Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 112

Happiness is a Great Loaf of Bread

I know, I’m down to the basics, but given where my country is right now, the staff of life is just what we need. (Well, that and a new government.) My local grocery has brioche and challah, and I have butter and cheese and wine, so I’m pretty damn happy right now. Also I have a new potato recipe thanks to Ann.

What made you happy this week?

Random Saturday

Bob and I decided not to do HWSWA this week and ended up e-mailing all week instead. So no HWSWA. Do you have requests for topics? Because we’re out.

I have also discovered that an automatic “absolutely not” follows the words “alpha billionaire” in a book description for me. It’s right up there with “can he save her” and smirking. On the other hand the ingredients “chicken thighs” and “lemon” together make me hit Bookmark and the grocery. What is it about lemon and chicken anyway? Well, lemon and anything. Limes, I don’t get, but lemons? Hoo boy.

But I digress.

Oh, wait, this is a Random post. I’m supposed to digress.

So I went to look at the excerpt from a book recommended here and saw it was $9.99 and thought, Maybe not, and then read the excerpt and thought, Hell yes because that guy can write. And then I thought, What are my books priced at? because let’s face it, they’re all old at this point. The Harlequins are reasonable, and most of the SMPs are $7.99, but Bet Me is $11.99? And here’s a shocker: The Cinderella Deal is $13.99. Bantam must have lost its mind. No, we have no control what publishers charge for books. I was trying to think what the sweet spot was for me for hitting the Buy button, and I think it’s around $6.99. There was an excerpt I was reading the other day where I thought, Only if it’s free, and it was a BookBub and it turned out to be free, so I bit, but mostly if I’m going to try something, it needs to be cheap. Cheap R Us. Unless I hit really good writing, then I pay $9.99 for Sudden Death by David Rosenfelt. That’s not a recommendation, I’ve only read the excerpt, but it was good, so I’ll risk ten bucks. You want a recommendation? Rainy Day Sisters by Kate Hewitt. Currently two bucks on Amazon.

I know we usually complain about books not being available in digital, but I just discovered something much worse: Better Off Dead is not available to stream. What the hell are they thinking? That’s as bad as Green As Spring being $49. No, it’s worse, because at least Green As Spring is available.

I’m feeling the urge to do a John Cusack binge, not sure why, possibly he’s lurking as a placeholder for a character, but I’m having a hard time finding movies I want to watch. Grosse Pointe Blank, of course, that’s a no brainer. Say Anything annoys me, but Must Love Dogs I can’t remember, so I’ll try that. I do remember not liking Serendipity, but it’s a rom com and sometimes my tastes change; I didn’t like Down with Love the first time I saw it and then loved it the second time. I think High Fidelity was good. He’s made some violent stuff that I am not interested in seeing again just because I’m not in the mood. Give me comedy and romance, please, with a happy ending. At least until after the election.

Speaking of which, kudos to New Zealand to being well on the way to keeping their excellent PM. Now there’s a smart country.

My guilty pleasure right now is Marley Spoon. Every week, food arrives with recipes, like a gift from Santa, if Santa were Martha Stewart. It’s expensive, which isn’t good, but it’s my one guilty pleasure since all the others (eating out, going to the movies, shopping) are postponed until after the apocalypse. This week it’s Chicken Moo Shoo wraps, Lemony Chicken Scampi, and three desserts: Coconut Cake, Fudge Cookies, and Snickerdoodle Muffins. Next week is Peanut Noodle Stir Fry, Cheese Ravioli with Prosciutto, and Chocolate Lava Cakes with Drip-kit Coffee. Really, Christmas every Friday, and it’s all consumable so I don’t have to find a place to put anything. Perfect.

I’m babysitting my neighbor’s dog this afternoon. Jake has a schedule he needs to stick to, and my neighbors had a family thing, so Jake and I are together again (we’ve been here before). He’s a sweetheart, although sometimes he gets so enthusiastic about something invisible that he almost tugs me off my feet. We have discussed this, but I put up with it because he’s a sweetheart and he’s old, and this neighborhood has lost enough dogs this year. Beautiful Kara next door died the same week as Milton, and Jackson, next door to Jake is going on fourteen or fifteen, so his days are probably numbered although the little bastard runs his whole family so he may be able to defeat death, too. The point is, Jake can yank on his leash all he wants as long as he keep breathing. That’s all I ask.

