I open my eyes when I feel Roxie’s hand on me. I know it’s her. I can smell her the way I can smell demons and Ryan. The way I can smell Amanda (vodka and a slowly rotting liver and the Dr. Pepper-flavored lip gloss she used for years because I gave it to her); the way I can smell Stan (stale makeup and stale sex that never quite washes off and the burned plastic smell of a perflectly executed wallride on a really top of the line skateboard); the way I can smell the diner (bleach, pancakes, pot roast, blood); the way I smelled the dead underneath Bath & Body Works (blood, blood, copper, iron, blood, and horrible horrible flowers).

For me, describing the smell of something can bring a level of realism to an otherwise fantastical narrative — it can be a way of giving the reader an entrance into something they’ve never experienced (and in the case of demons, probably never will). It can also be an immediately accessible universal, if you want to play around with those — almost everyone knows what burning wood smells like, or the smell of the air after a thunderstorm. If you need to do a quick description to catch the reader up, throwing in a universal scent can get you where you need to go quickly and with a bit of panache.

Explore your own senses beyond just the visual — scent, texture, hot/cold/wet/dry, sounds, pressure… Then see how it can be applied to your writing to create something interesting and evocative for your reader.

Here’s an excellent blog post on a similar subject: Read React Review‘s “Smells Like Romance Spirit: On the super noses of our heroines and heroes.” Allie has a psychic nose! That is my only excuse.

Kat and I wrote Salt and Silver in six weeks. Then we had a week for editing and a week to review the copyedit and a week to review the proofs. It’s true that we were editing right through the proof stage — part of that is because we knew we could, and part of it is because we hadn’t had enough time to properly write and get feedback. (That’s why there’s a huge plot hole in Salt and Silver, although I am told by readers that they consider it a feature rather than a flaw. To each her own, I guess!)

We’ve been writing the sequel for almost two years. Kat had a baby, I moved across the country, a lot of other life happened. But we know what it’s about. We know who the characters are. We know what the ~~artistic theme~~ is. We know what our creepy-cool twist is, and what makes it all sexy, and what the romance trope we’re turning on its head is. We know the characters’ voices.

Yet we’ve been writing and rewriting and rewriting the same 20,000 words for almost two years. First we wrote it in the first person POV of the hero. Then in limited third person POV for just the heroine, then just the hero, then swapping back and forth. At some point in between there, we changed the plot — twice.

We’ve finally settled on first person from the heroine’s POV — and we’ve got the plot pretty worked out — so now it’s time for us to buckle down and write. Kat’s already done a lot; I’m working on it now. Since she sent me the file, I’ve written five short stories (between two and six thousand words each), edited almost eight hundred thousand words of other people’s work, watched both seasons of Fringe (twice!), both seasons of Southland, Nigella Lawson’s entire oeuvre, and read several million words of novels, nonfiction, fanfic, blog posts… Oh, yeah, and I write two blog posts every day (sometimes three!).

The book’s file sits on my desktop, and I look at it every day. Sometimes I even click on it, open it, write a word or two. Then I am gripped by a paralyzing fear and I close it again.

After all, if Kat and I ever do finish this book, it will be completely obvious to everyone that Salt and Silver was a fluke, that I am not a writer, that I am holding back Kat’s literary genius, and that my computer should be taken away for the good of everyone. Or, almost worse than being a bad writer… it will be discovered that I am a mediocre writer. Not the worst, not the best, always missing that one something that makes characters come alive on the page.

This is, of course, ridiculous. I know I am a good writer. I know there are people who enjoy my writing, that it works on a fundamental level. I know that I can put together an excellent sentence, a compelling scene. I know that I know what my real flaws as a writer are (plot, as anyone who’s read my solo stuff can tell you!), just as I know that sometimes I can actually make my work stronger by writing my flaws into it. I know that Kat will fix whatever missteps I make, just as I fix hers — no ego, no bullshit; I have her back and she has mine.

But I can’t really convince myself of all this. I still sit in front of my computer and think, “Kat should write this book by herself so that I don’t ruin it.”

How to get around this? I still don’t know. I am still paralyzed by these thoughts of my perceived inadequacies. Even telling myself that I am writing my parts of this book for Kat, who loves my writing (as I love hers) doesn’t help.

