Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 125

Admin Question

How many people are having hang time problems with posting comments? I know Jane and Corin are. I need to know the scope of the problem, please.

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Happiness is Getting Something Done

I got the 2005 posts tagged, categorized, and republished, and the 2006 posts will go up on Working Wednesday. That was not a small thing, although it is comparatively speaking. I picked up speed in later years. The blog is just packed.

I’m also making progress on hacking through the end of Nita Act 2. Planning on starting a Twelve Days of Nita’s Act Two tomorrow, inspired by the 2005 resurrection.

All of this makes me happy because it feels like competence porn. Look at the things I’ve done, not the fact that I’ve been working on Nita for five years. ARGH.

What made you happy this week?

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Argh: 2005

So the 2005 post are up again.

The first post in July 2005 talks about having problems with You Again (still not finished after it was rejected) and meeting Bob and starting Don’t look Down, so a lot has happened in fifteen years. There’s also a reference to Charlotte’s Book which is one of those things that just died on me. I can’t even remember what it was about. Fifteen years, people.

Some of the August posts aren’t really interesting any more–“Your Reality May Differ” is about an RWA scandal fifteen years ago, although interestingly enough, it foreshadows the one we’re going through now. “Walden the Blog” was about enabling comments. Okay, not that great. But “Why Caramel Pecan Perfection Isn’t”is pretty good about rage, a recurring problem of mine, and “Susan Elizabeth Phillips, the Dark Side” is one my favorite posts of all time (I ran it past her first but she has such a good sense of humor that it wasn’t a problem). “Writing in Books with Boys” was about collaboration for the first time, so not that exciting.

Things picked up in September. I went to Maui so there were those posts, and then I did the Twelve Days of Trudy for “Hot Toy.” “The Maui Effect” and “Things I’m Not” are still fun to read, I think. And then there’s “Patricia Gaffney, The Dark Side.” For the Trudys, I’m going to start that Post Series page (see banner menu above) for series posts. The Trudy Twelve Days are completely skippable, they’re almost all just word count posts, but some of the later “Hot Toy” posts might be interesting if you want more on those topics.

October was the last of Trudy, plus Terry Brooks, the Dark Side which was a bait and switch because Terry Brooks has no dark side, the guy is a prince. So the post was mostly about the Surrey Writer’s Conference. I did a LOT of conferences back in the day.

There was only post in November, about a trip to NYC that included publicity pictures organized by Mollie and foisted on Bob: So I Went To New York.

December had a Trudy post, so that’s on the Trudy page, and a Random Sunday that was clearly written while I was writing Faking It because of all the 60s music references.

And that’s 2005.

The big takeaway from this is that I should do a Twelve Days of Nita Act Two and a Twelve Days of Making My Living Room into My Office to keep me accountable.

So this took me all day and it’s the SHORT year. This could take awhile.

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Thinking about Argh Ink

I am behind on the comments, so if you asked me something there, I’ll get to you, I swear. I’m slashing Nita’s Act Two with a vorpal sword, and talking with Krissie about rake heroes in general and her latest book-in-progress in specific, and talking with my brother about winding up our parents’ estate (my brother is a wonderful, wonderful person, a saint, I’m telling you), and trying to turn my living room into an office, and making sure the dogs get out in the sun, and then there’s dishes and laundry and the sheets need changed and it’s 4PM and I still haven’t had breakfast or lunch.

The days are just PACKED.

In the meantime, I need to clean up this blog, which means I need to simple things up.

Argh Ink was born in July of 2005 because Mollie wanted regular new content for the newly revamped website. I think she suggested I post once a month. I know she told me never to enable comments because that was a time sink. You all know how that went. The last time I checked, the blog has 122,250 comments on 2,706 posts. Argh Ink is a monster.

The problem is that the blog has morphed through time because I never really had a plan for it. Example: There used to be a separate discussion forum called Cherry Forums where we talked a lot about reading and writing. When it came time to shut it down, in order to give the community someplace to go, I started doing Cherry Saturdays in March of 2013 as a comment-about-anything-you-want day. At this point, every day is a comment bout anything you want day, and Cherry Saturday is pretty much unnecessary, taking up blog space for no reason. So Cherry Saturday is now dead. Anybody who wants to argue for it is welcome to do so and I’ll listen, but really, it’s not accomplishing anything. It’s not like you all hesitate to talk about what you want anyway, and since there are no stay-on-topic police because we-don’t-care, I’m good with letting that go.

