such as cell phones and video game consoles (because I play Super Mario OLDSCHOOL, YO.)

And to receiving those extra special BONUS POINTS (look, capslock!), I will not hesitate to inform you that I have been away from my computer during most of this Christmas holiday, and missed out on the Amazon Challenge of Awesome.

Laurenzo, please send along your address. Scarlett is on her way.

The good news is: I have another copy!

Whenever I get a copy, I obviously have to give it away, so . . . this means I have to think of another contest. I thought about having a contest in which people give me suggestions for contests, and the winning contest suggestion won the contest . . . but that logic made me so dizzy that I had to go sit down for a while. I will come up with something.

Today, I want to talk about The Writing Of Books.

I have many things on the To Do List for 2008 besides writing the next Scarlett book. One of the big ones is . . . revamping this site! And one of the big things that this site needs, I know, is a big FAQ to help you with your book reports. I know this because I get letters almost every day from book report sufferers—and most of them contain ten questions or more that you need answered IMMEDIATELY!

The sad truth is . . . I’m almost never able to reply to these, not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t have time to answer them all individually. However! I want to make something that helps you! So I am compiling a list of Questions You Think I Should Answer in an FAQ.

But since it seems to be the height of book report season, I’ll answer one I’ve gotten a lot recently, one all authors get . . . where do you get the ideas for your books?

You know, I asked Libba Bray this question the other day, just to see how she would react. She did exactly what I do . . . she got a spooked, far-away look in her eye, like she was noticing Zac Efron slipping out her window with her prize hamster in his jaws.

Almost every writer I know hates this question. We are, by nature, a lazy people. Hard questions disturb our state of mind. This is one of the hardest of the hard, topped only by things like “How do you write a book?” and “Why are there so many headless girls on the covers of your novels?”

I always try to make something up . . . some weird, cobbled-together, IKEA-quality answer that will definitely fall apart the second you attempt to deconstruct it. This is because, for me, there IS no answer.

The ideas just come from my brain. I store stuff up there, and the brain monkeys play around with it and put together different combinations. They come to me with stuff all the time, as your brain monkeys must do for you. They are not always helpful.

BRAIN MONKEYS: Hey! Guess what we put together today! That time you got stung on the lip by a bee, your hatred of fried eggs, and that wallpaper pattern from your bedroom when you were little!

ME: That’s nice. What am I supposed to do with that?

BRAIN MONKEYS: We have no idea. We just put stuff together. Now we’re just going to run “My Humps” through your head for an hour while you try to work.

ME: #%$#$&*^&^!

BRAIN MONKEYS: Oh, and that question you were going so crazy about . . . what was it, two weeks ago?

ME: What question?

BRAIN MONKEYS: About that scene you were writing, with the thing . . . anyway, your iPhone cord is in your purse.

ME: That’s not what I asked!

BRAIN MONKEYS: Yes you did. You were wondering about that an hour ago. About an hour. Maybe it was yesterday. Anyway, that’s where it is.

ME: What about the scene?

BRAIN MONKEYS: What scene?

ME: You just said you figured out that scene I was having problems with! What scene was it, and what’s the solution?

BRAIN MONKEYS: Oh, we don’t have a solution. We were just thinking about it. That was a tough one. We have some random facts about squirrels, if that will help.

ME: It won’t.

BRAIN MONKEYS: How about the smell of blue cheese after a wild summer rainstorm?

ME: Do I even know that smell?

BRAIN MONKEYS: Probably not. We were going to work on it for you. Do you think Fergie felt at all self-conscious when she sang the words “my lovely lady lumps”?

ME: Just shut up, okay? Turn off the song.

BRAIN MONKEYS: If you want. We have some commercial jingles we were going to play for you later, but if you want them now . . .



The writer's brain is always at work.

But every once in a while . . . a great while . . . they get lucky with the soldering iron and make something I can use. In the case of Suite Scarlett, for instance, I can tell you that I was sitting at my desk when then the brain monkeys handed my something that went roughly like this:

BRAIN MONKEYS: Hey! You know how, when you were little, you liked stories about a lot of people crammed together in one building, like in The Westing Game or the All-of-a-Kind-Family stories?