Friday night, though, as I did my daily staring at the file on my desktop, I thought about when I started writing original fiction again. I’d stopped writing fiction in 2000, when I started working in publishing — and didn’t go back to it until after I’d left my full time job for freelancing. (In between, I wrote hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic, which I found — and continue to find — deeply satisfying.)

In March 2007, one of my friends thought I wasn’t writing enough (fanfic) for her entertainment and she offered to pay me a dollar to write her a one hundred thousand word science fiction novel — “the crappiest science fiction novel you can,” is what she said to me. I wrote 25,000 words of what eventually became Salt and Silver, and the responses of the people I sent it to were wildly varied. Some, like Kat (and the friend for whom I wrote it), really liked it. Others told me that the protagonist (proto-Allie, then completely unnamed) was “unlikeable” — and some other words I won’t reprint.

The response that tickled me the most, though, was from one of my mentors, who pinged me on IM to say, “Great googly mooglies, you really can write.”

When I read those words, I got a rush of wonderful warm sparkly happiness — and reading them now, remembering how good it felt to impress this person whose opinion I thought (and continue to think) very highly of… well, that’s awesome. It makes me feel awesome. It makes me feel like I can do anything.

I also went back and read a bunch of old emails Kat and I exchanged while writing and editing Salt and Silver — that was intensely fun, and rereading those emails reminded me of that. It reminded me that I love writing stuff she’s going to read, because she loves reading it — and the more I write, the more she’s going to write, and I love reading what she writes. It’s a symbiotic relationship of total awesome — and if I don’t write, I don’t get to participate in it.

Finally, I thought about all the other times I thought that if I did something, people would see me for the impostor that I am. Things like taking that job in publishing in the first place, and starting an imprint at age twenty-three, and doing a photo essay for my undergraduate thesis, and working with the expensive, professional audio/visual equipment in college. Learning Greek. Writing articles about the publishing industry, negotiating contracts for hundreds of thousands of dollars, deciding which books should be published. Baking a soufflé. Sewing a quilt, competing in a cartwheel competition, knitting a sweater, partitioning a hard drive using DOS commands.

I don’t know that I’d agree that “the best way out is always through,” or that the only way to handle fear is to stand up to it and bring it into the light of day — but the old adages seem to hold true in this case. The more I write, the better I feel, the easier it is to keep writing, the less I feel like I’m faking it and someone’s gonna call me on it.

All I can do is keep saying, “I can do this” — and then do it.

A comedian goes onstage and starts a routine.  Let’s say she’s got two choices:

1) She starts an anecdote that the audience can relate to on a universal level (i.e., something that anyone in the audience might be familiar with, either personally or through someone they know) — the humor comes out of exploring this universal concept, sometimes from a new or personal angle.

2) She starts with an anecdote that is, on the face, supposed to be universal, but instead is so deeply particular (and often disturbing) that the humor first comes from the audience realizing that the comedian’s “universal” experience is actually just her own, sometimes embarrassing one — and then again from watching the comedian realizing that her “universal” is anything but.

That second option can be funny in a comedy routine, but it’s something that I worry about all the time: What if I’m trying to describe something I think everyone can relate to, but instead it just shows how weird I am?

Here’s an off-the-cuff example: I happen to love the smell of cigarettes and cigars. I don’t smoke, but I’m happy to inhale and sigh dreamily if someone happens to be smoking near me. I know I’m not in the majority, though, so it’s important for me to remember when it’s appropriate to use the scent of cigarette smoke as a description.

I mean a couple of things when I say “appropriate” — obviously no one out there can tell me what I can and can’t write (though in reality, I have to keep in mind my editor, the copyeditor, the proofreader, and a few thousand readers…), but if I’m in the business of creating an experience in the audience’s mind, then writing something confusing or jolting isn’t going to help me. An unusual description can be appropriate when using it to highlight a character; it can be inappropriate when setting a scene using a third-person omniscient narrator to evoke a particular image in a reader’s mind.

Examples!

Good idea for a general positive-smoke description: Early morning, and the air was thick with fog and wet-wood campfire smoke.

Bad idea for a general handsome/yummy description: He leaned forward, the sweet smell of an early morning cigarette still fresh on his clothes.

In modern Western society these days, smelling like cigarette smoke isn’t going to be seen as a positive — in fact, without further description, the poor character might be immediately labeled as a bit untrustworthy, or deceptive. I find it hot, but my reader probably won’t.

