Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 52

This is a Good Book Thursday, June 29, 2023

That swoosh sound you heard was June speeding past. Good grief.

My therapist and I were talking and she asked me what my favorite book was. I told her that was impossible, especially since it depended on how I was feeling at the time. I mean I love Heyer and Francis and Stout and Chase and about a million more, but I don’t think any of them are my favorites. (Well, Francis’s Hot Money is great. Stout’s Some Buried Caesar. Heyer’s Cotillion, and The Grand Sophy, and The Talisman Ring. Chase’s Carsington series and the Difficult Dukes. And of course Michael Gilbert’s The Quiet House and The Body of a Girl and . . .

That was a terrible thing for a therapist to do to me.

I finally came up with these five in no particular order:

Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens
McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue
Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London
Wells’ Murderbot
Connie Willis’s Take a Look at the Five and Ten, or maybe Crosstalk

So now you’re on the hot seat. Top five books. Let’s go.

Working Wednesday, June 28, 2023, a little early

I have had a very frustrating week already, and it’s only Tuesday afternoon. People continue to thwart me as I’m trying to move. I wasn’t going out today because I’m so frustrated I’d start aiming for people with my car, and then I had to go out anyway and I didn’t hit anybody, so more frustration. So I’m putting up Working Wednesday early and going Zen for the rest of the night.

One good thing: we have a cover. I think the only change yet to come is going from “A Novel” to “A Liz Danger Novel.”

Happiness is a Soup Truck

Happiness is a SoupTruck

So some of you may have noticed that I haven’t published anything in awhile. Like ten years. It took several years of therapy to track down the reason: I have a problem with depression. In this, I am not alone; turns out writers are 121% more likely to suffer from depression than the general public. I don’t know if depression makes us turn to making up stuff to survive, or if making up stuff for a living makes us depressed, but I do know that throwing yourself headlong into building a career in publishing would make anybody nuts. And yet I did that for twenty years, and then face planted. I kept writing—you’ve suffered from reading how many unfinished manuscripts in here?—I just couldn’t finish anything.

And then, as you know, I roped Bob Mayer into helping me finish Lavender which became a collaboration, which became a three book series. I still panicked every now and then and Bob would talk me down, but mostly we were just working so fast, the stories came so fast, that I didn’t really have the time to panic often. We sent the three books off to our agent, who is excellent, and started in on the next series with Rocky Start. And I started to clutch again.

Because now we were submitting to editors and getting caught up in the insanity of traditional publishing, and although our agent tried to protect us as much as possible, it’s a jungle out there, even worse than it used to be when it drove me into writer’s block for a decade. Then we got an offer and I really tensed up, but the good news is that it was a lousy offer. And Bob said, “Let’s just self-publish,” and I said, “Oh, god, yes, yes, yes.”

Which is when I realized how bad publishing is for me and why: I have no control. The minute you send a book into the maw of traditional publication, you’re no longer a creative genius who constructs worlds out of nothing, you’re a soup maker, dealing with people who are putting your soup into cans to sell, and their basis for judgement is how they can sell that soup to a lot of people. This is not a criticism of publishing: If you take your story to market, you’re the one who made it soup, so you’re going to have to deal with people wanting more or less salt in your recipe and offering you much less than you feel your soup is worth.

Unless you decide to set up a food truck and sell the soup yourself. You’re still making your story into soup, but now it’s your soup, you get to decide how much salt and how much to charge and when to open the cart and all of a sudden, life gets easier. Not richer, not more successful, but do-able. (Especially when your collaborator is doing all the heavy lifting of self-publishing. Thank you again, Bob Mayer.)

Of course, we’re self-publishing in a summer when we’re both moving and we’re both dealing with health problems, but we’re both so relieved to be doing this ourselves because we can get the books out fast and only a month apart and price them so that people don’t have to sell a kid to afford them, (the print versions are going to cost a lot because of paying for paper and ink, so apologies for that up front), and because neither one of us needed one more damn source of stress right now. (My internet isn’t working right; that’s like taking oxygen from me.) I can’t tell you what a relief it is not to be dealing with contracts and outside revisions and sell-throughs and all the other things we’d have no control over.

Happiness is a soup truck, people. I sincerely hope you all have one.

So how were you happily trucking this week?

This is a Good Book Thursday, June 22, 2023

I’ve been reading a lot of meh romances which is depressing, but I’m also reading Rocky Start, and because it’s still early in the process I haven’t started to freak about maybe it’s no good and I’m a terrible writer and I should just eat worms and die. Stay tuned for that much later. But then I found my favorite writing text book, Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, was $1.99 on BookBub for the tenth edition. I must have three other editions of this, but not in ebook and not the tenth and for $1.99? Happy reader here.

What did you read this week that wasn’t meh?

