Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 311

Crazy People Still Evolving

Aleta Dodson went to the OSU Library and copied my MFA thesis (one page at a time) and I looked at it for the first time since I turned it in in 1997. I had most of the stories on my hard drive, but I lost my copy of the thesis ages ago, so it was a real trip to read some of it again. There were two stories in there I’d lost track of, the only piece of sudden fiction I ever wrote (“The Damn Goat Story”) and a character piece that I think has a really clunky ending (“Something To Cry For”), but the interesting part for me (it’s all about me) was looking at the Crazy For You proposal.

A proposal is the package you send to an editor (after she’s answered your query letter with a “yes” if you’ve never worked with her before) to give her an idea of what your finished book will be like. It has two parts, the synopsis, which is just a description of your story and shows the editor that you have a plot, and the first thirty or so pages, which shows the editor that you have characters that breathe on the page and, beyond that, that you can write. If it’s your first book, she’ll have to see the finished manuscript before she buys, but if you’ve worked with her before, she can buy the book straight from the proposal.

So as the intro to the thesis says, after Tell Me Lies I offered Jen a book that she turned down, which left me in a minor panic since I didn’t have a back-up plan. Then, according to the intro, I remembered all the stories I’d been writing for MFA exercises, all about women in the same small town, especially the ABC exercise I’d really loved, and I built the Crazy For You proposal from those stories. (I’d remembered writing all of them knowing I was going to be writing the novel, but I think the truth is both: Some of the stories inspired the novel and then I wrote others as exercises for classes that would deliberately build the characters for me. Basically, Crazy For You is my real MFA thesis.)

So I’m thinking that putting that proposal (synopsis and first pages) into the appendices in the book might be fun for people, to see the big differences between proposal and publication. We already had the first chapter of the published book in there so people could see what the stories led to, and the proposal pieces would be the link between the two. The thing is, though, I’m not sure people who aren’t writers would be interested and it might seem like we’re padding the book. I mean, I find it interesting, but then I would, I wrote it.

The other surprise in there was in the introduction. I talked about finishing some of the stories I’d been working on: “Bank Slut Blues,” “Meeting Harold’s Father,” “Wedding Toast,” “Loop,” “You’re Going To Love It Here,” “At the Sound of the Beep Leave A Message Unless You Are My Mother,” “Insanity is Hereditary,” and “Like Lucy.” “Bank Slut Blues” is now “Necessary Skills and in the collection; “Meeting Harold’s Father” is in the collection; “Like Lucy” stunk on ice and I buried it in the backyard; but the rest of those I have absolutely no recollection of. I’m sure I wrote drafts of them, I just don’t remember them. And since in 1997 I was working on floppy disks, I’m fairly sure they’re gone forever. Which may be a good thing.

So Mollie’s sorting through the stuff Aleta gave us (THANK YOU, ALETA), reading the two short stories to see if they’re good enough to go into the collection and cogitating on the proposal-as-another-appendix question, and I figured this would be a good thing to ask Argh:

Should the proposal go into the appendix or would that just be annoying?

Miscellaneous Sunday

No, this is not a Random Sunday. That involves actual thinking. This is just information.

Eric Selinger and the magnificent people at the Journal of Popular Romance Studies have put essays about my work online, and they really are fascinating. Better than the books they talk about, really. I meant to do a blog post on this but I couldn’t get around the idea that I’d be talking about people talking about me. It seemed so arrogant. Anyway, the essays have some very interesting approaches to my work (see? ARROGANT), so you really should read them just for the ideas. Not because they’re about me. Plus that whole site is terrific. You can get on an e-mail list for notification when the next issue is out and I highly recommend it. Other issues won’t be about me, so I can talk about them.



Aleta Dodson of Central Ohio Fiction Writers invited me to speak at their RWA chapter meeting so that’s where I’ll be Saturday:

Monthly COFW meeting – May 19, 2012

Grandview Heights Meeting Room

Grandview Heights Public Library

1685 West First Avenue

Columbus OH 43212

12:30pm-1:00pm Networking

1:00pm-2:00pm Business Meeting

2:00pm-4:00pm Speaker

Speaker:Jenny Cruise

Topic: How to Craft a Scene

Join renowned author, Jenny Crusie, on May 19, 2012, from 2:00 to 4:00 at the Grandview Heights Library, 1685 West First Avenue. Jenny will demonstrate how to dissect a scene, craft a scene and revise the same scene.

Also there’s a booksigning that Lani and I will both be signing at:

A book signing will follow the meeting from 5:00 to 7:00 at Barnes & Nobles, 3685 W. Dublin – Granville Road (161 & Sawmill).