This whole “hot or not” issue can get particularly awkward in romance, where the author is explicitly trying to induce a state of arousal in the reader. (Um, right? That’s what we’re all doing… aren’t we?) A particular description could be absolutely perfect for a vast number of readers, and completely horrible for the rest — as authors, we can’t know what’s going to work. We have some ideas — these days, for instance, a dubious-consent sex scene isn’t necessarily going to be something the majority of readers are going to find attractive as a major romantic jumping off point. But other times, our “universals” may just be whatever floats our own boat, and it’ll be a hit-or-miss proposition for any readers out there (who may then judge us for it. “This author likes dubious consent! GROSS.”).

For me, there’s a difference between knowing that you’re using a maybe-not-universal, and not realizing that your “universal” description is anything but.

My author crazy about universal descriptions: I can’t tell if what I’m describing is actually going to be universally understood! And what if someone thinks I’m weird for thinking it is? This haunts me as I write, and can be a big writing blocker — here’s my process to get beyond it:

1. Who cares if it’s not universal? It’ll probably work for somebody, and that somebody will be very, very happy.
2. Okay, I care that’s it’s not universal. Double-check whatever the problem phrase is with a trusted beta reader.
3. What if the beta reader is just as weird as me? Go back to not caring.
4. Not caring still doesn’t work. Fine. Recast the description to be a bit more universal.
5. I don’t want to give up my beautiful prose! That thing with the cigarette smoke really works. Is there a way I can recast the scene to make it clear that the smoke is supposed to be attractive? Well, if I make it a judgment call on the part of the female character, and maybe tie it in to some memory… maybe having to do with a past relationship that ended badly? But was worth the heartache? Hm…

And the next thing I know, maybe I’ve got a more rounded character and a better setup for my plot. This crazy might have a positive spin to it.

…or maybe not! Such is the power of the author crazies. Is there a description you’ve stumbled over that didn’t fit the bill? Did you write something that someone else choked over? Everyone’s a little mad here — join in!

As an author, it was much less important to me! At the time of writing the story, I was much more concerned with getting across the characters’ personalities. What do I care what people think they look like?

(Kat and I did, though, have extremely specific pictures of the characters in our heads. We are method writers; we know who is queer and who is not; we know who is a person of color and who is white; we know who went to college and who did not bother; we know all!)

Readers know what Allie looks like because she’s on the cover of the book. (Actually, her skin is less pale in the book than on the cover! But, yeah, she’s white, with darkish hair, and wears a pendant with the Seal of Solomon on it. She’s not anywhere near as thin as the woman on the cover of the book, though.)

When I wrote the novella we ultimately based Salt and Silver on, I had a very specific picture in my head of the character of Ryan. I knew exactly what he looked like, down to the glint in his eye. Yet nowhere in the book is he concretely described for the reader!

I did a search for the phrases “Ryan’s eyes” and “his eyes” to see if we ever even described them. Ryan closes his eyes, and rolls his eyes, and there’s sympathy in them at one point, and later in the story they are sad, hot, lost, uncertain, and filled with something Allie’s never seen before.

(Okay, now I am laughing. I would like to do this with every book I’ve ever read! I actually both love and hate books in which eyes do amazing things, like crawl across the room and bore into people’s souls and jump from one person to another. Just picture a pair of eyes jumping around, and you will never read a scene like that the same way again!)

Anyway, his eyes are “hooded and dark” and have “tiny lines crinkling the corners” — but most of the time? Most of the time Ryan has pulled his Stetson down over his eyes so they are hidden.

We don’t describe his hair. We don’t describe his skin. We mention that he’s taller than Allie, but not how much taller — but we do say he’s shorter than Owen. We describe his scars more than his looks (and, come on, that’s pretty hot!).

Maybe this is a shortcoming, but I don’t think so. I don’t think so because it means that someone can read the book and picture whoever they want in the role of Ryan — Jensen Ackles or Taye Diggs. Or John Cho. Or Sendhil Ramamurthy, or Kirk Acevedo. Or whoever!

And that is awesome.

And here’s our newest review! This one comes from Aja, who can be found at livejournal (with a mirror at dreamwidth).

