Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 180

Admin: Having to Sign In

Mollie’s looking into this.  When did it start?  Who is it affecting?  I know Deb’s in the US and Jane’s in the UK, so I don’t think it’s a national thing.  Also, very sorry for the hassle.  We’re on it.

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Joy in the Summer Morning

It’s August and in the eastern US, we’re having torrential rains, but though the skies may weep for a night, joy cometh in the morning, fat with drunken bumblebees and rackety birds and dogs who have to examine every clump of grass every day to make sure nothing changed overnight.  August mornings are the best in that last burst before harvest, rampant exhilaration in the sunshine.

How did joy come for you this week?

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Cherry Saturday, August 4, 2018

Today is Sisters Day.  I figure that’s both the sisters (and brothers) you were born with and the ones you meet later and realize are soul sisters (and brothers).  You know, like Argh.   The important part is to stick together as you roll down life’s highway. 

Also, it’s August.  How the hell did that happen?

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Argh Author: Jeanne Estridge’s The Demon Always Wins

Jeanne Oates Estridge‘s Golden Heart winner, The Demon Always Wins, is available for pre-order now, to be released on September 1:

After beating Satan at poker, demon Belial takes on a new bet: If he can get God’s champion to curse God, within the agreed timeframe, Hell gains another soul and Belial earns a promotion to chief demon.

The demon always wins, but this time the deck may be stacked against him. Widowed nurse Dara Strong, the granddaughter of famous demon fighters, has no problem recognizing Belial, so when he appears in her clinic in doctor’s disguise, she kicks him out.  

But Belial, the most successful soul-stealer in the history of Hell, is not about to give up so easily, and as their conflict escalates, so does their passion.  Caught between a victory-hungry Satan and an unforgiving God, Belial and Dara discover there may be only one way to ransom the soul of a fallen angel: sometimes you have to go through Hell to claim your Heaven.

Read the first three chapters on Jeanne’s website, then go to Amazon to pre-order.

 

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Argh Authors

I know we have a lot of published writers who comment here, and I’ve been meaning to set up an organized way to post about their books for awhile, and I just got nudged (politely) to do that, so here’s what I think.

I think if you’re a steady commenter here–Deb, Gin, Charlene, Jo, Laura, Roben, Kate, Jane, my mind is tapioca but I know there are a lot more–then we want to know about your books (fiction or non-fiction).  Which means they should get a post with your book cover, your blurb, a link to where to buy, and so on, and then, of course, all of the comment section to talk about it in detail.  Shorter blurbs are better because people wander off if they’re too long, but you can add anything you want in the comments, and people can ask questions about the book, about writing the book, about publishing the book (no, don’t ask how much they got for it), about your next book, whatever.   I know a lot of you have published books this year, so let’s say if you published something in 2018, it is officially a new book, and I’ll put up a post on it on a Monday, Tuesday, or Friday, where you’ll have the comments all to yourself and your book (instead of on Good Book Thursday which will have comments that go all over the place).

So here’s what I need (stuff with asterisk is required, the other two would just be nice):

*Your Argh username.

*Your Name as it appears on the book, on Amazon, etc.

*The title of the book.

Your blurb (can be longer than a Bookbub blurb, but keep it as short as possible; it’s a teaser, not a description).

*Your book cover unless it’s already on Amazon and I can just steal it from there.

*The link to buy it.

The link to your website where there’s more info.

NOTE: Do NOT spread this around to author lists.  If somebody hasn’t been posting regularly enough in the comments that people here will recognize their username, it’s not a community thing.   This is for family.   

And I apologize for taking so long to do this.  I’ve been out of publishing for so long, I forget other people are dealing with it.

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This Is a Good Book Thursday: June 28, 2018 except now it’s August 2

Note: For some reason, I did not schedule this on the right day.  Happy belated, George.  And now I must go write about dogs . . . .

If you haven’t read George Booth’s cartoons, you are missing out.  I love Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes.  I love Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County,  But George Booth is the cartoonist who really knows my life.  For example . . . .  