And speaking of Aleta, she went above and beyond the call of friendship and trekked all the way out to the OSU Library, braving the awful parking there to get me a copy of the my MFA thesis (I had the stories, not the thesis). I knew I had a copy of the original proposal for Crazy for You in there, but I hadn’t remembered it was so different. So we’re adding that to the Crazy People collection which will put that publication off again. I know, I know, but it’s interesting (to me, at least) to see how radically that book changed between proposal and publication.

And then there’s Writewell. I put together the 211 lecture on classic story structure, and then re-thought it. I think the workbooks and exercises in these packages are crucial to learning, but 211 is so global in its scope that I didn’t think the current workbook was enough. So I pulled a chunk out of the lecture (which made the lecture much better and much shorter) to do as a separate video in the same package, this one called “Revising Wilbur,” an exercise in how to revise a novel using the stuff in the lecture. I think it’s a really good idea, and I think it’ll be valuable, but it means I’m way off schedule on Writewell. I think that’s okay; we’re still figuring Writewell out and I’d rather be late with a really good lecture then on time but knowing I could have been better. Which also describes my fiction career, so it may just be the way I work.

And then there’s Liz. I can’t tell now if the book is as flat as I think it is, or if it’s just because I’ve been working on it for ten thousand years. The first act goes off to beta readers some time next week, shortly to be followed by the second, so that should give me a better idea. I’d put the first scene or chapter up here, but I’ve slapped so many versions of that scene into Argh by now, you all must be as sick of it as I am, so maybe not.

So that’s what’s happening now. Real blog posts resume this week. Actually, since this is such a miscellany, this might be a good post to put something you’d like to see on Argh in the comments. Questions, suggestions, things you’re dying to know about (that I can answer), here’s the place. Over to you, Argh People.

We Interrupt This Blog for a Question

Is there anybody out there who is at or close to Ohio State who would like to go to Thompson Library and do me a favor in return for which favor Mollie will send what she describes as a box of goodies but which is probably just any and all books of mine wanted that she still has copies of?

Bibliamnesia

I think that’s a perfectly good word. Of course, I’m up to my eyes in Sudafed and Benadryl, so that might be having an effect.

The topic for today, class, is why books you thought were simply splendid twenty years ago are completely awful today. I’m not talking about thinking Nancy Drew is the height of literature when you’re eight and then trying to read it at forty-eight and realizing she was a Barbie doll who surrounded herself with sychophants and bearded for Ned Nickerson. I mean the stuff you read as adults, those of you who have twenty years of adulthood under your belt. Case in point: Fletch.

If you who follow PopD, you know we did a podcast on Fletch the movie on Monday. We actually watched it on Saturday because Alastair needs time to turn it from two Audacity tracks into a podcast, taking out my wheezing and sneezing and the places where we stopped to talk about something else. (I haven’t heard it yet. Is the discussion we had on what a fortnight is still in there, with the crack I made about Alastair being the only human being I know who talks with footnotes? If that’s still in there, the guy’s a saint.)

Where was I? Oh, right. Fletch. I bitched long and bitterly about what Chevy Chase did to a great character, the wily, iconoclastic I. M. Fletcher, switching from smart and dedicated to a buffoon who sticks straws up his nose, and I believe I waxed eloquent on how good the books were. Then the podcast ended, and I treated myself to a re-read.

What kind of idiot was I in the seventies? Oh, wait, that’s when I was 21 and got married. So there’s been some growth since then. But honest to god, the guy sleeps with a fifteen-year-old girl who’s hooking for drug money. Never even attempts to save her. Really, I’m not a prude, but that’s statutory rape, you bastard. I read the second one, Confess, Fletch, and it has not improved with time, although Francis Xavier Flynn is still a keeper. Then I read the first Flynn book. Still liked the character, kinda, but the plot was frustrating as all hell. And that’s when I gave up on Gregory McDonald, who used to be on my keeper shelf.

Okay, so some time has passed since 1975 when the book came out, but not that much. What happened? Have things changed that much that people didn’t blink at the sex-with-the-fifteen-year-old then? The Grand Sophy is marred by anti-Semitism which is definitely a product of the time, so I just skip that part because the rest is still good. It still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so it is no longer my favorite Heyer. The Nero Wolfe books hold up, thank you very much, but Ellery Queen is damn near unreadable. I’m afraid to go back to Andre Norton, I loved her so.

I’m non-plussed. (Great word. I must have gotten it from Alastair.) Has this happened to you? What books? Why?

Discuss while I go get more Sudafed and Benadryl. Next topic: Allergies. WHY????????

The Writewell Academy. Ta Da!

Welcome to the opening day of The Writewell Academy. It’s a very stripped down website because we figured people would want to get right to the point, not wade through a lot of stuff to get to the information.

We have an introductory video here (it’s free), and there are two lessons available for download for a small fee (well, ten bucks), Lani’s Discovery Lecture and Jenny’s Conflict Lecture.

Also the School Store is open.