Salt & Silver is hellbent on giving you dark social satire with your demonslaying. In addition to populating the book with a host of complex, dark, memorable characters of all sociocultural backgrounds [...] the authors have gone one further and taken us on a taut, well-paced journey straight from our privilege zones directly into Hell; and, you guys, Hell is New York City, with all its excess and oblivion and disconnection from reality on display in horrific, compelling beauty. more…

Phew! Horrific, compelling beauty, huh? Wait until she gets the sequel about the vampires…

One of the biggest issues with writing any paranormal beastie is the need to bring something new to the table. With everybody writing about vampires these days, why should someone want to read about yours? Let’s say you want to make your vampires stand out from the pack by being different from your everyday Count Dracula stereotype. Where do you start? (more…)

Check it out for a quick mention of what’s coming up in the Door-world sequel!

I often think that the kiss, rather than the sex scene, is the primary romantic force of the romance novel. For me, a sex scene is emotional, sure, but for the most part shows up as titillation for the reader. The kiss, though, is where the love comes from. A kiss can tell you a lot about how two characters feel for one another, how they approach this strange new thing between them.

And there’s nothing quite like kissing someone for the first time — the leading up to it, the uncertainty, the raw delight and aching tension in the “what if” and the “when.” If a book just brushes past the first kiss to get to something ostensibly more sexy… well, it just makes my little heart break a bit. That there is a missed opportunity to make your readers really feel the investment your characters are putting into this thing.

Here are some examples of my favorite kinds of kisses:

• I’m a sucker for the slow approach. I mean really slow. Sam and Jill’s kiss in Gilliam’s Brazil (skip to 7:00 in the link)? Fantastic. And my shame when it comes to loving the kiss-before-the-reveal in the 1995 Sabrina? Epic. Though not as epic as my love of the kiss between Bella and Edward in the first Twilight film. If it takes two people five minutes just to close the distance, I am weeping with joy by the end of it. This works better on-screen than in text, I think.

• The unexpected kiss. Yes, this is somewhat in contrast with the above. I first discovered my love of this many years ago in Rosemary Edghill’s Turkish Delight, when the female lead is ranting about something (perhaps English weather?) on the back of a horse, and immediately following the end of an impassioned speech from her, the next line reads, “He kissed her.” This works absolutely best in text, though on-screen is no slouch.

• The kiss everyone is pretending means something else. My absolute favorite example of that right now is from Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, when Bob and Charlotte (both married) are on the elevator in their hotel, returning to their separate rooms, and they’re both pretending that wanting to touch, wanting to be together, isn’t why they’re kissing goodnight — even though they both know it is. (4:10 in this fanvid shows a little bit of what I mean.) It’s awkward, it’s a little bit wrong, and it’s fooling no one, but you can feel every second of it on your skin.

• Kissing as seduction. This would seem pretty straightforward, but think about it — usually you get stuff like “witty conversation”, “deep spiritual connection”, “shared history”, or, you know, “mutual feelings” as the way to get characters to fall in love. And those are all great, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes, I just want there to be kissing. Kissing for bad reasons, like bets, and kissing for no reason, like an empty terrace and boredom. Kissing because someone’s there, and the character just really wants to kiss someone. Basically, I want all the characters to be wearing this t-shirt when the book starts. And then… it becomes something more. Maybe it’s a really good kiss. Maybe it’s all a lot less boring than everyone thought it was going to be. Maybe it was an awful kiss, and everyone backs away and says, “Whoa, what? What happened there?” — and has to think about what they’re doing. Mary Jo Putney’s Thunder and Roses has kissing thrown in to shake up a bet; the heroine just wants to get through it without embarrassing herself, and the hero just wants to see what happens if he messes with her. That entire book (and a lot of Putney’s works, come to think of it) basically becomes an ode to “kissing is awesome”.

• Finally, the memory of kissing. It’s not a kiss that happens onscreen — it’s the kiss that happened years ago that no one can forget. The kiss that’s been built up and worried over and made huge (sometimes even when it shouldn’t be) — the kiss that dulls every kiss after it, because nothing can compare. With movies and television, I like little sudden flash-cuts of hotness in the middle of mundane activity. With fiction, though, I like a good solid wallow. I want every detail, and then I want to know exactly what made this kiss the one that’s stuck. Everything builds from that. Yum.

