Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 186

Wear the Lilac Towel Day

Today is Towel Day, in honor of Douglas Adams’ injunction in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to never forget your towel (also, don’t panic).  It is also Wear the Lilac Day, in honor of Terry Pratchett’s Watch tradition and to support Alzheimer’s Research, Pratchett’s cause..  Mostly it’s just to remember Adams and Practchett, two very smart men who looked at reality with skepticism and wit and decided the worlds inside their heads were better.  They were right.

.  I am grateful for their books because, as one of Pratchett’s characters (and my personal fave) Susan Sto Helit once thought, “. . . this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it — the book was true and reality was lying.”

Wear the Lilac Towel today and read Adams and Pratchett; what’s reality ever done for you? 

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This Is a Good Book Thursday, May 24, 2018

How I managed to get to my advanced age without reading Colin Watson’s Flaxborough mysteries is beyond me; I even did my first master’s thesis on mysteries (“‘A Spirit More Capable of Looking Up To Him’: Women’s Roles in Mystery Fiction from 1845 to 1920,” don’t look it up, it’s terrible).  Then the first one showed up as a Book Bub special and I was hooked.  Just finished the seventh one, lovely real old-fashioned British murder mystery, not at all stodgy, in fact pretty wry while still being comfortably cozy.   It’s been a drizzly week today, perfect for reading about quirky death in quirky small villages.  Then I went to download the seventh and found out it’s not in e-book form until the 31st, and the publication of the rest is being strung out even longer, into July.  You know, these are old books.  Why not put them all out at once?  Annoying, but Watson is worth the wait.

So what are you reading?

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Working Wednesday, May 23, 2018

I’m still slowly digging out the side yard.  The front yard is a meadow which I like but which gives my very nice neighbor across the street pain (he has miles of carpet-like grass), so I ordered a mounding daisy and some lithodora for there.  And then there’s the house and the breakfast scene (ARGH).

So what have you been doing?

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344,940 words and Still No Finished Novel

I just got my four-week report from Grammarly.  It said I wrote 344,940 words this month.  A novel (according to my contracts) is 100,000 words.  I wrote three and a half novels this month, evidently mostly in rewrites of the first part of Nita’s Act One (the only doc I’d uploaded), e-mails, texts, blog posts, and comments.  What’s really weird is that I deleted the Grammarly app, so it’s become an invasive app, like butterfly bush, sneaking in everywhere.

The thing is, I like Grammarly on the net; it catches my mistakes when I e-mail or write posts and it makes it easy to correct them, although about 90% of the time I hit “ignore.”  It also lets me put the words I use that I don’t like into my own dictionary.  Here’s my dictionary so far:

Forcas
fruck


headhopping


infodumping
infodumpy


Jeo


parademon
parademons


schmuckbait


tazed


Uplet

 
But back to that 344,940 words.  At least 300,000 of those are blog posts, blog post drafts, comments, and e-mails.  That’s a sobering thought.  Every word I’m typing right now could be part of Nita’s book and clearly, they’re not. Although, trust me, I have hundreds of thousands of words of Nita’s book.   And some of those words are from the big four posts of the week which takes me about an hour each week to set up, so that’s not bad.  And a lot of them are from commenting here.  And I don’t talk to people much, aside from my neighbors who are lovely; most of my communication is typed, so maybe that’s not so outrageous after all.  
 
But still, sobering.  
 
So back to Nita.  This week, I’m going to get all the files organized so I have ONE version of each act (the rest can go in draft files), and write all the sex scenes so I make sure they arc.  I think there are three, one bad, one disconcerting, and one where they get it right.  I don’t like writing sex scenes unless something’s going wrong or something else important is happening or, best of all, something is going wrong while something else is happening.  
 
It’s a plan.
 
344,940 words that weren’t Nita.  Damn.

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Going for Happiness

I love this Douglas Adams quote:

It’s so easy to look at my life and think, “This is not what I planned, this is not what I wanted,” and forget that in so many ways this is exactly what I wanted, more than I dreamed I could have, I just didn’t get it the way I thought I wanted it.  It’s not just “count your blessings,” it’s “don’t define your blessings by what you wanted last year” or, god knows, twenty years ago.  

Right now, in this moment, I am happy.  That’s a blessing right there.

Where did happiness need you to be this week?

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Cherry Saturday, May 19, 2018

It’s National Hamburger Month (Cheeseburger Day is September 18th) so find yourself a diner and indulge.  Get the fries, too (French Fry Day is July 13).  And don’t forget the ketchup (June 5th) and pickles (November 14th) and lettuce (June 9th) and onion (June 22nd).  

You’d think they’d coordinate or at least throw a party together. 

 

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This is a Good Book Thursday: May, 17, 2018

I’ve been reading mostly news and crochet patterns lately.  I really have to stop reading the news.

What have you been reading?

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So I’ll see you all Friday . . .

We had another SBP.  I won’t have power until Friday.  

Good news: Good Book Thursday, Cherry Saturday, and Happiness Sunday will post automatically.

ARGH.

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Working Wednesday, May 16, 2018

I have been slowly putting in planting beds.  I figure if I get them all set up this year, next year I can just order plants and put them in without all this sweating and moaning.  I did get three kinds of daisies planted, none of them Shasta (those are going in somewhere else).  I have Big Plans and a Black Thumb, so we’ll see.

What have you been up to?

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Krissie is Heartless

Well, her new book is Heartless,  the final book in the House of Rohan series, and it’s on sale today at Amazon. She says there’s even a Crusie Easter Egg inside if you look hard enough.   

We’re going to do a Slack chat later this week (next week? we’ll get to it) talking about the book and writing and probably cats and dogs and food because we have difficulty with focus, but in the meantime, that cover is great and the story inside is probably even better.  Off to buy my copy now.

Anne Stuart’s Heartless:

A strong, resilient woman who learned to survive in a world of betrayal. Emma Cadbury had been an innocent, a whore, a charity worker and a surgeon. She chose a life without love until she saved a dying soldier in a charity ward.

A scarred soldier who fought to redeem himself from the horrors he’d committed. Brandon Rohan had lost himself to drugs and degradation, wanting to die, and only one person could save him. But she’d disappeared.

A love neither of them wants, and a passion so strong it could burn down the world. Now they’ve come together again, but he doesn’t remember, and she doesn’t want to. But someone is trying to kill her, and Brandon is the one man who can save her.

England in 1840, where no one is what they seem.

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