Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 34

Working Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Today, I will finish with Rocky Start and hand it back to Bob with glad cries of relief. And then he’ll send me Very Nice Funerals. It’s a cycle.

What did you work on this week?

The Green Room

Okay, I promised to post the Damned Family Reunion stuff here, and this is really prequel explaining why the posts won’t start going up until next Tuesday, but since you asked . . .

This is the cast of The Damned Family Reunion, minus Aunt Brassica and her twins, Kohlrabi and Bokchoy. They did arrive today along with the last of the other chicks, so I can get started with production. Very exciting.

Happiness is Realizing It’s Sunday

I woke up this morning, realized it was Sunday, and rolled over and went back to sleep. I’m thinking of doing that again when I finish typing this. Please understand, I actually don’t do weekends, I work straight through (because I love my work and want to, not because I have to) so the Sunday Effect should be completely wasted on me, but still, it’s Sunday, and I’m going to sleep late because that makes me happy.

What made you happy this week?

This is a Good Book Thursday, March 21, 2024

This week, I read some Ben Aaronovitch, some art crime articles, and several recipes for mustard chicken. And Rocky Start, of course.

Tell us what you read this week, please.

Working Wednesday, March 20, 2024

I’m working on a Rocky Start rewrite while Bob pushes ahead on Very Nice Funerals, pausing every now and then to politely ask why I did something in there with a strong undercurrent of WTF?. I’m also researching small freezers because the one that came with the fridge that came with this place is not adequate. And as always, I am unpacking many boxes, some of which are arriving in the mail full of chicken egg cups and salt and pepper shakers. Oh, and I’m crocheting. I love starting things. Finishing, not so much. Hmmmmm.

What did you work on this week?

Argh Author: Deborah Blake’s The Eclectic Witch’s Book of Shadows Companion

. Our own Deb Blake has TWO books out this month, so you definitely need to know about her new workbook, the perfect companion to The Eclectic Witch’s Book of Shadows. This fun and easy-to-use workbook is packed with witchy activities, prompts, and guidance from bestselling author Deborah Blake. Your magical endeavors will be stronger and more fulfilling with a variety of spells, correspondences, recipes, and divination charts.

This workbook also features illustrations by artist Mickie Mueller, coloring pages, and space to write down the results of your magical experiences. This hands-on companion, organized the same as The Eclectic Witch’s Book of Shadows for ease of use, is the perfect tool for continuing to develop your own Book of Shadows. Explore herbs, stones, candles, gods and goddesses, and more.

Whether you’re looking to try chakra spells or invocations, this book will enhance your daily practice and help you create unique magic.

Buy Links
Llewellyn | Amazon Print | Barnes & Noble

Author Links:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/deborahblake
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/debor...
Newsletter: http://dld.bz/dWEQs
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/deborahblake
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deborah.blake
Blog: http://deborahblake.blogspot.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deborahblak...
Website: http://deborahblakeauthor.com/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Deborah Blake is the author of the Baba Yaga Series from Berkley (Wickedly Dangerous, Wickedly Wonderful, Wickedly Powerful), as well as the Broken Rider Series, the Veiled Magic series and the cozy mystery Catskills Pet Rescue series. She has written over a dozen books on modern witchcraft with Llewellyn Worldwide, along with a tarot and an oracle deck. When not writing, Deborah also works as a tarot reader, and energy healer. She lives in a 130-year-old farmhouse in rural upstate New York with various cats who supervise all her activities, both magical and mundane.

Happiness is Egg Cups

Did you ever run into a wall while you working and think,”If I just work harder, if I just keep banging away at this, if I wasn’t so stupid and lazy, I could DO THIS THING.” Those are bad thoughts. Stop that. What you have to do is something completely different, something with no consequences so that the Girls in the Basement come out from under the pool table where they were hiding to punish you because you were yelling at them. Tempt them out with something like, oh, I don’t know, EGG CUPS, and they will give you stories and happiness.

The moral: Follow your egg cups. (Well, not Howard, but in general.)

What were the egg cups in your life that made you happy this week?

Argh Author: Deborah Blake’s Witchcraft on a Shoestring

. Our own Deb Blake has a great book out now, Witchcraft on a Shoestring, that will take the reader through a fun and engaging journey of magical practices without breaking the bank. You’ll have a magical time creating spells, divinations, and even recipes that cost little to no money, all to remind you that you don’t need fancy tools to practice the craft; all you need is a little imagination!

Witchcraft Without Worry

We’ve always believed that Witchcraft should be accessible to anyone brave enough to answer the call, and fortunately, Deborah Blake has created a wonderful resource for tapping into the powers of the craft without the need for excessive investing, making the craft once again attainable. Contained herein are instructions for making oils, runes, candles, charms, and more using easy-to-obtain materials while showcasing over fifty methods of working magic that cost little to money.

Buy Links
Amazon Print | Barnes & Noble | Crossed Crow Books

Author Links:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/deborahblake
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/debor...
Newsletter: http://dld.bz/dWEQs
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/deborahblake
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deborah.blake
Blog: http://deborahblake.blogspot.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deborahblak...
Website: http://deborahblakeauthor.com/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Deborah Blake is the author of the Baba Yaga Series from Berkley (Wickedly Dangerous, Wickedly Wonderful, Wickedly Powerful), as well as the Broken Rider Series, the Veiled Magic series and the cozy mystery Catskills Pet Rescue series. She has written over a dozen books on modern witchcraft with Llewellyn Worldwide, along with a tarot and an oracle deck. When not writing, Deborah also works as a tarot reader, and energy healer. She lives in a 130-year-old farmhouse in rural upstate New York with various cats who supervise all her activities, both magical and mundane.

