Brynn, do you think you could explain to him in a non-confrontational way why you want a pseudonym on any future articles you might write for him? (Although, I doubt it would surprise all that many people in the academic writing community that you got rewritten by the editor. :-))

Maybe you could ask that you be assigned the pieces that allow for greater creativity instead of the straight news pieces. Do some features first and then work up to some news features then do some straight news.

I liked the challenge of flipping back and forth from feature to straight news to editorial. But, if your heart's really in telling a story and not researching and informing, features will be much more comfortable to you.

Deb: Part of me wants to bake that cake just to see if it really does kick my ass... I might if I wasn't bitter and boycotting the magazine. Ha.

Yeah, I thought about just bowing down but I am committed to at least one more news article. Plus he sent me this :"Thank you so much for agreeing to take on a few assignments. I look forward to having you as one of our regular contributors throughout the course of the year."

Gah. *all aboard the guilt train*

Pseudonym... I wonder if I could be I.P Freely?

See, the features thing might work although from what I have seen the features section is rather, well , paltry in its content and controled by an editor who doesn't seem concerned about coming across as a dictatorial control freak. I guess I could look into that. I really can't see myself handling week after week of articles beginning with:

"When Judith told her highschool shops teacher she wanted to be an engineer, he laughed"

(This was the example of a "good" hook sentence sent to me for the topic of women in typically male jobs article or some such thing)

If good means "hack' he's got it! I'm sorry...that was snippy, huh?

Damn, Brynn. Sounds as though he jumped before you did, and boxed you up with guilt.

IP Freely. Rocknroll note: John Entwistle of the Who used to check into hotels under the name Sir John Pitzperfectly.

Which could be fun, if you dumped the "Sir" bit.

I need brainstorming help on character motivation:

I'm writing scenes where our heroine, Lucy, has known our hero, James, for, oh, two weeks or so. And they've now been married for three days, and are doing pretty well, all things considered, for near strangers who get married. The sex is good, James is good company, and he's given her a really, really nice horse for a wedding present.

So, I need some conflict, and at this point it needs to be internal to the couple. Actually, most of the conflict is like that. I'm not big on contrived kidnappings and such. So I want Lucy to have some doubts, guilty feelings, and the like. As I'm writing it now, I've got her a bit confused by how much she's enjoying The Sex, because she's still a little bit in love with someone else, and she thinks it makes her a bit of a wanton, even though logically she knows it's better that she enjoys what she has with her husband than moons over someone else.

And in addition to the horse, James gives her an expensive but gaudy and over-the-top diamond set. Lucy hates it, but being as she's only known James two weeks, and he's the one who basically rescued her and all her family from dire poverty by offering marriage, she feels she has to fake liking it. This is the first time she's lied within the marriage, and small as the lie is, it's a distancing factor. Also, something about the diamonds make her feel bought and paid for, almost like it's a gift you'd give to a mistress more than a wife. So she goes back to pondering something that's been puzzling her all along--namely why James would be so extravagant as to offer marriage to a woman he hardly knows, no matter how desperate her situation. And she deduces, correctly as it happens, that he married her in large part to get a convenient sexual partner. (Because of an incident he witnessed while a very young man, he decided he'd never resort to prostitutes or keep a mistress--as a result, he'd been NGA for about a year, after his older widowed lover broke it off with him, and, well, he's young and horny.*)

Anyway. Does it make sense that Lucy (who's quite young and inexperienced, but practical and intelligent) would balk a bit at discovering her own capacity for sensuality, and be a bit squicked to realize James married her more for sex than for disinterested kindness or love (not that she thought he loved her before)? Or is that too Victorian for 1810?

*I wrote him deciding not to pay for sex because I get a little squicked over Duke of Slut heroes in historicals, knowing the prevalence and untreatability of STD's back in the day. I wanted to keep James's previous partners to a small enough number that I could believe he wouldn't be giving poor Lucy syphilis. But I liked what it did to his character and motivations, anyway.

Perhaps an older female relative of now-impeccable-reputation but with actually a by-current-standards-licentious background (those Georgians were loose even by our standards) might pay her a call to dispense some reassuring words of wisdom?

Oh, I've already figured out how to get her out of this mental loop--I just need to make sure it's plausible that she feels that way in the first place.

Does it make sense that Lucy (who's quite young and inexperienced, but practical and intelligent) would balk a bit at discovering her own capacity for sensuality,

I don't know if this is at all helpful, but I'm reading a book set in the 1940s right now where the young inexperienced wife has to convince herself that she's not a nympho for wanting to sleep with her husband, even after he loses his legs.

Susan, I think you've set Lucy up as a character who does wonder about this sort of stuff. Also, she's a) in a new set of circumstances, and b) likely to be slightly overwhelmed. I think the loop is plausible.