ME: Yeah . . .

BRAIN MONKEYS: You know what buildings have a lot of people in them? Hotels.

ME: That’s true.

BRAIN MONKEYS: And how you love New York, where you live? And how your best friend was the poster child for Easter Seals when you were in third grade? And all those hours you spent in theater school sitting on the floor watching actors learn how to do stagefights and pratfalls? And how you love Patrick Dennis? And we found this Art Deco sunburst pattern.

ME: Slow down . . .

It went on like this for a few hours, a string of pictures and voices and memories of all stripes. By the end of it, I had written the premise of Suite Scarlett. All six Martin family members arrived, along with Mrs. Amberson, their long-staying guest. The Hopewell Hotel landed right on top of me, like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where the house lands on the Wicked Witch. Obviously, the book wasn’t done, and it took a long time to develop it all, but that’s how it started.

I think this is, in some fashion, how all ideas for books come about. Your brain fuses together a bunch of things. So, you can either take “I don’t know” or “Brain Monkeys” as my official answer. When I make the FAQ, that’s what it will probably say!

If you have questions YOU think would be useful for the FAQ and any potential book reports, please leave them in the comments! I will be coming up with another contest for the next galley.

In the meantime, you can also see me rambling about myself in this quickly-made video. Hank Green (brother of John Green) tagged me in this YouTube thing where you have to say five things about yourself. I am not proud of my answers, but that has never stopped me from answering anything before.

ALL HAIL THE SHINY THING

I got something yesterday that stopped my clock completely. It’s possible that this is the best thing that has ever happened to me—even better than my free monkey riding up with my new Vespa. I am going to share it with you.

Before we get to the exciting bit, though, I have to mention something while I am still up here at the top of the page, and not seventy feet down it. Do you see this little white box over here to the right? Slap your e-mail in there and you will be signed up for my SUPER SECRET MAILINGLISTACULAR! Go on! Sign up now!

Okay. Let me tell you about the shiny thing.

So, yesterday, I was writing with Scott Westerfeld and Justine Labalestier. We worked at Westerestier HQ, a secure, carefully wired compound, high above the streets of Manhattan.

Scott is very busy writing Extras, the fourth book of Uglies/Pretties/Specials. His fingers barely stopped typing the whole day, except when he did his hand jives to figure out how hoverboards fly. More importantly, yesterday was the release of Justine’s 3rd book in the Magic or Madness trilogy.

Naturally, when the day was over, we had to celebrate this momentous occasion. We paraded around, drinking some champagne and having three course desserts, and generally made merry in the way that you have to when the third book of the Magic or Madness trilogy comes out. When we returned, I checked my e-mail. There were several messages waiting.

First, we found out that writing partner John Green had been hospitalized for his incredibly bad pink eye.

And then, there was the shiny thing.

It came in the form of a link to this WORD FOR WORD recreation of my blog entry on how to write a book. Additionally, it incorporates material from another entry on what writers do all day, and my trip to IKEA with Daphne Unfeasible.

I can’t describe it any further. It really just has to be watched.



Note the three girls in this image.

Scott and I were blown away by many parts of this—not the least of which was the astonishingly accurate recreation of a group of us at work. When Justine re-emerged in her pajamas (Justine likes pajamas) she watched it and identified the artists behind it as some excellent readers she met white signing in Texas.

“I like that John is being played by a girl,” Scott said, when he had shaken off his initial amazement.

I sent it over to John Green, who was in his hospital bed, typing with one hand and reading with one eye. The first thing he said (after happily noting the Brotherhood 2.0 appearance) was, “I like that I am being played by a girl.”

E. Lockhart, the other person represented in the café scene, also loved it.

“I liked the fact that John was played by a girl,” she said, after making many positive comments on the use of Kenny Loggins in the final dancing scene.

It’s a good thing I have this, as it completely eliminates the need for me to write 200 pages of blog today. Which is very good, as I have to run off now, as this afternoon is the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age 2007 exhibition. I am happy to announce that Devilish is on that list, along with books by Scott, Justine, E. and many other fine people. Last year, I watched the Leo NYPL lion (or a librarian dressed as Leo) secretly paw a can of Coke! Even fake lions get thirsty, you know.

