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“Consume” is a word that has so many layers of meaning and is a word that is so important in my writing and to “chick lit” – my genre of choice. A character can be consumed by passion or a character can consume a massive amount of calories - whether in the form of rich foods or alcohol - after a bad break-up with the scoundrel boyfriend whom readers know is wrong for her. Just as I want readers to consume and be consumed by my books, my characters consume and are consumed by love, sex, and shopping. At the end of the day, what is reading if not consumption? And what is love if not being consumed?

Here is a short passage from my novel, _Chanel, Champagne, and Chocolate Cake: The Adventures of Sadie Smyth_:

"Sadie sat looking at the empty cake pan before her, and she realized that she had crossed over into “pathetic woman” territory. She was an editorial assistant at the most glamorous fashion magazine in New York: how could she consume an entire chocolate cake in one sitting? She couldn’t be fat; her career would be ruined. She couldn’t let Harry and his foul ways drive her into eating her pain. She should think about something else: reorganize her closet or call up one of her gal pals for some comfort or distraction. But let’s face it: she couldn’t stop thinking about him. It was as if she was consumed by thoughts of him; as if he had consumed her as quickly and as permanently as she had consumed that chocolate cake. How was she going to survive Harry when she didn’t even have the power to survive a box of Betty Crocker cake mix and a can of frosting?"

Literal. Say what you mean, and mean what say. Words have meanings. We know what they are. Words are not games. I am here because I know words. I know how to put them together and say something. Read the text, examine the words, and you know what it means. Be literal. Enough said.

Oh, god, I love the word “play,” for all of its wonderful associations…the play of children, the play of language, the play’s the thing … I’m no Stoppard with the word play, but the word “play” evokes in me such joy, such spontaneity, such liveness. Ohhh! It makes want to leap up right here and land on the floor, roll on the ground, explore the space around me, live to fullest of my physical being. If there’s one thing I love about the theatre, it’s the play—not just the script that we perform as the curtain opens but acts of play that we bring to stage with every word we write, with every gesture we make, with every line of dialogue we speak.

My passage:
Alice: It was joke, lover.

Mike: A joke. This is our love Alice, our bed, our marriage . . . it’s not a joke.

Alice: Oh Mike, you’re just so serious about sex. Can’t we, you know, play once in a while?

Mike (Suddenly incensed): It’s always playing with you…playing mind games, playing your damn jazz, playing the fool. And now you want to play in our sex life? Isn’t anything serious for you? Doesn’t anything mean something?

Alice: Of course it means something…it means that I care enough about you that I don’t want to shroud you in anger, or in pain. When I’m with you I want to feel light, to feel free, to play around, not to do work. I don’t want us to be work, Mike.

My favorite word? Certainly, it is ____. Why? Everyone likes this. You like to ____. I like to ____. Some in the world condemn those who freely ____, but we know what that they are simply cattle, their inculcated "Mooos" an echo chamber of self-righteousness. But everyone loves - needs - to ____. You stand there, or sit, reading this, and I know, even if it shocks or even horrifies you, you are there and all you can think is, I want to ____. It makes you feel good, yes? It's is like ... it is like that first gulp of air after almost drowning. Every. Single. Time.

A sample passage, from my novel-in-progress: Want a ____?

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You watch as Jonathan fumbles with his keys for a moment before pulling them out of his pocket. He must be thinking, Where there's ____, there's.... You see him shake his head, dismissing the thought. She won't. She can't. From your hiding place, you watch him stand there, keys suspended, waiting, as though listening to air. His mouth falls into a frown. Straining, you listen and hear nothing; you smell nothing. The door closes behind him. Muffled voices slide beneath, along the uneven, stained floor.

Jesus, Sarah, must you always ____ as soon as I walk out of the door? You ask me to trust.... you ask... -- you hear the hiss of a sigh -- for God's sake David, could you please *leave*?

Jonathan, dear. -- her voice, almost breathless, with only a hint of resignation -- Yes, you caught us. We happen to be enjoying a nice ____. I invited David over. I asked him to stay. Why be such a prude? It's not like you've never seen me ____ before. It's been months since you and I even thought to ____, so why shouldn't I look elsewhere? You weren't even supposed to be home for two more hours.

May... maybe I should go. I can read the ____ sig... --she cuts him off--

David, stay right where you are. If Jonathan can't be a man about this -- and you see in your mind's eye Jonathan, hands shaking, bleeding, his keys cutting into his fingers, his shoulders slumped inside his jacket, leaning against his anger -- if he can't be a man, she is saying, he can go ____ himself an...

You plug your ears; you inhale silence. You don't want to hear the rest. The curses and the screams you know are to come. The police will ask and you, you do not like to answer questions. Rising, you walk up the staircase, back to your apartment, back to your writing desk, treading on ashes.

My favorite word is: **promise.**

Promise is such a multifaceted word. People keep promises, they break promises, and the ways they deal with promises tell us so much about them. The future holds promise, and so do children. I like the possibilities that such a word offers when I develop characters and situations.

Running her fingers lightly over the faded wood of the doorframe, Sara paused on the threshold and stared back into her house. So many memories. Here Brad had carried her laughingly into this, their first home, the two of them giddy with love for each other. Through this door they had carried Taylor, snuggled securely into her car seat, she and Brad terrified yet full of wonder at their little girl. Here, she sighed, here the officers stood that night, hats in hands and apologies in their eyes. And here, in this house, she’d learned her strength. Thresholds, she thought, the in-between places. And now for the last time she stood here, and let the bittersweet memories wash over her. “The bitter will pass,” she could hear her mother’s voice whispering to her from beyond, “the sweet will remain, but you’ve got to seize the moment, seize every moment of every day, darlin’, because these moments, they’re what’s precious, and they don’t last.” And she turned, only to see her little girl toddling forward, one hand steadied by the tall man who held his other hand out to her, and she smiled, taking it, seeing their future bright with promise. It was indeed the start of a brand new day.

