Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 39

This is a Good Book Thursday

As Tammy requested, please list the best books you read in 2023.

[They don’t have to have been published in ’23, that’s just when you read them.]

[Also, no worries if they aren’t books with my name on them. You know me better than that.]

My 2023 was so chaotic that my best books would all be comfort rereads, so I’m leaving this up to you all.

Working Wednesday, January 3, 2024

I got all fired up and made a list of things to accomplish this week, and I’m already behind. So I looked at the list again and realized that nobody on God’s green earth could do all of that in one week.

So this week I’m working on setting rational goals. Like one thing a day. (You had ONE JOB, Jenny . . .)

What did you work on this week?

Happiness is Surviving 2023

I don’t know about you, but I had a helluva year. Happiness is remembering the good stuff. I moved to a place where I could drink the water right out of the tap, I have lunch with a good friend frequently, my writing partner did not ditch me when I started shrieking a couple of weeks ago, and my seventeen-year-old dog is still tottering around. She looks like hell, but so do I, I’m just happy we’re both still tottering. Also I’m proud I wrote three good books with a good guy, and I’m delighted I like talking to my now-grown daughter who worked her ass off all summer to save mine, and even more delighted that she appears to like talking to me. So I’m happy because of all the good in my life. The bad memories can go rot behind the dumpsters in my spleen, I have no time for that. (In case you wondered, the spleen recognizes and removes old, malformed, or damaged red blood cells memories. Go spleen, that’s what I say.)

So what made you happy this year?

Great Comfort Read on Sale for $1.99

If anybody here hasn’t read the Terry Pratchett Watch series, the first one, Guards Guards, is a deal right now on Amazon at $1.99. It’s one of my comfort reads and just wonderful, full of dragons and people fighting for good and evil and a wonderful hero who starts out in the gutter and a heroine who runs a dragon rescue. Oh, and there’s a six-foot dwarf just come in from the boonies to join the City Night Watch, and he’s memorized the rule book which nobody else in the city has bothered to read, including the rest of the Watch. More good news: Guards Guards is the first in an eight book series within the much larger Discworld series: Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Fifth Element, Night Watch, Thud, and Snuff.

It’s funny, it’s fast-paced, it’s heart-warming, it’s wonderful. In fact, I need to read it again now. MAJOR comfort read.

“Patchett demonstrates just how great the distance is between one- and two-joke writers and the comic masters whose work will be read into the next century.” —Locus

Magic, mayhem, and a marauding dragon combine for extraordinary fun in this cheeky Discworld novel from New York Times bestselling author Terry Pratchett.

Insurrection is in the air in the city of Ankh-Morpork. The Haves and Have-Nots are about to face off. Again.

It’s old news to Captain Sam Vimes of the city’s ramshackle Night Watch. But this time, something is different—the Have-Nots have found the key to a dormant, lethal weapon that even they can’t fully control, and they’re about to unleash a campaign of terror on the city.

Long believed extinct, a draco nobilis can now be seen patrolling the skies above Discworld’s greatest city. Not only does this unwelcome visitor have a nasty habit of charbroiling everything in its path, but it’s also soon crowned King.

Can Vimes, Captain Carrot, and the rest of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch restore order (before it’s burned to a crisp)?

The Discworld novels can be read in any order but Guards! Guards! is the 1st book in the City Watch collection and the 8th Discworld book.

This is a Good Book Thursday, December 28, 2021

My only resolution for 2024 (I don’t believe in resolutions) is to get these posts up on time.

In the meantime, for those of you not reading, the preorder for the audios of the Liz and Vince series is up; publication date February 6, 2024. Bob tripped over them somewhere; he lurks on the net a lot.

What did you read this week?

Working Wednesday, December 27, 2023

One of the joys that moving re-introduced me to is crochet. Crochet kept me sane for a long while until I lost it completely to depression, so moving my yarn and WiPs and sorting through them once I got here has been immensely pleasurable. I have over forty things in progress, many of them from a decade ago, and most of them are great and–this is the part that boggles my mind–almost finished. You think there might be some connection between not being able to finish a book and not finishing forty crochet projects? Anyway, the upshot is that I’m getting a lot of almost instant gratification finishing stuff now. Plus I was looking for something to use in the Rocky Start series and came across this pattern: Ghostober Skull Pattern.

So now of course I’m starting another project. Just thinking about the colors I could use is making me happy. ‘

What work made you happy this week?

Back to Work

Like we ever stop working. But I did dig up the floorplan for the building that Rose’s shop, Oddities, is in, and that Rose’s and Ozzie’s apartments are above. And some of you really seemed to enjoy Anna’s floorplan of the museum a couple of months ago, and more to the point, found problems and solutions to those, so . . .

Here’s the floorplans for the Oddities building:

Argh Author: A. Y. Caluen’s Lost and Found

. Our own A. Y. Caluen (that would be Chacha to you) has a reissue out, Lost and Found. Here’s what she has to say about it:

Hi Arghers,

Chacha1 coming to you with a backlist title. I wrote this novel during a six-month period of unemployment in 2019, when my recurring themes of loss and reinvention really took hold. It’s been slightly revised since then, and this year was given a wide launch along with most of my other backlist titles. I consider it an F/M romance novel, but those who know me and what I read will not be surprised to find significant queer content.

It’s a book about finding a new way to relate to the world after a major loss, rapidly and unexpectedly followed by a major inheritance. It’s also about finding the people who accept and embrace you no matter what.

LOST & FOUND is Hollywood-adjacent, features a number of my other characters in supporting roles, takes the main characters from first meeting to their honeymoon, and is one of the five most unusual books I’ve written. I’d love for it to find an audience. (And it’s 50% off through Jan 1 on Smashwords!)

This blog post went up when we completed the redesign, and is now updated with vendor links and a link to a bonus flash fic:
https://thelastories.com/blog/2022/8/27/a-new-look-lost-amp-found

Happiness is Eves

Holidays actually leave me kind of cold; too many people, too much noise, too much exhaustion. But eves, the nights before? I love eves. So much potential. So much excitement. So much new coming around the corner. No surprise that Halloween is my favorite holiday (although a lot of that is the plethora of stuffed crows and marked down candy). And right now we’re in the Big Eve, the dark time before the new year, sitting in the shadows of the old, waiting for the sunrise of 2024. We’ve got a week left in this year to snuggle down in front of the embers of 2023, wrapped in the memories of everything that kept us warm all year. God knows what’s going to happen next year, the world kind of came apart at the seams this year, but it also darned up some holes: Covid is still out there but there are vaccines; the income gap is still kneecapping the US but we appear to have avoided a recession; and too many old white guys are still holding on to power with a death grip, but they’ll get theirs.

So happy 2024 eve; what are you hoping to happily unwrap in the fast approaching new year? (Yes, goals and expectations make for happiness, too. But no resolutions. Those suckers are just setting us up to fail.)

Argh Author: Susan B. James’s Maybe This Time

Our own Susan Berger writing as Susan B. James has a book out today and it’s on Kindle Unlimited, too! Maybe This Time: A Second Chance Romance is here!

TIME. TRAVEL? Worst birthday present ever!

London stage star Jennifer Knight’s life goes haywire when her genius niece sends her tumbling back in time from London in 2001 to 1968, bringing her face to face with her worst nightmare – her first husband.

Now the only hope of righting the universe is to go forward in time and alter their future.
Maybe this time Jen and Lance will get it right.

For more information on Susan, see her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SusanJames and her website: https://susanbjames.com.