My Sudden Fiction, or Why I’m Suddenly Obsessed with Egg Cups

Sudden fiction or flash fiction is very short stories, although technically, what I’m writing is called micro-fiction, under 400 words. As I write this post, I have nineteen different egg cup micro-fiction stories, the longest of which is 103 words. All together the posts are just under 1000 words, all inspired by photographs of the Egg Cups of the Damned interacting with others at their family reunion.
So this probably needs some explanation.

I was making myself insane trying to write in chronological order quickly, two things I should never do. This was NOT Bob’s fault, he kept saying, “We have plenty of time, we don’t need to publish these fast, we can wait until 2025” but my own self-imposed guilt was making me insane. Everything I wrote was dreck, I was falling back into depression, and then Bob said, “This needs to be funnier,” and I started to scream.

I’m not funny on purpose, you know. The characters do that. I once had a very nice lunch with people from Writer’s Digest who wanted me to write a book on how to put humor into fiction. I kept saying, “You can’t put humor into fiction, it has to come from the characters, be intrinsic to the characters.” They were both lovely people, but I never wrote the book because you can’t put humor into fiction.

Where was I? Oh, right, I couldn’t put humor into Rocky Start.

So to keep working, I started thinking about the secondhand shop that’s the main setting in the book. It was supposed to be full of junk, but the guy who brought the junk in from his travels around the tri-state was an ex-spy with a perverse sense of humor, so the junk would have to be interesting. So I went to eBay and did a search for “weird.” Don’t do that, by the way. It turns up some very upsetting stuff. But it also turned up these demented egg cups:

which I called the Egg Cups of the Damned.

And then somebody on Facebook (Shelby Lynne) said she’d keep them in the basement, so still just playing around, I put them on my kitchen counter with my Spaghetti Monster canisters and one of my Betty Boop cookie jars.

Which is when I saw them interacting with other characters. Made me think about what kind of people they’d be. Male, for some reason. Probably teenagers. Mean little bastards. I started wondering what their names would be. And because I kept searching for the weird for the RS books, I found these:

These looked like girls to me, possibly cousins of the Damned, and I imagined them meeting at a family reunion. They’d drive the Damned boys crazy, I thought, just smugly smiling through all the Damned’s harassment. I decided they were from the Damned’s mother’s side of the family so their last name wasn’t Damned, it was Smug-Chuckler. (Mama was born a Smug. Her sister married a Chuckler.)

And then I gave the Smug-Chucklers names–Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Marie Therese–and it didn’t seem right that the Damned had no first names, so I called them Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Howard, and the stories appeared. Names will do that.

So there’s a lot more–I widened my search to salt and pepper shakers and hit gold–but basically, this was play. It was just for me to have fun. It would never be a novel. (No, seriously, I will never write a novel about hostile delinquent egg cups.). But every time I’d find something weird on eBay, I’d mentally put whatever it was next to the Damned egg cups, and a story would appear. A very short story (the shortest one is fourteen words). At first, I was doing just one piece of flash fiction per new character–“This is X. Here’s how the Damned feel about them/what they did to them/etc.”–but then sequels and inter-relationships appeared which is the real key to story–how do these people change in relationship to the people they interact with–and now I have nineteen pieces of flash fiction and I don’t think I’m done.

You want your creativity back? Write something simple that’s fun and that you don’t have to do. I do think it’s a shame that Charlotte Smug-Chuckler accidentally broke Howard Damned’s heart, but Howard was just assuming too much. Meanwhile Byron Damned is hitting on everybody, and then Uncle Robert Damned, a terrifying egg cup, showed up with his four daughters, Medea, Circe, Medusa, and Gladys (another find from searching for “weird”) and the Damned boys are frankly a little afraid of them. Well, not Byron. Byron will hit on anything.

Sometimes I look at that and think that joke of naming the fourth egg cup something different loses its impact by the third time, but then I remember this is just for fun and I do the Meatballs chant: “It just doesn’t matter.” Nobody’s depending on this stuff, it’ll never be formally published, and I’m cracking myself up. The only downside is that I’m going to end up with a lot of weird small china, and frankly, I’ve been here before (yes I still have some of the Walking Ware).

The big thing for me is that writing fiction is fun again. Even the Rocky Start stuff because I’ve re-discovered my inner ham, the writer who will stoop to ever lower levels to find depths of her characters thinking things they shouldn’t and doing things they really shouldn’t. (The Damned boys stole Aunt Emily’s egg, but Charlotte made Howard give it back. He’s helpless in the force of her fluffy little smirk.). I think I’m going to start putting a flash story up every Monday on Facebook. There’s just not enough egg cup fiction on Facebook.

Yes, it’s all dumb. And I’m having a wonderful time. So that’s the explanation for the egg cup stuff.

This is a Good Book Thursday, March 14, 2024

This week I read and revised the completed draft of Rocky Start and the second act of Very Nice Funerals. And wrote the fan fiction equivalent of egg cup shorts. It’s weird: when I try to be focused and organized, my creativity dies. When I find demonic egg cups, I can’t write (very short) stories fast enough. Too bad there’s no money in egg cup fiction.

What did you read this week?