Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 25

Crusie’s Guide to Art 17

Well, this is bizarre. As I said when I started reposting this series, these captioned paintings were something I fooled around with one weekend over a decade ago. You know me, anything for a cheap laugh. But I just searched to see what this was before I got cute with it, and believe it or not, it’s Isabella and that damn pot of basil again, or to be more precise, pot of Lorenzo. This one is by “Ricciardo Meacci (5 December 1856 – 15 January 1938), an Italian (Sienese) painter who came under the influence of the “Pre-Raphaelite” movement” as per Wikipedia. I’m just gobsmacked it’s another Lorenzo-under-the-herb. And these (this week’s and last week’s) aren’t the only two, either, there are many many if you google. How a lover’s severed head in a pot of leafy greens became a great romantic motif is beyond me, let alone the fact that a poet as great as Keats wrote about it in a beautiful sixty-four page book (it’s here).

And now I really want to write a romcom with this in it. We’re doing art crime next year, I think. Possibly one of them will be about a painting of a pot of Basil.

Happiness is Having a Book Actually Finished

I thought Rocky Start was finished so many times and then couldn’t leave it alone, but now it’s actually out so it’s done. Except we’ll still probably fix all the mistakes people find. Argh. But it’s a huge relieved happiness to have that done. And now Very Nice Funerals . . . .

What made you happy this week?

The Crusie Website: A Saga

Many years ago (about thirty or so) I was in grad school and they told us about this website building program called (I think) Home Page (maybe) and suggested maybe we should build one. So I did. I used Mucha’s “Medea” poster as a visual starting point because I loved the colors and because it always struck me as funny (I really like my brother, so it wasn’t that) and because I knew nothing about designing websites, but I really liked the finished project, and. when it was done I considered myself finished with web chores forever. I had a website, didn’t I? Then one day, in a fit of responsibility, I explained publishing to my daughter on the theory that she’d need to know how that insane business worked if I got hit by a truck and she had to deal with my (very few at the time) copyrights.

Which was the last time I had any control over my internet empire (one website, one blog, the occasional Facebook page).

My daughter has been terrifyingly efficient since birth. I swear, I sat there in the hospital with her in my arms, gazing at her adoringly, and she gazed back with skepticism and resignation, as if she recognized then that this was the maternal card she’d been dealt and she was going to have to make the best of it. So she took over my website, asked me what I wanted it to look like and designed this peppy diner-looking place that pretty much summed up my early romances. Anybody remember this?

She also put up the Cherry Forums, so those same checks were all over the place there, too. I loved that website design. It was so . . . ME.

Time passed, I moved into single title, and it was decided (I do not remember by whom) that the website needed an upgrade. I had MANY ideas, mostly visual, and Mollie found this great web designer, Joelle of Moxie Studios, and I loaded her up on visuals and said, “I love collage,” and then went back to writing books. When Joelle sent her first pass at the design back, it wasn’t anything at all what I’d wanted when I sent her the visuals, but it was exactly perfect. Even today, so many years later, I’m still stunned by how exactly she captured the way I felt about my stories. It was dark, it was funny, it was dramatic, it was weird, it had an upside down monkey, it was GORGEOUS. I still love that website design. (Stripped down versions of that website design below.)

But time keeps passing, and websites are built differently now, and mine was basically a steam engine in a world of electric cyber trucks, so it was time to revamp. And in addition, we’d had to take the site down at one point and half the posts weren’t available any more on the blog and the gorgeous visual was now stripped down . . . yeah, it was time. So we went back to Joelle and now I have to figure out what I want the new place to look like.

The first problem is that I really love the old website. Really, really love it. So the first couple passes were based on the old one and I knew better, I really did, you have brilliance like Mollie and Joelle, you let them do their thing, so I was kneecapping them.

The second problem is that I know what I want in book covers and website design, but I don’t seem to be very good at getting it across. I love the book covers we got for the Liz/Vince books and Rocky Start, but those designers have no desire to ever work with me again because I became tactless (I truly am sorry about that), and I definitely didn’t want to do that to Joelle. But two passes and we weren’t close, so Mollie and I talked on the phone for a long time while she tried to figure out what I wanted (bright, colorful, fun, off-the-wall, fluid, non-genre-specific, St. Lucy, a goldfish, the monkey, world peace . . .). We took a trip down memory lane with the old iterations of the site which made me remember Medea from my first website, and I made a small color board and e-mailed her that while we talked about what bright, colorful, fun, off-the-wall, fluid, and non-genre-specific meant to me.

The fonts above are from Joelle’s design and we love them, so they stay. The typewriter and fish are from the Linnea collection so we can’t use them on the site, they’re just there for color and image reference for the idea board. But the real revelation was the Medea poster. Those colors just seem like something I’d write now. The light background, the drama of the complements, plus those staring eyes–St Lucy with her side eye, the goldfish with its huge eyes, the monkey with its terrifying eyes and then Medea with the insane nuts bonkers eyes (gotta love Bernhardt)–I said, “We need Medea back, if only in the colors,” and Mollie said, “Yes, I believe we do,” and that’s where we are now.