So, please, sign up, watch the video, and praise its makers. I’ll be back tomorrow or the next day with an unnecessarily long report on what I saw and heard.

I leave you with this question . . . and I want you to be honest with me. Seriously. When I came back from England, this is what my rubber plant looked like. Do you guys think my plant is dead?



Can you spot Free Monkey hiding in the foliage?

BRIEF ENCOUTERS WITH FAMOUS PEOPLE

Friends, when I last left you, I was writing from the London Office, where I was recovering from flu and talking about television and my FREE MONKEY.

Getting home was an experience I must share. After all, because of 13 Little Blue Envelopes (and, you will find, Girl At Sea), a lot of people think of me as “that person who writes about traveling.”

Before I left England, I carefully packed my free monkey into my suitcase. Oscar (having just read my blog about getting the Free Monkey) said, “Do you know what? There was a rush on the Free Monkeys. People started buying three or four at a time, and they ran out. People are trying to get them.”

I smiled at my monkey.

To be honest, I didn’t think I was going anywhere. I’d heard about the massive snowstorms that were descending on the East Coast, partially from the news, and partially from my mother, who called me about six times to tell me. But Virgin Atlantic seemed unaware of the storm. I checked. There was no delay. I went to Heathrow Airport expecting to be laughed at and sent home.

“Isn’t there a delay?” I asked, as I checked in my bag. “Because of the snowstorm?”

“What snowstorm?” they asked.

That would be the snowstorm that canceled all the American Airlines flights and caused all their passengers to be put on Virgin Atlantic, including flight 25, which was my flight.

By the time we got on the plane, they were admitting that there was a storm.

"There's a bit of bad weather in New York," the pilot said in his lovely Irish accent. "We're going to feel it about two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic. And we may have to circle a bit when we get there, but don't worry. We've put on extra fuel. Happy Saint Patrick's Day to all of our Irish passengers."

That sounded fun. Turbulence AND holding patterns! I was glad they hadn't delayed us.

About 30 minutes into the flight, the pilot came on and said, “Are there any medically qualified persons on board? Specifically, we would like a midwife.”

So, presumably, there was going to be a BABY born on our flight. And if there was going to be a BABY born on our flight, you would think we would have to land. Short of going back, the only place I could think of that we could land was Iceland, where (I had just recently been told) you often can’t land anyway because of the wintry fog.

I started to mentally plan my crazy night out in Reykjavik. First, I would find Bjork . . .

That was as far as I got. We didn’t hear anything more about the midwife, so I don’t know if there was a Virgin Atlantic flight 25 baby or not. If there was, they were awfully quiet about it. I’ve been on flights before where they have been medical problems (like the time the woman actually collapsed on me when I was trying to work on Girl At Sea), and it’s been chaos. People running up the aisles. People with no medical knowledge at all standing around, giving advice.

About halfway through the flight, I looked up to see our captain wandering the aisles. I fought the urge to get up and scream, “THE STEWARDESS IS FLYING THE PLANE!” Or even something weirder, like, “BJORK IS FLYING THE PLANE!”

I laughed to myself, albeit a little nervously.



I didn’t know who was in charge.

When they announced that it was about time for us to land, and if we wanted to get up we had to do it now, I left my seat to change out of the yoga pants I had put on earlier in the flight and back into my jeans. A friendly, if somewhat drunk, Irishman was waiting with me.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

It was a little too general of a question, but I got the idea that he was asking me something about our general chances.

“There’s a storm,” I said. “We might be diverted.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “The pilot is Irish! He’ll land this #&$^#*&^$#*& plane no matter what.”

I laughed, a kind of loud “Ha ha!” that I often employ around drunk people when I myself am sober. The bathroom was free, and I stepped up for my turn.

“Can I give you a hand in there?” my new friend asked me.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve been going to the bathroom by myself for over five years now.”

I locked the door carefully as he puzzled this over.

He was right, though. Our pilot landed that plane, very suddenly in fact. I could see from the flight tracker that we were dropping altitude fast and bumping like crazy as we went through the clouds. He came on the loudspeaker and said, “Flight crew, take your seats IMMEDIATELY.”