In other words, my life is quiet and full of small pleasures, and I am grateful for that, even as my country burns down around me. Please god let this election go well so we can go back to being boring in the news. Somebody described Biden’s town hall as being “delightfully boring.” That’s my wish for America’s future. Delightfully boring.

That and food in a box every Friday and old dogs that don’t die.

This is a Good Book Thursday, October 15, 2020

This week I mostly read Anna, finding things the Girls sent up and I wrote down without much thought that now seem like foreshadowing. I love my Girls. I did try another Mary Stewart and realized that whatever made me love her in the past is now gone. That’s okay, she was great for me back then. I reread some Rex Stout, too, and a lot of Book Bub samples, and started a book by a mob daughter. Coming soon in the mail: used books about Russian icons.

So what did you read?

Working Wednesday, October 13, 2020

I’ve been cooking, trying to clear things out for winter, working on Anna. Bob and I decided to skip this week’s HWSWA, and then e-mailed about our plots anyway. He wrote that he was giving an old character an identical twin. Secret twins are death in fiction but no shutting people down while they’re in discovery, so I said something like, “Uh huh.” Then he e-mailed back: “Joking.” Turkey. Very excited about tomorrow; I get to go to the grocery, buy stuff to make vegetable soup, nachos, spaghetti. Much chopping for comfort food for cool weather. Hey, small pleasures count.

What did you do this week?

Every Book Makes Its Own Rules

I have just realized that I’m writing this book in chapters in chronological order. I NEVER do that. It’s the weirdest thing, but that’s the way it’s coming to me in chunks of 5000 to 6000 words. It’s just bizarre. I’m fairly sure I’ll break free by the time Act One is done, and of course there will be copious rewriting, but I’ve never written a book like this before. It would worry me, but I figure I can blame Bob. He’s very linear. We’ve been talking about writing for weeks. It’s his influence and his fault.

The pacing of the love story seems faster, too. As in, usually they begin an affair at the midpoint/point of no return and the rest of the book is them working out the relationship as they struggle to solve the subplot. Of course, usually they don’t hit the sheets in the first chapter, which is where this one starts. I like the idea that they have a fantasy idea of each other and then get a rude awakening–who among us hasn’t been there?–and then they work out a new relationship as they work out the subplot and find out that they’re not that different from who they were in the beginning after all. It was really important to me that they don’t lie in that first chapter so there are no tiresome “But you said” arguments. They both screwed up in their assumptions, they both accept that, they move on. They’ll have enough to argue about without Big Misunderstandings. I feel the same about Big Misunderstandings that Joan Crawford felt about wire hangers.

So that “many roads to Oz” bit I’ve been bashing students with for decades, I now realize applies to changes within a writer’s career, too. This book is different? Fine, straight on til morning and don’t sweat the small stuff. Like EVERYTHING’S DIFFERENT THIS TIME.

But, like Anna, I am calm.

Plotting, a Whine

By now, it’s obvious to anybody who reads this blog that I am not a natural plotter. Some people think in plots. Those people would be Bob and Krissie. Normally these would be aim-for-them-when-I-drive people, but they are important to my life, so I just have to put up them. Meanwhile, I make tables and conflict boxes and mind-maps and act diagrams and scream a lot. Really, I just want to write people having snarky conversations; a reason for those conversations seems a lot to ask.

Take Lily and Anna, for example. I don’t think Lily is ever going to have a plot. At most, I’m guessing it might be a novella. It’s just a bunch of people I like sitting around eating food I like and flirting. There is nothing wrong with this as long as I don’t show it to anybody (well, except for you guys, you’ll read anything). So I really don’t think Lily is ever going to be a book. But Anna . . .