He definitely know where I live:

And he clearly understands what happens when I finish a book and come up for air and look around the place::

And he definitely understands my priorities:

George Booth is 92 today.  Happy birthday, Mr. Booth, and thank you for the joy you’ve brought so many people.

 

 

 

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Working Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Hey, it’s August.  (That whooshing sound you heard was summer going past.)  School supplies are in stores.  Parents are counting the days (well, Mollie’s counting the days).  I’ve started crocheting again, a sure sign of recovery.  And it’s time to trim the forsythia.  What’s on your To Do list?

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This is a Good Poem, August 1, 2018 (Okay, a Little Early)

Robert Frost was not a nice person, but he wrote excellent poetry.   This poem has been in the front of my mind for two years now, pretty much since November of 2016 . . . 

 
Mending Wall
 
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

 
 
But my favorite Frost will always be this one because of that blazingly brilliant last stanza:
 
Two Tramps at Mudtime
 
Out of the mud two strangers came

And caught me splitting wood in the yard,

And one of them put me off my aim

By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”

I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind

And let the other go on a way.

I knew pretty well what he had in mind:

He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,

As large around as the chopping block;

And every piece I squarely hit

Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.

The blows that a life of self-control

Spares to strike for the common good,

That day, giving a loose my soul,

I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You’re one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight

And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,

His song so pitched as not to excite

A single flower as yet to bloom.

It is snowing a flake; and he half knew

Winter was only playing possum.

Except in color he isn’t blue,

But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look

In summertime with a witching wand,

In every wheelrut’s now a brook,

In every print of a hoof a pond.

Be glad of water, but don’t forget

The lurking frost in the earth beneath

That will steal forth after the sun is set

And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task

The two must make me love it more

By coming with what they came to ask.

You’d think I never had felt before

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,

The grip of earth on outspread feet,

The life of muscles rocking soft

And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the wood two hulking tramps

(From sleeping God knows where last night,

But not long since in the lumber camps).

They thought all chopping was theirs of right.

Men of the woods and lumberjacks,

They judged me by their appropriate tool.

Except as a fellow handled an ax

They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.

They knew they had but to stay their stay

And all their logic would fill my head:

As that I had no right to play

With what was another man’s work for gain.

My right might be love but theirs was need.

And where the two exist in twain

Theirs was the better right–agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.

Only where love and need are one,

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the deed ever really done

For Heaven and the future’s sakes. :
 

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Act Blurbs

This book is huge with a cast of thousands and five subplots plus, of course, a main plot.  And as we all know, organization is not in my natural skill set.  This leads me to do Act Blurbs.

You know what blurbs are, those pithy synopses on the back of the book that run something like “She’s a cop, he’s the Devil, they fight crime!” and right away you know what the book is about and if it’s your thing.  So early on, I figured out that one way to break the progression of a book down was to give the acts titles.  Then I remembered I’m bad at titles and went to one sentence blurbs.  Like:

Act One: Demon Island blows up and Nita tries to put it back together while investigating Nick.

Act Two: Nita’s understanding of reality blows up and Nick helps her put it back together while they investigate the multiple crimes on the island.

Act Three: Nita’s relationship with Nick blows up after Nick is poisoned, and she has to face the supernatural with a swashbuckling wildcard instead of an emotionless dead guy.

Act Four: Nita blows up because she’s on her last damn nerve and harrows Hell to stop the fuckery on her island and in her life and get her damned boyfriend back.

I run them for subplots and supporting characters, too.  Here’s Button’s four-act subplot:

Act One: Button meets Nita and makes a career plan carefully distant from her.

Act Two: Button finds out the supernatural is real and she’s inherited a part of it, made annoying flesh in Max, and begins to rely on Nita.

Act Three: Button becomes Nita’s partner in spirit as well as name and joins the team, even though Max is part of it.