And then we were down on a solid white sheet of snow, the only plane in sight, surrounded by plows.

“Well, we’ve landed,” he said. “Unfortunately, we have nowhere to go. There is no gate for us. And I can’t really tell you when we will have a gate.”

That didn’t sound good. I made a few calls, then put my head back for a little nap. No sooner had I closed my eyes, though, then we were parked in a gate. We marched off the plane, just an hour and a half after our scheduled landing, which seemed fair to me.

“Wow,” I said to myself. “That worked out well!”

It continued to work out well as I breezed through passport control, where my inspector was so bored that he didn’t speak and literally threw my passport back at me.

“I love New York,” I said happily. “It feels good to be home.”

I walked the few feet to the luggage claim and took a spot. Our bags didn’t seem to be coming. The loudspeaker crackled to life.

“Virgin Atlantic flight 25,” the announcer said. “There is a problem getting your baggage. Right now, we have NO TIME ESTIMATE on when it will be coming.”

It was 11:15. I sat down on the edge of the conveyer belt. I looked around me to see how the other passengers were taking this news. To my surprise, I noticed that—standing maybe ten feet from me—was Sigourney Weaver. It was definitely her. I heard her speak, and I’ve seen Copycat about twenty-five times (don’t ask). Obviously, she had been on the flight.

I laughed to myself again as I thought of a dozen jokes about how it wasn’t a good sign to be on a long-haul flight with Sigourney Weaver.



The jokes write themselves, really.

By 12:30, I decided to stop sitting on the edge of the belt and to fulfill a minor lifelong dream of stretching out on the belt itself. The airport sent down a representative—a very flustered-looking man, who was immediately descended upon by my planemates. (But not, I should add, Sigourney Weaver.)

“I’m sorry,” he groveled. “I have no explanation for this. I’ve called them and they tell me the bags are on the belt. Why they aren’t coming down, I have no idea.”



This is a surprisingly accurate representation of how I spent Friday night.

Around 1:30 in the morning, as I was fully reclined on the conveyer belt, I called Daphne Unfeasible. I call Daphne whenever I have any decision to make that I’m on the fence about.

“Daphne,” I said. “Do I really care about my bag? Is there anything in there that I really need, except my FREE MONKEY? I think if we leave they’re either going to send our bags back to England or blow them up.”

“Your free monkey is in there?” she asked. “You have to stay.”

I knew she was right. I shut my phone and looked over at Sigourney Weaver. She was waiting. So would I. Those free monkeys were rare.

We all started making friends. I lent a Swiss girl my phone, and she offered me delicious Swiss chocolate. Another girl offered me a magazine after she heard my free monkey call to Daphne.

“You can’t give up,” she said, passing it over. “Here.”

I nodded and thanked her. I opened it and immediately noticed something in there that caught my eye—it was an ad for fitted sheet covers for airplane seats in loud “designer” patterns.

If ANYONE sits next to me on a plane and starts putting fitted sheets over their seat, I thought to myself, I might punch them in the face. Honestly. I’m not a violent person, but I think that might bring something out of me that is otherwise contained. You know how the Hulk pops out? I think it might be like that.



MAUREEN SMASH!

I shut the magazine and went back to my previous occupation, which was watching Sigourney Weaver out of the corner of my eye.

By 2, we were all getting a little tired of this. An angry hoard of us (me not included, I couldn’t be bothered to get off the belt for a while) surrounded the airport representative, who looked pretty close to suicide. In fact, when I did go over to hear what he was saying, he actually threatened as much.

“If I was responsible for this mess,” he said, “I would put a GUN to my HEAD. You deserve so much better.”

This seemed a bit much to me.

At 2:15, the belt started moving and about eight bags came out. (Including Sigourney’s. Either that or she just gave up.) We cheered. And then, nothing. We watched the belt go around. We started writing notes on pieces of paper and putting them on the belt for other people to read and respond to.

My bag came tumbling down at 3 AM.

“At last,” I said, pulling it along. “It’s over.”

