The Girl from Ipanema is not in our book...

This post is mostly for Jaren and Mike to laugh at me, but here goes anyway! There are many things to think about when writing with other people, but one of them is that sometimes there is just no way of knowing what type of reaction you are going to get from your writing. What I mean by that is that sometimes you write something that you think is really good and you get super excited about it and then you hand it off to your co-writers and you are hit with a resounding "NO!" I have a perfect example of this from our book. I wrote a little bit about Windy where she is walking down the street messing with boys. She is wearing a skimpy little outfit and seeing how many guys she can get to look her way. It was a funny little piece, meant more to showcase how Windy was somewhat calloused but more so that she was still trying to have a bit of fun. I wanted to let the reader know that she was still a human being and that despite her awful situation that she could still smile. I had her singing the Girl from Ipanema, which starts out "tall and tan and young and lovely..." which I imagined Windy as being. It made perfect sense to me. I even included some of the song in Portuguese. It was brilliant, so I sent it off to Mike and Jaren, and Mike replied right away with an absolute no. I could probably dreg up some of the emails he sent, but the basic message was that he hated that song more than anything in the entire world and would basically either stop writing the book or shoot himself in the head if we left that part in the book. Obviously I had hit a nerve! But, if I learned anything from having two parents, it is that if one person says no you always try to see if you can get the other one to say yes. So, I checked in with Jaren to see what he had to say. And, to my surprise, he said that he absolutely hated that song as well. Jaren and I have both lived in Brazil, so I just assumed that he would love that song, but boy was I ever wrong. It brought out a level of hatred in him that I have never seen before. Undetered, I pressed forward, pleading my case a few more times to both of them to keep that part in. I tried everything I could think of, but to no avail. The truth was, that for one reason or another, my writing partners absolutely detested the Girl from Ipanema. So, after a month of tastefully and tactfully pushing for this (and don't listen to them if they tell you I was anything but tasteful and tactful :) I finally relented. Time went by and I found another place to include the Girl from Ipanema. It was just as a reference, and it was actually in Book Two and it worked really well. I was thinking that perhaps they just didn't like my take on Windy, and that it wasn't actually the song itself they disliked but the theme of the passage, so I would try again. To be honest, I'm surprised that they boys didn't start up a websited called firejedpeterson.com to get rid of me. In about three seconds I had received emails from Jaren and Mike telling me that there was NO WAY that song was getting in any of the books. So, I did some research and found another song from Brazil to include and used that instead. There was no mistaking their message - the girl must go. And so, go she did. So, while this was sad for me, the main point to this story is that while there is almost always a compromise to be made when writing with other people, sometimes there is just nothing you can do. Mike can tell the story someday of his little zombie cop-killing boy that got cut in somewhat the same fashion. I would absolutely love it if someday we put together an extended edition of the book with some of the stuff that got cut out, but I know that if that happens, and if I bring up adding the Girl from Ipanema, that most certainly I would wake up the next day with a horse's head in my bed. No, the Girl from Ipanema will never get to know Hade. It is a shame, I feel, but sometimes life is like that. Sometimes you just have to move on, even when you never do. Tchao, Garota! Ate o prossimo!