So: Kisses! Those are my favorites — what are yours?

More information as we have it…

If our publishing contract allowed for it, we’d put our work under a Creative Commons license, which would also allow free distribution of the e-text of the original work — but since it doesn’t, we cannot legally do that. However, we do encourage readers to use their local libraries to access the text of our current book and future other books if purchasing it isn’t an option for whatever reason.

We do ask that you do not screw around with our ability to earn our livings from writing, which means that you cannot ever sell any of the transformative works you’ve done based on our stuff.

We are also concerned with being sued and with keeping our ideas for the characters and universes we’ve created more or less “pure” in our brains — to that end we are not going to access any of the transformative works based on any open canon of our writing. Once we’ve closed the canon (officially stopped writing about the particular characters/universe), all bets are off!

(Basically we’re pretty selfish and so we’d like to encourage people to write Allie/Roxie — or Narnia/Roxie! Or Ryan/Harry Potter (their love is so full of adolescent angst!) — fanfic and put it up on the Archive of Our Own so we’ll be able to eventually read it!)

If you have any questions (or want one of Kat’s ten billion interesting copyright links), leave a comment — we have a lot to say on this subject.

One of the things we wanted to discuss and did not get around to is the difficulty of writing with a loud internal editor. It is really difficult to turn that editor off and just put the freaking words down on paper (or, in our case, type the freaking words into the shared Google document). Everyone who has a loud internal editor learns a different way to turn it off. I wish I had any super-effective tips or secrets to share—but I don’t. You just have to get past it, one way or another.

The way I personally silenced my inner editor most of the time was by making a deal: I would write for X words or hours, and then edit to fix.

(Anna: “Kat, how did you silence your inner editor while writing?”
Kat: “Panic.”)

Kat says that having a deadline was very reassuring—and that while writing, she felt confident in our backups. Me, our editor, our copyeditor, the proofreader, the production editor, our agent…

I too found it extremely reassuring that if I missed something in my own edit, Kat would be there to catch it. One does not necessarily need a co-writer for this—just a trusted critique or proofreading partner. It is much easier to fall backward blindly when you know someone is there who will definitely catch you—or at least cushion your fall.

Something to remember is that all authors feel the same. Seriously, you are not the only one who has ever had these problems, even if it feels like it sometimes. It’s very comforting to know that author and editor problems are actually universal—and if you as the author are annoyed with something to do with the book, probably the editor feels similarly, or can actually reassure you that your insecurities are not based in our reality.

We also talked at the presentation about a list we made up of things that authors can do that will make easier the lives of everyone involved in making the book—but we didn’t really go into each of these things in detail, so here’s the annotated list.

1.) Proper manuscript format. People blow this off all the time, but it is extremely important. It is important not just to the editor/agent to whom you submit, but to the people who are going to work on your manuscript once it’s purchased and in production. Editors who want a format that is not the traditional proper ms. format will specify what format they want; with no specification, use this: 1” margins all around, double spaced, 12 point Courier New typeface.

2.) Do not put images in your manuscript. You might think it’s cute to put a heart at the beginning of each chapter, or insert an image of a star everywhere you have a scene change, but it is not. It’s just annoying for everyone who looks at your manuscript and has to do anything technical with it. (If you have a specific request for the type design—for example, if you want the published book to have a heart at the beginning of each chapter—that is something to let your editor know once the book is finished and going into production.)

3.) In the header, put your full name, the title of your manuscript, and the page number. In your footer, put the page number. Page numbers should be on the right hand side of the page always; that is where publishing people automatically look for them.

4.) Make a reference guide. This will be handy for yourself, your editor, and everyone involved in the production process. Kat and I, despite knowing we should do this, did not. This resulted in our bad copyedit being even worse, and made us feel totally stupid. So after we spent many hours wrestling our copyedit into submission (and scrawling STET—meaning “keep as originally written”—on everything), we wrote a letter to the proofreader, which you can read here.