But it wasn’t over. Because all two or three hundred of us stepped outside into a major winter storm, with icy rain. The sidewalks and road were covered in so much snow and slush that it was almost impossible to pull our bags along. Along the curbs, there were one foot deep and three or four feet wide slush lakes. I needed to cross these to get to the massive cab line I gave up trying to be clever about it and just waded through, dragging my bag and allowing my boots and jeans to get soaked. There was no other way. We all did it.

My bathroom friend stood behind me in line. He was a lot more awake and sober. We all were. It was freezing, with a strong wind. It was almost impossible to get into the cabs when they came. I got mine after maybe twenty minutes, and had to actually throw my suitcase over the gulch and into the back seat. Then we slipped and slid along the parkway at top speed, narrowly missing other cars. My cab driver did a strange thing—he stopped to get gas. And then we promptly stalled in the gas station.

I was beyond caring.

I stumbled in my door sometime after four, took a look at my now officially dead rubber plant, and dropped my things. I opened my suitcase, and took out my free monkey.

“You are home,” I said.

So that’s how I got here. I am now safely back with my writing friends. E. Lockhart is next to me, and Scott Westerfeld is across from me. John Green is snowbound in Detroit with pink eye.

Just to address one other point from my last post (and thank you for your many comments). Daphne got right in there and had to shout out her love for Face from the A-Team.

Like I said, I love all members of the team (not including, as previously stated, Frankie “Dishpan” Santana, who is not a true team member). But Murdock is clearly and obviously superior to Face. And I can tell you why in painstaking detail. Daphne knows this. She is consciously is playing with fire, because she is well aware that I could unleash my massive backload of A-Team knowledge AT ANY SECOND. It’s like a tsunami of information.

But I will resist.

However, she brings up an excellent point in mentioning her other love, Bo Duke. I never liked Bo Duke. I gave Luke a weak allegiance. But I do have something to tell you about Bo Duke that is very much related to this topic.

Since I became a fully-grown mj, my parents have done a lot of traveling. One year, they went on a cruise of northern Europe. When they returned, I went home to have dinner with them at our local favorite, the Olive Garden. (When you’re there, you’re family. The Olive Garden is the best of the local options around Chez Johnson. Take from that what you will.)

“Your father made a friend on the trip,” she said. "Tell her."

My dad looked up.

"I did," he said. "He was a great guy, named John. We played cards almost every night."

"That's nice," I said. To tell the truth, the story had already paralyzed me with boredom. It didn't seem like a good start.

"Funny thing, though," my dad went on. "People kept asking to have their pictures taken with him. This went on for a few days, so I finally asked him why. He said that he used to be on TV a long time ago. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He was on a . . . what was it. Something Dukes . . .”

“Not the Dukes of Hazzard,” I said, setting down my ice tea spoon carefully.

“That’s it,” he said. “He was one of the main guys.”

“You’re not talking about John Schneider, are you?” I asked.

“Right! That was his name.”

I leveled a look at my father. He is not, to be completely fair, Mr. Hollywood.

“You spent two weeks hanging out with BO DUKE?” I said.

“I guess so. He’s nice. We would go to the casino together. Good card player.”

“YOU HUNG OUT WITH BO DUKE FOR TWO WEEKS?”

“I just told you I did.”

To some of you, this won’t mean much. Let me explain. In the early 1980s, Bo Duke was THE major heartthrob of network television. Whether you liked him or not, you couldn’t avoid him. The thought of him hanging out with my dad—a man who still thinks the invisible dog leash is still a very funny thing and who reads Parking Today magazine—was not something my brain could handle. I felt it struggling to put these two ideas together, and the feeling was sort of like what it looks like when you make those fake volcanoes and mix baking soda and vinegar which DON’T MIX WELL and explode into foam.

Anyway, it just goes to show that you never know who you are going to meet. Until next time . . . when I promise to address even more of your comments.



That’s John Schneider. The blonde does not represent my father. Their relationship was strictly platonic and seemed to involve a lot of blackjack and manly walks on the Ledo deck talking about blackjack.

FREE MONKEY

In case you were wondering, which you probably weren’t, the reason I’ve been somewhat quiet for the last few days is that I came down with a flu bug immediately upon landing in England.