Krissie, Lani, and I used to have a personal blog (no professional stuff) called ReFab, and one of the things we did was Happiness Sunday, where we talked about what had made us happy that week because otherwise we were dwelling on what had made us miserable. When we shut down ReFab, I moved Happiness Sundays here, and I think we should keep them. It’s really helpful to take one day a week to highlight the good stuff. So unless everybody here thinks the happiness posts are unnecessary, I’ll keep doing that. It’s kind of a pain in the ass to do, but at this point, I could probably just post “So what brought the happy this week?” and you’d all pile on, so any hassle is of my own making.

This is a Good Book Thursday stays. The rest of the blog may collapse around it, but that sucker is permanent.

Working Wednesday I’m ambivalent about. I really like hearing about what you’re working on, and it’s a good place for me to see if I actually did any work that week, but I don’t see it as essential. Still, I’ll keep it unless you all say to let it go. It does tend to keep me honest about working.

So that’s weekly posts on Wed, Thur, and Sunday, and the other days can be anything else or blanks. Except right now we have Lily Mondays and Fridays, but that’s a temporary thing, a playground until we’re out in the world again, so I’m good with that.

That’s part one of the Blog Clean-up. Part Two is getting the old posts out of draft form. You may remember that the blog got hacked and then there were other problems and I took the whole thing back to draft. I’ve been very slowly reposting old posts, but I think what I need to do is just go back to 2005 and start reposting by year. A lot of the posts really aren’t valuable and they smother the ones that are valuable or entertaining or worthwhile in some other way.

I’ll put up a post about each year as I liberate them. There are sixteen years of blog, so that’ll be sixteen posts just to let you know that year is done and probably provide links to any post from back then that I really liked. I’ll try to get a post up for each blog series, too, possibly as a page in a new header topic that I will have to think of, so there’ll be a page for Leverage Posts and a page for Person of Interest Posts, and a page of Cleaning the Office posts, and the Twelve Days of (Fill in the Book Here) posts, all of which should make it easy to find things.

So in summary, the old posts are coming back, Cherry Saturday is dead, Good Book Thursday is forever, and Working Wednesday and Happiness Sunday can stay around unless you don’t care about them. Organization and decluttering, that’s the key. Let go of anything that doesn’t bring me joy while thanking it for its service. (Thank you, Cherry Saturday, you fulfilled your purpose for a long time and now you may go.)

This work for you? Because, let’s face it, at this point it’s as much your blog as mine.

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This is a Good Book Thursday, May 14, 2020

This week I OD’ed on Regencies, not a genre I usually read. But I’d re-read Heyer till I could practically recite the dialogue, so I moved along to Loretta Chase and glommed like mad. Her Olivia must be distantly related to Nadine. Great character.

What did you read this week?

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Working Wednesday May 13, 2020

I’m worthless this week.

What are you doing?

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The Shoulds Got Me

I figured out why I didn’t write Lily this week. I was treating it like a book. That is, if this is a book, I should be dealing with the museum, I should be writing more Van, I should be exploring Dorothy, I should . . .

The Shoulds got me.

This is my fault (not yours, Katie or anybody else). I know how my discovery mind works, and it’s just to noodle until I have about 60,000 words. I have no idea how many words I have now, but it’s not 60,000 (20,000 maybe?). Sixty thou is about half a first draft–I always overwrite–and at that point, I know whether I have a book or not and need to buckle down.

The difference this time is that I’m letting you all play in my noodles (that metaphor needs work) and it’s been very beneficial, I’m learning a lot and you’re bringing good ideas to the mix, and the ones I can’t use, I ignore. But somehow I let that slop over into Should and, as we all know, that way disaster lies.

This does NOT mean you should stop discussing the drafts. I’ve gotten a lot out of your comments. It does mean I have to reorient my brain from Should to Noodle. (These are all highly technical terms from the most elite of writing circles; I’m quite sure Tennyson felt strongly about Shoulds and I know Byron noodled. With everybody.)

Still, I feel the need to entertain. All I have is the first act of Nita, now rewritten for the last fucking time, at least until somebody in New York gets their hands on it and says, “Needs more dog.” The problem is that most of you have read Nita’s first act four thousand times. And it’s 36,000 words. So I’m thinking no on that.

