Susan, I also had some minority reactions to 9/11 and got the stares. I'm sitting her nodding.

A word of caution, though: keep a very close eye on just how much introspection you have her delving into. If she doesn't do more of it during the book, it will stick out like a sore thumb, and appear to be the author writing the author, not the character being the character. Also, if she is going to show those introspective tendencies throughout the book, be very careful about how you write Jack. Two introspective characters will stand a good shot of getting you raised eyebrows, and also have the potential to bury a lot of the action in the story itself.

Susan, I also had some minority reactions to 9/11 and got the stares. I'm sitting her nodding.

Deb, was it you with the Pentagon/Cthulhu comment, and the last thing the hijacker seeing was a big tentacle coming out of the Pentagon? I laughed my ASS off at that.

I had stopped loving my father long before he died, but I did feel a complicated set of emotions when he died. I was relieved. I was sad about his lost potential. I was sad that I hadn't had a better father. I felt guilty that I was not as upset as people seemed to expect me to be, even though I'm a pretty pragmatic person. When someone dies, you can be sad that they weren't what you thought they should be. At the funeral, I just remember feeling numb and thanking a lot of people for coming. I think numbness is pretty common under those circumstances.

Someone please tell me I'm not crazy and using epithets ('the blond detective', 'the young anthropologist') instead of the characters' names in dialogue tags, etc. can be really, really annoying.

For some reason, the use of them sets my teeth on edge. If the scene is from the point of view of someone who doesn't know the characters in question, fine. Most places I see it, though, the reader already knows what the characters look like, etc. It tends to come across as adding variety because all the writing books tell you you have to add variety, if that makes any sense.

Sorry to rant, but I fear I'm about to get involved in a feedback wrangle and I want to make sure I won't sound like a total whackaloon.

Deb, was it you with the Pentagon/Cthulhu comment, and the last thing the hijacker seeing was a big tentacle coming out of the Pentagon? I laughed my ASS off at that.

Me too! That was one of the funniest things I've ever read.

It find that annoying, Anne. It's acceptable once, to establish that he's blond or tall or whatever, but after that it annoys me. My theory is that dialogue tags are just to move the story along and make it clear who's speaking, and that writers start being annoying when they start thinking "I've used 'said' too much. I've used 'John' too much. Maybe I should use 'exclaimed the young detective.'"

Anne, I will back you up on the overwhelming annoyingness of "the blond detective" being used on a guy who already has a name. That goes double when it is "the titian-haired heiress" or "the sultry rake".

so out of synch with what came to be the general consensus that I kept saying the wrong things

I stayed home (alone) all that week for this very reason. (I mean I did not say the wrong things; I just removed myself from any situation in which I might be invited to say the wrong things. Because I had a suitcase full of them.)

Yeah, I think that only works when somebody is coming in from outside. Like in one of my fics, I have Jimmy McNulty, coming in to Gee's shift for the first time, refer to Kellerman as an "Opie-looking detective,"

Deb, was it you with the Pentagon/Cthulhu comment, and the last thing the hijacker seeing was a big tentacle coming out of the Pentagon? I laughed my ASS off at that.

Yes, and the "gasp, how dare you" reactions were still showing up two years later. I also had the reaction to "Golden Gate Bridge at threat!" of not worrying about it because terrorists in a rented motorboat would never find the damned bridge, under all the fog; I figured they'd slam into Alcatraz. Also got the We Are Not Amused looks. Whatever, yo.

Jesus wept, I lost seven people I knew when WTC2 went down, including my nephew's best friend and business partner. My nephew is alive only because his New Jersey neighbourhood had a seventy minute power outage the night before, and his alarm clock turned itself off. But if the reactions aren't pure rote at times like that, society as a whole will have no trouble reminding you that, at the first sign of species trouble to hit us en masse, we scoot back into the cave and throw rocks at any different reactions.

Anne, I so completely disapprove of that method of writing that, if I see it, I won't read past the second usage. Find a way - preferably one that doesn't involve a character stopping to regard him or herself in a hallway mirror - of showing. "The blond detective" as is cheap and tell-ish a way of doing it as I can imagine.

the titian-haired

Oooh! Nancy Drew flashback!