Or, probably more correctly, that tiny cough I developed while packing got a lot worse over the Atlantic. For whatever reason, planes are sickness machines. If you board a plane a little sick, you’ll get off sicker. I arrived at Heathrow with a raging fever. I noticed this when I got to the London Office and began talking to the dog. Sadly, the London Office does not have a dog. I was talking to a lamp.

So, for several days, I could do nothing at all. I was flattened. I managed to get out my thoughts on how to deal with Amazon reviews. The rest of the time I spent asleep, or trying to sleep, or sitting in front of the television with a box of tissues in my lap. Pretty much the most exciting thing that happened for a few days was that we went to the supermarket because I needed a bottle of something called Night Nurse.

We also needed another box of tea, because I was drinking it at a ridiculous rate. I was reaching for a small box, which was all we really needed, when I noticed that they had massive boxes marked FREE MONKEY. Along with the freakishly large box of tea, you got a sock monkey in a little t-shirt.

I sniffed and reached for one of these.

“You’re getting the big one?” Oscar asked. (Of course, it was Oscar who had to drive me to the store in his Oscarmobile.)

“Free monkey,” I explained, putting it in the cart. (It came out more like, “Fwee mukky.”)

A sock monkey in a t-shirt is probably the last thing I need, but there was something about the words FREE MONKEY that I could not turn away from. And the people who make PG Tips tea know that. It is a cheap but effective trick. It’s amazing how little it takes to satisfy us.


Could you say no?

Speaking of that, I was just reading an e-mail from my good friend, editor J.Z. Migraine. J.Z. suffers from crippling insomnia, so he will often write me long, brilliant screeds in the dark of the night.

“You’re doing your blog all wrong,” he wrote to me. “People want to hear about what you like to watch on TV. That’s what they’re really after.”

Is this true, readers? Have I been denying you what you have wanted all along?

Well, then! Since I have caught up on some TV this week, I have decided to compile a listing of my TV CRUSH HISTORY, starting from the earliest days. What I find, in looking over my list, is that I generally fall for the wrong character. I rarely “take the free monkey” when it comes to watching shows. And when I do, I get very mad about it.

CRUSH ZERO: WILLIAM KATT

When I was a tiny mj, we had a neighbor across the street who was in high school. He was handsome, with curly blonde hair, and apparently, I LOVED him. I flirted with him CEASELESSLY, I am told. (By flirting, I mean “screamed his name across the street.” I was three at the time.) I don’t remember this, but everyone likes to tell me about it. It makes a certain sense, though, when you look at my first crush . . . William Katt.

William Katt starred in a TV show called The Greatest American Hero, which I can remember absolutely nothing about except the theme song and those luscious blonde curls. I developed a lifelong case of something I call “William Katt Love Hangover,” which has left me hopelessly enthralled by curly-haired guys ever since. Peter Camp, the love interest in my book The Key to the Golden Firebird, probably owes his curly hair to this disease.

WK seen here in the movie Carrie, right before the pigs' blood comes down. Oh, those curls. Look how they shine.

OMEGA CRUSH: MURDOCK, THE A-TEAM

Confession: when I was little, I worshipped the A-Team.

Is the A-Team the worst television show ever made? Pretty much. It’s violent. It’s formulaic. It makes almost no sense. But I didn’t see that at the time, because I wanted to BE in the A-Team. I could write many blog entries about my love of the A-Team, but I won’t, partly out of pride, and partly because it would scare you a little. (Such as my amazing do-it-yourself A-Team episode guide.)

The member of the team you were supposed to fall for was Face (or Templeton Peck), played by Dirk Benedict. While I liked Face (I liked all members of the team except for Frankie “Dishpan” Santana, who was not a real member at all but merely a gimmick tacked on to season five to spice up the post-trial Team, but I digress . . .), the member I truly loved with all my heart and soul was H.M. Murdock. Superstar pilot. Actual mental patient (though we all knew that he was faking). The man who learned to speak Chinese in one afternoon. Murdock, with his flexible grasp of reality, was the team member for me. He also seemed to be the only one with any real skills. He could scam better than Face, build better than BA, and plot at least as well as Hannibal. So what if he had an imaginary dog? He was still the only one, after YEARS in Vietnam, who had ANY GRASP of Vietnamese.



My heart was with Howling Mad.