So it’s Choose Your Own Entertainment time. Tell me what would amuse you, and that’s what I’ll do on Friday. (And thank you very much for playing in the comments on Monday’s post. It reinforces my feeling that the posts are just here so you all have something to hang the conversation on.)

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Lily Delayed

So it’s almost eleven on Sunday night, and I still haven’t written any Lily. I would feel bad about this, but I worked on Nita and made a lot of food, most of it now frozen–chicken casserole, beef stir fry, chicken noodle soup, steak quesadillas, tortellini, tuna salad, and coming up next, lasagna–so I feel like a non-slacker. I will get Lily 8 up when the Girls send up something. I think they took the time off so I’d make food–I was eating a lot of sandwiches–and now that the freezer is full again and I’m fed for the next couple of weeks, I’m sure they’ll start sending stuff up again.

And after all, it’s not a book. I just feel bad about promising to entertain and then not following through. Entertainment tomorrow, apologies tonight today.

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Happiness is Grocery Shopping in a Pandemic

Karl-Heinz Wellmann from WikipediaI go out for groceries about every ten days, which is about the time the Diet Coke runs out, and the veggies in my freezer are depleted. I have to replace fresh vegetables–the old standards tomatoes, celery, peppers, onions, potatoes, lettuce, bok choy, snow peas–and bread, which right now is brioche bread, something I should not be eating but fuck it, it’s a pandemic. I LOVE brioche bread. And rolls. And raisin bread. Brioche raisin bread is insanely good.

Unfortunately, only one grocery store in this little town carries brioche bread, and it’s not My Grocery. It’s the Annoying Grocery. So this week I went to the Annoying Grocery, where I had to stand in a six-feet-apart line to wait to get in because there’s a limit to the number of people inside at a time (150, if you want to be exact).

This made me strangely happy.

For one thing, it meant people here were taking this whole thing seriously. (Well, we’re in New Jersey, we better damn well take is seriously.). And the grocery had its plants on racks in the front of the store, and the line moved slowly enough that I found a Roma tomato plant. Yes, I know you don’t get the best plants at a grocery but I was thrilled. And then I got inside and of course they had no bok choy, but I was prepared for that. They did have Romas and some small deep red vine tomatoes, and shallots which are really hard to find, and some gorgeous leaf lettuce that I passed up for romaine. And a ton of brioche so I scored there. Then I got to the Diet Coke aisle and there was none. Okay, the apocalypse is here.

But then I went to My Grocery, where there was plenty of Diet Coke (although no Caffeine Free Diet Coke which means you should all brace yourself for a lot exclamation points !!!!!!! and ALL CAPS in the coming weeks) AND bok choy, and I realized I’d forgotten the celery in the Annoying Grocery, so I got that and some mini peppers and . . . somewhere in the middle of all that, I realized I was extremely happy.

It might have been just being surrounded by gorgeous produce, that’ll do it every time, but I think it’s also the idea that I was finding things instead of just picking them up. That everybody there was wearing a mask and being patient in line and keeping their distance while being wonderfully polite and pleasant. It’s weird to see people wearing masks, but it’s also a reminder that we’re all in this together (I know we’re not, I know lower income people are not living the life I am) and that even though it’s weird to wear a mask, at least we’re all being weird to protect each other. That’s a good thing.

I came home ridiculously cheerful, left my mask in its place in the car, let the dogs out, toted in a ton of vegetables and brioche bread, not to mention enough Diet Coke (!!!!!!!) to give me a caffeine high until September. And the happiness has stayed with me. It’s more difficult to shop now, but it’s not impossible. I have to search for things now, but that makes it a challenge, And I no longer think I look like an idiot in my mask. I think I look like part of something bigger than me. That makes me happy.

What made you happy this week?

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Cherry Saturday, May 9, 2020

It’s Hamburger Month. (That picture below is Epicurious’s Ultimate Hamburger.)

I’m heavily into hamburgers/cheeseburgers at the moment because (a) they taste good, (b) they have infinite variety, (c) they’re fast to make, and (d) I’m writing a book a noodle about a diner. My current fave is a two-cheese (cheddar and jack) burger on a brioche bun with spinach and tomato, mayo-dijon, and a pickle on the side so I can control the sour, but last week I had a bacon cheeseburger with homemade ranch dressing, romaine, and sautéed shallots, oven chips on the side, and it was excellent. The possibilities are endless, and I can count it as research.

Celebrate Hamburger Month. There is no downside.

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