Act Four: Button kicks racist ass, holds down the island while Nita’s in Hell, and does not shoot Max again.

So that’s all well and good, but I’m now picking up the book again–I lost June to some medical issues–and the second act is full of great stuff but it’s not exactly tightly structured.  Or structured at all.  So I looked at what I had and decided that internal act blurbs would be good.  Since many of you have already read a semi-final truck draft for Act One, here are its act blurbs:

Act One, Part One: Nita becomes convinced that her suspicions that something’s wrong on her island are true and works to straighten things out; Nick looks at the mess that is Hell’s part of Demon Island and works to straighten things out.

Act One, Part Two: Nita and Nick establish a tentative truce at breakfast; they part and work on solving their individual problems as Nita finds out she’s on Weird Duty which changes her plans and Nick finds out demons built the island because of him which changes his plans.

Act One, Part Three: Nita goes to Motel Styx and finds out the supernatural is real and her job is a lot more complicated than she thought; Nick goes to Hell and finds out Nita’s life is more complicated than he thought which means so is his job now.

Act One, Part Four: Nita and Nick snarl at each other until they’re threatened, at which point they act as a team; Nita finds out Nick’s not the conman she thought he was, and Nick finds out Nita’s tougher than he thought she was.

Act Two, Part One: Nita melts down as the full impact of the supernatural on the island and in her own history is revealed, but Nick mops her up.

Act Two, Part Two: Nita accepts the New Normal and works to clean up the human-created mess on her island ; Nick refuses to accept his New Normal and works to clean up the Hell-created mess on Demon Island.

Act Two, Part Three: Nita pulls herself together as the rest of her heritage is revealed and cheers up; Nick comes undone as his New Normal becomes undeniable and gets cranky about it.

Act Two, Part Four: Nita adapts settles into her a New Normal (“My boyfriend’s going to be the next Devil”) and Nick implodes and collapses into his New Normal.

This may seem like a waste of time unless you’ve ever tried to organize a long novel with a lot of characters and subplots.  For that kind of story, this kind of shorthand can be a lifeline.  There aren’t any rules for doing act blurbs because they’re just there for my use, much like discovery drafts, but I do think that constructing the blurbs with clear relationships in the sentences helps organize the content of the story at large.  For example:

• The Act blurbs start with the character to whom the book or the subplot belongs, in the case of Act One with Nita (main protagonist) in the main plot list and with Button (subplot protagonist) in the Button subplot list.  I don’t want a progression that has Nita as the subject of some sentences and Nick as the subject of others: the story belongs to the protagonist who is Nita  (Nick can have a subplot).

• The sentences are parallel in their construction so that they’re related to each other, which means that the act sections will fall into place with each other: Act One’s sentences all have “blows up” as a verb which means that that act is all about disruption and chaos (start with the day that is different); the Act One break-down of four blurb sentences all start with Nita (protagonist) and end with Nick in a parallel construction so that they’re moving through the same kind of plot, encountering the same character arc path even though their events are very different: They work to straighten things out, change plans, find out their jobs are more complicated, discover they misjudged each other, etc., in tandem so that even though they spend the second and third parts of that act apart, they’re still in sync.

• All the blurbs are one sentence, as short as possible (should be shorter) because the idea is to nail down the essence of that move in the plot arc.  Too much detail obscures the parallels.

• There are only four or five sentences in each set because more than that and I’m not doing an outline of the plot, I’m doing a synopsis.  

Obviously I’ll keep tweaking those sentences because they’re not quite right (too long), but they do what I need them to do: analyze a text that’s so damn complex I need a roadmap to keep it coherent.   And now that I have a map, I’m gonna hit that road and get some work done.

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Ava’s Happiness List

I have no idea if Ava Gardner actually said that, but if she did, she was my kind of woman.  In the end, that’s what happiness comes down to, I think: beauty around you in sight and sound, people you love close to you, work and play that fulfills you, and really great food.  Everything else is noise.

What was on your list for happiness this week?

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