Anna has been weird. That first 6000 words/Chapter One just wrote itself. I’ve tweaked it since, but it’s essentially the same as the first draft. The second 5000+ was a little harder, but not much, and again, I’ve tweaked it, but it’s pretty much the same, too. This is new for me. Usually I’m slashing the beginning or at least rewriting it severely (Remember Mort? No? That’s because he’s gone) but the first 12,000 or so words are pretty much what they’re going to be, I think. (I could regret saying this.).

But once I got into the third chunk of narrative, I had to start making some plot decisions. As in “Get one.” I had the romance plot and the art fraud plot and one of them had to get first position, and that was the romance. Which is when Bob said, “Forget the art fraud for now, you can put that in later, concentrate on your main plot.” Which is really good advice. So now there’s all this stuff happening (Fairfax, anybody?) that I’m not sure about but that complicates the romance nicely. I’m sure the Girls have a plan that I cannot see yet, so I’ll just write down whatever they send up on the crime subplot and just concentrate on the journey that is Nate and Anna.

Of course, that leads me down some possibly blind alleys. Like the scene in the grocery store (in Chapter 4, which you haven’t seen yet). What the hell that’s doing in there I don’t know, but I remember thinking the same thing about the softball scene in Welcome to Temptation and that turned out to be crucial. And then I did a cast list table with one column for the romance plot and a second column for the crime subplot and realized that the romance plot was Anna, Nate, and Anna’s mom, which is not enough for a developed plot, I think. But there was the grocery scene, with three other characters who were only romance plot. So the Girls probably know what they’re doing.

What I’m thinking is that there are two or three subplots and Anna and Nate have to untangle them. The reason I’m thinking this is that I was rereading Leave It To Psmith, and that has one of the twistiest plots ever (it’s a farce that the Marx Brothers would be in awe of) and I thought, “That would be fun,” so now I have two subplots, one for money laundering and one for an old crime of Grandpa’s, and I’m thinking some kind of art fraud would be good for the third one. I have no idea what any of these plots are. Yes, absolutely come here for writing advice.

In other news, I just made a floor plan for the museum. It’s in an old Victorian, three floors and a basement, and while I was figuring out what and who went where, a lot more information bubbled up from the Girls. They LOVE floorplans and maps.

So I am working. I have no idea what I’m doing, but by god, I’m doing it.

The Museum:

Happiness is Comfortable Clothes

I remember a time when I had to wear pantyhose. Those were dark days. Then I quit my full time job and became a student/TA, and my wardrobe got much simpler. Then I became a full time writer, and my wardrobe bifurcated into Tour Clothes and Writing Clothes, aka pajamas and nightgowns. Then the virus hit and I left the Tour Clothes behind forever and now it’s Writing Clothes all the time. I’ve never been so comfortable in my life. I even have one Writing Clothes dress in several colors. It’s this one. Long enough to cover everything up without looking like a tent. Stretchy so it never binds. Hoodie if my head gets cold. And bonus, if I put this jacket over it with the hood down in back, it looks like I Made An Effort. Also, POCKETS.

The virus is a horrible thing, but it has made comfortable clothes a possibility 24/7. That makes me happy.

What made you happy this week?

We’re Talking about Bob’s New Idea on HWSWA

Bob wants to bring back Shane, and here’s his starting idea.

Anna, Part Three

I have been working, you know.

Arresting Anna, Chapter Three

This is a Good Book Thursday, Oct 8, 2020

I’ve mostly been rereading my own works-in-progress along with some research books, old school in hardcover. I’d really missed underlining in the real world. I reread an old Mary Stewart and was surprised by how light on the romance it was. As in, no arc. And I’d loved that book many decades ago, too. I’m desperate to find something to take my mind off the increasingly bizarro news, so I will keep searching for re-reads. The problem is that I’ve reread my fave Heyers, Francises, Allinghams,Aaronovitch’s, and Murderbots so many times I can recite them now. So maybe Pratchett and Wodehouse. I can read Baxter falling down the stairs several more times without fatigue, I’m pretty sure.

What are you reading?