It wasn’t so much a crush in the case of Murdock. I wanted to BE Murdock, because Murdock was having the most fun of anyone. And do I even need to mention that he saved the entire team from execution? No. I do not. Moving on . . .

THE CRUSH I JUST REMEMBERED: FOX MULDER, THE X-FILES

Oh, they laughed at him at Quantico. They called him Spooky Mulder and made him live in the basement. But we all knew Mulder was right, and the truth was out there, and that he really did love Scully. And we loved him, until they got weird and brought in new people, and then I forgot The X-Files was even on so I don’t even know how it ended. I only remembered the show because there is a TV on in the background here, and The X-Files just came on, and I got all misty-eyed remembering the good times with the Fox.



RUN SPOOKY, RUN!

THE CRUSH THAT EVERYONE DEVELOPED: LOGAN ECKOLLS, VERONICA MARS

Okay, Veronica Mars. I didn’t want to watch you. I only did because my agent Daphne Unfeasible slipped the first season of you into my purse. She used my love of girl detectives and my lifelong ambition to open a private investigator business to sucker me in. And I went right along with the rest of you, like a LEMMING.

I had resisted so many. I turned up my nose at Jordan Catalano from My So Called Life. (And who’s laughing now? Anyone seen Jared Leto lately? Ho ho!) I liked Spike as a friend. I never even made it through an episode of The O.C. so I escaped all of that. I thought I could never be lured by The One You Are Supposed to Like.



Hey, Jared. They do make waterproof eyeliner, you know. And does the fencing team know you stole one of their futuristic turtleneck uniforms?

And then, along came #$^&#*$^&# Logan Eckolls.

Those sneaky VM people knew exactly what they were doing, making us hate Logan for so long. They made him evil, obnoxious, racist. For reasons I could barely understand, I started to like him—maybe because I was smugly self-satisfied at not liking Duncan Kane, the first love interest, who is so wooden as to be his very own forest. You could build a cabin out of him.



Duncan Kane: smoking hot, in a “belongs in your fireplace” kind of way

Really, though, it was all a setup for Logan. They USED us. I think they even pulled tricks from the book The Game, which J.Z. Migraine read and Cliff Noted for me. There’s this thing called “negging,” where you (a guy) purposely say something that is negative, so the girl (us) doesn’t think you’re trying too hard . . . or because jerks trigger some kind of elemental biological response in us or something like that. The theory is, we like meanness. Not a lot. Just enough.

Logan negs Veronica left, right, and center . . . and we slobber along. Then they took their good, sweet time redeeming him. They gave us just enough to make us follow along. It was this drop-by-drop baiting that made me end up at Daphne’s door at one in the morning, begging for season two, just because I had to see who was at the door.

I hate myself for it. But there he is. Smart-alack, negging Logan.


I love this @#$^@#^&hole.

Don’t tell me anything about season three. I haven’t seen it.

THE DEAD CRUSH: MASON, DEAD LIKE ME

Yes, you were supposed to like Mason. But since it seems like only 15 people even watched Dead Like Me (sad), I feel like I can get away with this without too much guilt. And Mason is a supremely constructed character, well played. He’s scrawny. He’s smelly. He’s a thief and a drug addict. He died forty years ago from drilling a hole in his own head. And I defy you not to love him.



How can you not love someone who says, “I’m so smart, I’m practically retarded”?

SIDEKICK CRUSH: GUS, PSYCH

Gus is the reason Psych works, and if you’re not watching it, you should. Because of Gus. Oh Gus.

Gus is the sensible sidekick to fake psychic Shawn Spencer. Gus has a real job (he’s a pharmaceutical rep), knows who has won every spelling bee for the last twenty years (and was a champ himself), is a comic book collector, a Civil War buff, a wannabe safecracker, and is still recovering from his own TV crush on Elyse Keaton, the mom from Family Ties. He also has an imaginary cat named Missus Pickles.




Gus is very good at spelling. How many characters can you say that about?

I’m sure there are more, but I need another cup of tea. There is a lot of it to get through, you know, because of the big box. Still, FREE MONKEY.

Do you have a TV crush? Or is there a TV show you have been dying to get my opinion on? Please let me know.