All questions answered by Alastair and Lani from the website or by me here on Argh in the comments.

(I can’t believe we finally did it. Well, we had to. I wrote “established in April of 2012″ in the intro video, and we weren’t doing that sucker over again.)

Questions, comments, complaints, requests, general nattering about . . . put it in the comments. Thank you.

The Faculty

The Problem of Stock Art

Why yes, I know I’ve been notable for my absence. Three things converged on this upcoming weekend because of my splendid planning skills. The good news is that by this time next week, all three will be done unless I’ve screwed up completely. One of them is the long-delayed-but-now-finally-almost-here collection of short stories, Crazy People. I’ll post more about them next week when they’re actually available, but for the moment bask in the glory of the cover . . . and then check out the poster that is evidently all over Oregon:

Isn’t that a great graphic? Somebody in Oregon thought so, too:

Nobody in Crazy People has an STD (that I know of; I really don’t trust Ronnie), but of course nobody in Oregon will believe that now.

Stock Art, the bad boyfriend of the graphics world: It’s cheap and untrustworthy. And yet, still attractive.

Playing Well With Others. And Magic.

Krissie and Lani and I have been talking about our Fairy Tale Lies book for a long, long time. LONG time. We all have other obligations to get out of the way before we can work on a fun project, plus it’s hell finding a time when we’re all free. But we’ve met this month three times to talk about it . . . two of us have met, the other one keeps forgetting but we love her so we forgive her . . . because we all really love this world we’re building. And because we’ve had a scathingly brilliant idea: until we can write the novel where the Big Stuff in the Kingdoms happen, we’re going to write short stories and novellas about the world on our own.

All we have to do is stay within the rules of the world and pick a fairy tale character that nobody else has called dibs on, and then we can write whatever we want and show it to the others and tweak it to make sure we haven’t violated any world rules–it’s a complicated world–and we’re good. And the best part is, we’re having such a good time making up the world together that we’re sparking all kinds of ideas in each other. I even started three little collages for my first three stories, which I would take a picture of but it’s night and it’s dark, so no for that. Then because I am obsessive I found an old frame engraving and made a banner for the website and used it to mock up book titles which is when I really had fun.

I love the way we gravitate to the kind of fairy tale that fits us. We put Krissie’s name on Beauty and the Beast because we knew she’d want it and then she came back and asked for Bluebeard and the Robber Bridegroom; she loves a Dark and Dangerous Hero, and murder is no bar to romance in her world. She also wants to do Anderson tales even though they’re dark and Danish because she’s Danish and, uh, dark. I can’t wait to see what she’s going to do.

I had called dibs on Red Riding Hood right away because I wanted to tell the story I was originally going to tell in FTL, the one about the older (grandmother) Red who goes into the woods after her granddaughter to keep her from making the Family Mistake and runs into this wolf she used to know . . .

But then I started to play around with fairy tale titles for me and came up with “The Frog Principle.” I didn’t know what the hell that meant so I kept poking at it and there was this blonde princess–blonde in every sense of the word–who kissed a guy who turned into a frog, so she had to call the EMTs–Emergency Magic Technicians–but she can’t tell them she’s a princess because somebody is killing off the royal family (that’s in the back story for the novel), so . . . (The EMT are really Lani’s invention, a kind of a magic bomb squad who show up to defuse magical disasters. If the defusing goes wrong, the blowback turns them into chickens, so their mascot is not a dalmation, it’s a rooster. Named Geoffrey. Geoffrey wasn’t always a rooster . . .) Anyway, now I want to write “The Frog Principle.” I’m thinking Jane Horrocks for a placeholder.

Then I came up with Slow White for Lani, and she said, “Uh, probably not,” so I went downstairs and watched my favorite Leverage episode (“The Rashomen Job”) and there was “Sloe White and the Seven Alibis.” I think her name is Sloe Virginia Fizzwilliam White (hey, I can stoop as low as the next girl for a joke, although not if the next girl is Lani who is stocking up on chicken jokes as I type this), and then I looked up what “sloe” meant and got “the small, sour, purplish fruit of the blackthorn.” Except for the “small” part, that’s my Girl. I need somebody sort of . . . waspish for that. Maybe Claire Foy. She was fabulous as Adorabelle. Hmmmm.

I love brainstorming with the sisters.

Okay, your turn. What fairy tale title would you write?

Details, Details . . .

We’ve been pedal to the metal on the Writewell lectures, the learning curve is huge on this, especially since Lani and I have, well, competitive streaks, so we kept looking at each other’s work in progress and upping our own game. But finally, FINALLY, we have the first three lectures done, the first one that’s just an introduction to the project so it’s free, Lani’s Lecture 102 Discovery, and my Lecture 103 Conflict. So tonight, basking in the glow of my accomplishment as I start work on 211 The Four Act Structure, I take a closer look at a teacup I used as a macguffin all the way through 103 and into 211. And I do a head-desk.