Your reference guide should include:

• A list of the names of main characters and any nicknames used in the story (with their correct spellings!)
• Brief character descriptions and notes on any special characteristics (ex.: Anna Louise, 29, black hair, blue eyes; also referred to as: Lou, Annalou, Pineapple, Banana)
• A list of places that appear or are referred to in the story; this is particularly important if your characters go to foreign or alien places with names that are not commonly used in English or are in languages you’ve made up
• A list of difficult words—any non-English word or phrase, or uncommon usage of a word or phrase. For example, in Salt and Silver, our narrator says a couple of times, “I cannot even.” This is a complete sentence, generally conveying frustration beyond words, but it really confused our copyeditor. Another problem is sometimes colloquial phrases, which can trip up non-native English speakers/readers. So, for example, if your character calls sidewalks “pavement” or something, note it.
• Any uncommon non-English words or phrases; whether it is French, Welsh, or an alien language you made up, it is important to provide a list of what’s in the book and its translation. This is both so these things can be double-checked easily and because this way if the people working on your book are not familiar with the words, phrases, language, or font, they will know exactly what’s going on anyway.
• Any particular style items. For example, Kat and I wanted “gray” to always be spelled “grey”; we wanted “sulfur” to always be spelled “sulphur”; we wanted the serial comma used. Often there is a “house style” that will be imposed upon your manuscript, but if you have a particularly strong opinion about something (or it is important somehow to your narrative), that must be said to the editor early on so everyone knows.
• A timeline. If your characters attend school, what is the school schedule? If the character works, what is the work day like? What is the order in which things happen in the book? Lists of this type can not only help your editor, copyeditor, and proofreader do a better job on your book, but it can also help you organize the events of the book.

5.) After phone conversations with your editor (or anyone at your publishing company), send a follow-up email to confirm the information you exchanged—and, if you have an agent, CC your agent. This will not only help prevent miscommunication, but it will also protect you in the event that your editor (or whomever) is a jerk. Written records are the best for keeping track of things, and email is awesome because it never has to go away. (Kat and I suggest Gmail.com for a free email account with nigh unlimited space for email storage.)

6.) Do not be an idiot on the internet. Editors (and agents and other people) not only search their own names, but have friends. Your editor (or agent) may not say anything to you, but rest assured: when you say mean things about your editor/agent/publisher/whoever on the internet, we know. And we don’t forget. Ever.

(Separately from being that type of idiot, check out RaceFail for many examples of authors losing current/future readers by being careless and/or malicious, and not apologizing for their mistakes, and defending their bad decisions. Please try not to do this, and if you make a mistake, don’t defend it—just apologize. Sincerely. If you’re not sorry, think about why.)

7.) Let your agent do hir job. If you have an agent, let the agent do what an agent does. Let the agent handle the business stuff with your editor and publisher. Let the agent negotiate the contract. When there is a problem and you’re upset, go to your agent first. Your agent can explain to you whether you’re overreacting to a normal publishing process or if you have a really valid point that the agent will follow up on. The agent is your buffer and part of the job is protecting your working relationship with the editor and other people at the publishing house. Use that.

8.) Relatedly, ask questions. If you do not understand something, ask that it be explained. The more you understand about what’s going on, the easier it is to participate in the process.

9.) Be proactive with your questions, but don’t be annoying. Let your agent be annoying. If you don’t have an agent, say to your editor, “I have all these questions. Here is my list of questions. I don’t want to be annoying, so please get to this when you have a chance, and if I don’t hear from you in a week or two, I will bug you about this again.” Be reasonable. Be practical.

10.) Have blog posts prepped in advance. Seriously. Even if you just have a document full of rough sketches or two line ideas of what you want to write about, it will help you in the long run when you realize that authors who blog successfully write entries more than once every eight weeks.

11.) NEVER TWITTER OR BLOG IN ANGER. Take a deep breath, take a step back, walk away from the computer. If you must blog about something that pisses you off, get a trusted friend who is clever to read it over for you to make sure that it doesn’t read like this: STUPID MEAN HORRIBLE AWFUL HATE HATE HATE BITTER ANGRY ANNOYED!!!!! No one wants to read that except people who want to cause or observe your drama, and that’s not why you want attention.

12.) Related: People on the internet are often wrong (whether with reviews, comments, history, whatever). You will see these people, and wish to inform them of their wrongness. Perhaps even loudly. DO NOT DO IT. Don’t engage, don’t talk about how you’re not engaging but you really want to, don’t send other people to engage for you—just don’t do it. You won’t be hailed as a modern-day folk hero, or the unlikely victim of a vast conspiracy—you’ll just come off as an ass. DO NOT BE AN ASS.