one of my earliest childhood memories is clutching my brother’s hand as we crouched under a desk, hoping the police wouldn’t find us.

Okay. That will give you a distorted view of the neighborhood I grew up in, and so let me give some context. One of the neighbor girls routinely teased me. On this particular day, she had told me my dress was ugly. Then she stole my chalk. Since I was about four years old, I burst into tears. My brother saw this, and being older, he dealt with the situation as only a mature boy of fourteen can: He picked up a piece of decorative bark and hurled it at our neighbor’s forehead. It split her scalp and she bled like the dickens. She had to get three stitches.

Did I mention her dad was a cop?

“CM,” you are saying, “that’s all well and good. But what does this have to do with Legalese?”

I’ll tell you. My original version of Legalese had the stupendous title of “Dower Corrupts.” Which, incidentally, I still love even though it is an absolutely horrible title for a romance novel. In any event, Dower Corrupts was a book about money–specifically, an heiress who could buy herself everything she wanted, except for the things that money can’t buy. And she met a man who also had pots and pots of money, and together they figured out that money sucked and then got rid of most of it.

“CM,” you protest, “you have not yet got to the throwing of decorative bark.”

Right. I’m getting there. That version lasted about 3000 words, and it was axed when a critique partner asked some very pointed questions and I shamefacedly mumbled and said, “But–but–but if I don’t do it this way, everyone’s going to look at her and say, ‘You are stupendously wealthy. Get over yourself.’” And she rolled her eyes and said, “You know, I’m still thinking that.” And I cursed her silently–or not so silently, as the case may be–because she was right, and I started again.

The next version of the book that I wrote was about money. It was about a girl who had a stupendous amount of money and could buy anything she wanted, except the things money didn’t buy. And then she met a man who had all the things that money couldn’t buy, but was a little short on the money parts himself. And sparks flew because they were totally outside each other’s experience.

This is the version that I’ve been writing for lo these last seven months. For seven months, I have deluded myself into thinking that I am writing a book about money, but on a rescan of the pages I’ve written, “money” itself has cropped up, say, twice, and other things drive the emotions, the plot, and the characters.

And here we get to the decorative bark. I am not writing a book about money. I am writing a book about the most important thing money can’t buy: family. And so my proposed finale, which was supposed to be all about how they get rid of the money, no longer actually works. Because money has no emotional weight in my book. What does have emotional weight is that damned piece of decorative bark. You see, I have always known that my brother loves me, no matter how prickly he may be. When I cast my heroine’s brother as the villain in this little play about money, I have never been satisfied. He’s gotten dark–very dark. I planned to have him do all sorts of nefarious things, but halfway through the book, he up and quit doing those dark things in a scene that I still have to rewrite because it doesn’t quite work yet. Still.

At some point, I realized that the money had nothing to do with the happily ever after. My problem was that I could envision a happily ever after with any amount of money–but I couldn’t see a happily ever after with her villainous brother clutching all the decorative bark and laughing maniacally. Once I realized that, I found my black moment. It was blacker than anything I had imagined. It had my hero doing something that still makes my skin crawl, and doing it for the only reason I can imagine he would do it. And then, he had to dig himself out of the deep, deep hole he dug for himself.

Naturally, there’s only one way for him to do it.

Decorative Bark. And that’s all I’m saying. You’ll notice that I’ve blown past the 384-page stopping point by a long margin, and I’ve upped my estimated point for “The End” somewhere to 420.
So you tell me. What’s the theme of your book? Is it better than “decorative bark”? Can it possibly be worse?

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