I mention all of this because there’s going to be some remodeling in here since Argh will match the new website, plus there will be a newsletter which will have nothing in it that’s new for you all since I share my every waking thought with you, so this is just to let you know that there will be hammering and dry wall dust in here along with a new paint job and some very fine programming behind the scenes that will make everything work much better. And we’re keeping the monkey. If you have any suggestions, hopes, fears, or general input for this blog or the website or for the newsletter (yeah, I know, I already asked that one) feel free to unload in the comments. In my spare time, I will be going back to the almost four thousand posts here (no, I am not kidding, 3,794 posts, of which 2,107 are still in draft form from the Great Reorganization) and sorting out what goes where and making sure they’re all tagged and possibly linked. You know, when I’m not writing books with an insane Green Beret who’s still bitching about two spaces after a period even though he puts apostrophes in plurals.

Where was I?

Right. Big design changes coming right up. You have been warned.

This is a Good Book Thursday. July 18,2024

This week I read a lot of old Bloom County comic strips. It was just that kind of week.

What did you read this week?

Working Wednesday, July 17, 2024

We’ve got a book ready to drop Sunday, which is terrifying, always. And I have ten million things to do here, not the least of which is figure out how to use this new fangled thing Bob sent me to jump the battery in my car. If you don’t hear from me again, I blew myself up.

What did you work on this week?

Argh Author: Jean Marie Ward’s Dragons, Cats, & Formidable Femmes

Our own Jean Marie Ward has a short story collection, Dragons, Cats, & Formidable Femmes, out today (July 16) from Ginger Blue Publishing.

Meet Lord Bai (a very classy dragon), two cats who channel a top paranormal investigative team, deeply spiritual flies, a kitten who’s a real demon, a dedicated lover of gold, some wild Greek demi-gods, and many more fun, fierce, and fascinating characters, including a refrigerator that is far more than it appears to be.
This whimsical collection brings together a host of offbeat and unexpected tales, many of them never-before-published, to entertain and amuse. Flash fiction, short stories, novelettes, and novellas all combine to create a collection that’s perfect for whatever reading mood you’re in.

From Jean Marie: “Every story in the collection is illustrated by a human (no AI here), most by cover artist, Lisa Dovichi.
– The collection will be available in paperback and multiple ebook formats. However, you can only pre-order the paperback version from Barnes & Noble. The paperback will also be available from Amazon, but only after it’s officially released.
– Although the collection has a heavy focus on dragons and cats, one of my favorite stories, “The Gap in the Fence,” is all about two girls and a dog. Of course, both girls are formidable.”

• Buy links:

 Amazon
 Barnes & Noble
 Kobo
 Apple Books

• See also JeanMarieWard.com and GingerBluePublishing.com/coming-soon

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Crusie’s Guide to Art 16

Per Wikipedia: “Isabella and the Pot of Basil is a painting completed in 1868 by the English artist William Holman Hunt depicting a scene from John Keats’s poem ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.’ It depicts the heroine Isabella caressing the basil pot in which she had buried the severed head of her murdered lover Lorenzo.” It’s the sad old story of the girl who is supposed to marry a rich man but she falls for a poor boy instead, so her brothers murder the poor boy and she digs him up and puts his head in a potted plant. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabell....]

I really wish I’d found this out before I put the caption on so many years ago because I definitely would swapped out “Jason” for “Basil.” I know the head in the pot is actually Lorenzo, but Basil is funnier.

Happiness is More of a Good Thing

I’ve been binge watching The Brokenwood Mysteries and finally made it to Seasons Nine and Ten, which to my surprise and delight are new to me. Favorite characters in new stories, the ultimate comfort watch. Bob has explained to me that we’re doing series from now on, and as I’m winding down Season Ten, I can see the wisdom in this. Happiness is definitely more of a good thing.

What made you happy this week?

This is a Good Book Thursday, July 11, 2024

I read Rocky Start for what I hope is the last time, although I still have to go through it for pull quotes. Like this one:

What did you read this week?

Oh, Hell, It’s Wednesday Again

The good news is I’m done copy editing Rocky Start. I’m also having conferences on the website redesign, planning the newsletter (yes, there will be one), and giving up on my plan to stop drinking Diet Coke (such a relief). Also, I’m making brownies tonight.

The bad news is I’m putting Working Wednesday up late again. Really sorry about that. I need to look at this blog again and figure out how to better plan for you all to have a good time here. No, I will not touch Good Book Thursday, that definitely stays, but I’ve been coasting here so if you have any ideas for improvement, put ’em in the comments.

In the meantime, I’m going to go take a nap. I deserve one.