The example is Edna and Bernie and if you’ve heard me talk about goals before, you’ve heard me talk about how Edna is waiting for this cup of tea that Bernie makes her every night at six, serving it in the special teacup he gave her for a wedding present. Here’s the cup:

Of course, it wasn’t that SIZE when I put it all the way through the video as the cup Bernie gave Edna. I kept looking at it, thinking “What the hell is that in that cup, an egg?” but did I blow it up to look at it? Noooooooooooo.

I am not doing that video over. I have replaced the cup in the new video, and I’m counting on nobody noticing. Which of course they will. Especially now that I’ve told you guys, you keep secrets worse than I do. I keep thinking I can explain it away as an aspect of Bernie’s character, but basically . . . no.

Edna’s new cup is lovely:

And the lesson for today, class:

Look at your illustrations closely.

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

The Thrill of New Things

No, I'm not talking about shopping although that's excellent, too. In the past two weeks I have learned more new skills than I have in the past two years. They're simple skills, but that doesn't matter, they're NEW. And suddenly, I am a New Skill Junkie. I'm bright, I'm happier, and god knows, I'm more productive just because I have all these new things I can do.



It's also shown me how much free instruction there is on the internet. I've been using Google forever to answer questions, but I never watched many instructional videos–very short attention span–until suddenly I needed fast instruction in Keynote animation. And you know how it is when you Google, one thing leads to another. Google: the potato chip bag of the internet.

And it's not just research that leads to another thing. I had the rough Keynote presentations done for my first three lectures, so I was feeling pretty cocky. Then I started writing the script for the first one–thirty-two slides–and realized that I'd missed some good details, so I went back and added some more slides. But then I realized that some of the graphics I'd added could be really good illustrations of those concepts so I added some more slides. Then I did an outline and realized that I could focus those concepts better, so I rearranged and edited slides. Then I rewrote the script and added some more slides. Then I did the notebook and realized that I could add a couple more slides for clarity. Then I did the workbook . . . . One hundred and eighty-one slides. In half an hour. Most of that is from animation, but still, it's a whole new world of teaching: words on the screen, spoken words, pictures . . . fingers crossed it's not just a mess.

I'd forgotten how great it is just to learn new things–Pages is infinitely superior to Word, by the way–to make new things. One of the problems with writing novels is that they take so damn long. The thrill of finishing something in two weeks is addictive. I don't know how much anybody else is going to learn from these lectures, but I'm learning a lot. I'd tell you what I've learned in detail, but I must go add slides to the next lecture.

And We Have Audio . . .

You know, it seemed like a simple idea. Do Keynote presentations, add audio, put together a workbook and a notebook, hey, piece of cake. I've been teaching for forty years, I can do this.

So far for this project, I have learned Photoshop and Audacity, found where the Mac keeps its special characters, become a passionate devotee of Graphics Fairy and Dover Clip Art, and realized that my voice is so nasal that I sound like Fran Drescher. Lani finished her 102 lecture day before yesterday, but it's taking me longer because of the learning curve and my distaste for my own voice. She's had a lot of experience in broadcasting, plus she has a great voice. I don't even like to leave messages on answering machines. But I have just now finished my sixth attempt at recording a half hour audio track for Lecture 103: Introduction to Conflict, and this one is a keeper (still nasal, though). The slideshow is done. The audio is done. I'm going to tweak the notebook and workbook some more because they don't look right to me, but the content is good. I'm thinking my first Writewell lecture is pretty much finished.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's good. Lani and I kind of egged each other on in the graphics department. I had a lot of clip art in mine, and then I watched hers and thought, "Man, she's good," and went back and reworked mine. Eventually, we'll be the death of each other but at the moment, it's good for us to raise each other's bars. I may, however, have gone overboard on the clipart. The last frame of the lecture, before the end credits, is a compilation of all the examples in the lecture. I like it, if I used a mousepad, I'd want it for my mousepad, but that's a lot of stuff for thirty minutes of lecture. On the other hand, there are 180 slides. You be the judge:

We don't have a definite launch date yet, but it's soon. The website is pretty much done, Alastair has figured out the pay-and-deliver system, and by the end of the week, we should have the first three lectures ready to go. Oh, and do not search for Writewell.com because that's somebody else. We're WritewellAcademy.com. or we will be once the site goes up.

I can't believe that audio is finally finished. I think Wolfie's barking in the background on it, but that's just extra texture right? Because I am not recording that sucker again.

Edited to add: It wasn't. There was so much heavy breathing on there, it sounded like an obscene phone call. I recorded it again, but still, since I'm stuffed up, too much mouth breathing. Maybe I'll do it again pretending to be Marilyn Monroe. She was a heavy breather. ARGH.