Working Wednesday, June 21, 2023

We are finishing the rough draft of Rocky Start this week, Bob is doing all kinds of self-publishing stuff, I’m loading a truck to move and running a lot of Final Errands so I can hit the road in July, and we’re both looking forward to the end of summer when all of this madness will be over, we’ll be in new places dealing with new madness. It’s a goal.

What did you work on this week?

Exploiting You Again: Rocky Start Store Names

Remember when I asked you for store names for Nita? Motel Styx? Pins and Sins. Good times. Well, here we are again.

Rocky Start is a small town that straddles the border between Tennessee and North Caroline in the middle of freaking nowhere. It was mostly bought out by two spies on the run and made into a retirement community for agents who want out of the game. The majority of the town is just normal people, but a significant minority are retired spooks, many of whom opened small businesses.

We need business names.

We started with Oddities, the second hand store where our heroine, Rose, works.
Then we added Ecstasy, the bakery/coffee shop next door run by our heroine’s friend, a former German spy, Coral.
Sid Quill’s pharmacy is next door.
We mentioned a restaurant called the Wok Inn.

Okay, none of those are spy related, but now we have to figure out the names of some of the spy-owned businesses and we were thinking it would be interesting if they named them things that would signal to the others that they’d been operatives.

So right now we’re calling the bookstore Undercover Books, but that seems a little lame.
We also have an important character who’s a carpenter, making wood furniture, a little old lady assassin who runs a tea shop, and a cleaner named Melissa who has a funeral home. (The normal guy who has a funeral home is Geoffrey Nice; his motto is “Have a Nice Funeral.” That cracks me up every time.)

And since you all did such a stellar job on Nita, we thought we’d let you have at it. Very small town, full of spies, businesses can be anything that a small town might have.

Go nuts in the comments as you always do. And thanking you in advance . . .

Argh Author: K. M. Fawcett’s WILDE & DANGEROUS

Our own Kathy Fawcett has a new book out now: WILDE & DANGEROUS. She says, “I can’t wait for you to meet and fall in love with Vander Wilde and Riley Reynolds in this second-chance romance that incorporates my non-writing passion…Okinawan karate!”

What if a second chance at romance comes at a price they can’t afford to pay?

Riley Reynolds is finally fulfilling her dream of opening a karate school. Recently divorced, the last thing she needs is another guy in her life. But when her contractor turns out to be Van Wilde—her first love and the man who broke her heart—Riley is caught between old wounds and the undeniable sparks sizzling between them.

Struggling to bond with his estranged teenage son, single dad Van Wilde convinces Riley to teach them self-defense, hoping the activity will help Van grow closer to his son—and grow closer to the woman Van never stopped loving.

When passions reignite, Van and Riley draw strength from each other as they confront their demons and find the courage to forgive. But can they navigate their painful pasts, a challenging present, and their hopes for the future all while facing a menacing threat?

In a ruthless bid to sabotage her dreams, Riley’s abusive ex-husband opens a rival mixed martial arts school right across the street. And when he does the unthinkable, Van and Riley will have to fight for more than their rekindling romance.

AMAZON

Also available at APPLE, BARNES & NOBLE, KOBO,and SMASHWORDS

K.M. FAWCETT
Romances worth fighting for.
www.kmfawcett.com

Happiness is Kindness

So it turns out that even if the news is depressing or horrific, reading about the acts of kindness that the event inspires is a deterrent to depression. Observing kindness not only reaffirms our view of the human race as basically decent, it inspires more kindness. According to an article in the NYT, “When humans witness an act of kindness, “it gives us a special feeling called elevation,” said Buchanan, describing it as a “warm, fuzzy feeling in the chest,” and “an immediate rush of wanting to be a better person.”

That’s part of why we started doing Happiness Sundays on ReFab so long ago. We’re bombarded by such bad news constantly that we forget to concentrate on the good. And there is so much good in the world. Good people far outnumber the bad, it’s just the bad get all the press. (The news was full of Donald Trump this week, but this week Governor Pritzker of Illinois also signed in a banned book ban; libraries in that state can’t ban books there any more because of political disapproval.). And I’m not a fan of newsletters, but I love the Washington Post’s Optimist newsletter.. Every week I get to read about good people making good things happen in the world. Even if I don’t hit the links and read the articles, the brief descriptions of a dozen good things make me breathe easier.

Happiness is good people doing good things. Good thing there are so many of them.

How was happiness good for you this week?

This is a Good Book Thursday, June 15, 2023

This week I read a lot of manuscripts: Lavender’s Blue and Rocky Start. Felt too guilty to read anything else until those were revised/finished. Guilt reading. This should not be a thing.

What did you read without guilt this week?

Working Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Bob and I are setting up the publishing for Lavender (Bob), rewriting Lavender (Bob and me), finishing the first draft of Rocky Start (me) and throwing out most of my house (me). I’m holding on by my fingernails, and now he’s moving on to Patreon.

Argh.