Just thinking about HEAT sends pulses racing. Its many connotations make it so versatile and useful, especially when it comes to love and romantic suspense, which is why it turns out to be my single favorite word for writing romance novels. Just last year, I introduced you to Savannah Jones, who brought on the heat with her torrid pursuit of U.S. Marshall Shane McDaniel and the madman who had been stalking her for months in my romantic thriller “The Heat of the Moment”.

The minute Shane walked into the room, Savannah could feel the heat sizzling between them. As he crossed the room toward her, she could feel the heat building between her creamy thighs. That thought had barely registered when the heat of a bullet grazed her right shoulder. In an instant, Shane was kneeling beside her returning fire through the cracked window of her apartment. Though her wound was oozing steadily, the heat of Shane’s body kept her conscious. She was fighting panic and wondering where things were going next. The heat was definitely on…

"Catechresis"

Words fail me. Because they are the instruments of institutional power, they fail us all, and so I endeavor to illuminate their failings. Catechresis, as Spivak makes so clear, is about the absolute antipathy between language and the things we wish to talk about. There is nothing "natural" about using words to talk about things; there is only the predictability of the repressive.

Here's a sample: Anger. On the red dust and in the black deep water and in the acacia's thorns, all the griot took in was upside-down, all he knew was anger. The European hegemon's mad catechresis had been too much - he had nodded at the community's welcome ceremony, and then he had sighed, "primitive. Dark. Native."

"Memory"

When I try to think about the episodes that make up my life, I am almost always overwhelmed by the power of memory to help me understand what's important. I will never forget the beauty and the ugliness that I have seen, and that is a testament to how memory shapes me.

This is something I'm working on for my memoir, but I'm not really sure where it should go just yet. That's the thing about memory, you know, it's hard to make it fit, because it's so powerful. Anyway...

My grandmother told me when I was a girl that memory is like a river. She was right. Rivers cut through the earth in beautiful channels. They nourish floodplains. They collect what drains from higher elevations. They sometimes devastate everything. My memory does those things to my heart, too. It is a source and a shaper.

I cannot help but think about my memories of that first protest. The papier-mache smell from our giant puppets, the regular cadence of those drums, and the real solidarity of our chants collect in a clear image of what it means to change things, to really change things.

My favorite word is oubliette -- a type of dungeon, in which the only means of entry or egress is a small trap-door in the ceiling. Oubliettes have figured prominently in the work of some of the greatest writers in the literary canon, from Poe to Thomas Harris. It is a beautiful word in its own right, but the concept it describes is even more beautiful in its simplicity. Furthermore, the oubliette is an excellent plot device; it can be constructed easily by anyone, rich or poor, in any environment, with a reasonable amount of dedication, and it can be dressed up by being filled with rats, or poison gas, or a slowly rising tide of human blood. In these cases, the oubliette itself just gets out of the way, and allows the other elements of the story to be the stars. Indeed, the word is so important to me that I often like to think of my own novels as little oubliettes for the reader: elegant, well-constructed, and deadly. Here's an example of the use of the word in my own work:

Consciousness came slowly, dripping back into my brain like blood. It was dark, dark and quiet; a kind of dense atmosphere that did not sit well with my recollections of last night. Those recollections were dim, fragmented: wailing jazz, laughter, a woman's hair, champagne...and another drink, green and bitter. And was there more? A gaudy, neon-lit chapel just off the strip...a priest in pink vestments...an elevator ride, to a hotel room strewn with roses...but these snatches were all I could pull together.

The darkness was complete. I needed to open a window, to get some light and air. Hadn't there been a floor to ceiling window in this wall? But my fingers encountered only cold stone. I felt around, but the wall extended, unbroken, to corners with other stone walls on either end. Curious, I continued my exploration, running my hands over the four strong walls that surrounded me on either side, the low ceiling with the heavy wooden panel in the center, the cold floor on which I had awakened. Curiousity began to turn to panic. Had it all been a dream, or a hallucination brought on by whatever was in that green flask she had tipped into my glass, over and over last night, urging me to drink the contents? For this was not the honeymoon suite; it was an oubliette.

DISBELIEF

As a writer, you’re all the time sprinting from yourself. You’re winded and broken from escaping the truth. The fucking Cartesian cogito is the very thing that drives lactic acid into your bloodstream and paralyzes you with a cramped and twisted imagination that would otherwise take flight. So you learn to adapt. You embellish and therein create a material world for your fiction. So why is it any surprise when you learn that it’s the lying that fuels your reader’s lust? They know it, and you know it. After all, it’s simpler to hallucinate a more feasible set of circumstances than the one that is actually playing itself out in the world.

But don’t confuse disbelief with denial. The latter is far too stationary. Disbelief is transient, and sustainable. Disbelief allows you continually substitute the Polaroids and silver gelatin prints in your baby album and create an endless spread of color.

Disbelief is the word that loves you right back every time you manage to push it past your pouting bottom lip. Disbelief is the mantra that sustains you even when the forecast calls for mounting distress at sunrise followed by full blown horror in the late afternoon. Your life is a hurricane of disbelief and the word naturally seeps into your work.

Example:
Do you believe what had happened three nights ago behind the gleaming, red La Marzocco that sparkles each time the café door opens the way you know blood would sparkle all pooled up on a mirror laying out in the sun if you could just keep it from drying up? Does it make a difference if you do? Especially since everyone else stands in disbelief and there is no evidence. And since on the morning of March twenty-third the truth was irrelevant, you are free to rearrange crime scene.