Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 82

This is a Good Book Thursday, February 24, 2022

Yesterday, I freaked when my charger blew up and my wifi died and both MacBook and iPad went blank. Not my week, so I started Alice in Wonderland on my iPhone and then gave up because I was too tense to deal with anxious rabbits.

What did you read this week?

Random Monday: New Car Edition

I have had a taxing winter and it’s not over yet (for one thing, I still have to do my taxes). These are the some of the thoughts I had this weekend. They’re not deep. Feel free to skip.

Driving a new car is weird. I dashed into Home Goods to pick up a rabbit–there are going to be rabbits in Haunting Alice and I really liked this one, he has a stony-eyed look that fits the story–and then went back out to the parking lot and realized I had no idea what the car looked like. Well, it was black, but beyond that? A small SUV? Maybe. Thank god for dealer plates. It was the only way I found it.

I was looking for the numbers for the house (I’d bought them long ago) and finally found two 2’s, one four inches and one five, and suddenly the whole thing wasn’t boring any more. I found a four inch 9 at Home Depot, so now all I have to do it put them together and spray them blue. And glue them on to my mailbox. One damn thing after another.

I need bumper stickers for this car so I can find it in a parking lot, one each front and back. Amazon has stickers that you can put anything you want on. I could get one that says “Nothing But Good Times Ahead.” And send one to Bob that says, “We’re All Doomed.” He’d like that. I like “Destroy the Patriarchy, Not the Planet” but it’s in wimpy light aqua. “Please Be Patient: Student Driver” appeals. I love “Make Orwell Fiction Again,” but maybe it’s too elitist? Do I care? “I want gay married couples to protect their marijuana plants with guns” is good except for the “guns” part. “Republicans for Voldemort” is another good one. Then there’s the “I used to be cool” now on minivans nationwide. One I’m REALLY tempted by: “I’ll Believe Corporations Are People When Texas Executes One.” I also like “Jesus would slap the shit out of you,” but it’s more aggressive than I want on my car. Sigh. Must keep looking.

I just downloaded several different versions of Alice in Wonderland including the movie with Johnny Depp. So I will be reading Alice, watching Alice and reading about Alice. I have no idea how that’s going to work into Haunting Alice, but the Girls seem very sure, so here we go.

This new car thing is very weird. I was in a drive thru and suddenly remembered I didn’t know how to roll down the windows yet. Fortunately, it was similar to the Prius, but still. I really have to go back to the nice salesperson and let him show me the car the way he wants to.

I found two bumper stickers on Zazzle I would have gone for — “In my defense I was left unsupervised” and “Clowns [arrow pointing left] Jokers [arrow pointing right]” but they wanted $15 for shipping. There’s no way two bumper stickers cost fifteen bucks to ship. So still looking.

Putting up a mailbox is not fun. Putting mismatched numbers on said mailbox is a blast, but the actual construction? Not so much.

I’m trying to find the title to Agnes, a car I bought sixteen years ago. I have found my first two diplomas and my divorce decree, so there’s that. A defunct will. A bunch of notes that are so obscure I’m not sure what they’re for (definitely not for a book). A nice Vera Bradley folding file. The manual for the stove I torched. It’s a real memory lane here.

[Much later] I went with two mandalas for the front and back windows and a red and blue “Make Orwell Fiction Again” for the front bumper and “Clowns/Jokers” from Zazzle for the back bumper because I googled and found out that you can choose lower shipping than their default. I also got the “In my defense” sticker as back-up. I’ll find something to do with it. The stickers won’t get here until March, but these are not emergency bumper stickers. If I can’t find the car with all of that, I’ll tie a Cthulhu doll to the antenna. If the car has an antenna.

OMG, Amazon has multiple Cthulhu dolls including a rainbow baby Cthulhu which is just all kinds of wrong. Off to find out if my car has an antenna. (After googling.). Evidently car antennas are a thing of the past, like GPS and CD players. This is what happens when you don’t buy a new car for sixteen years. (I miss you, Agnes, you were a good, good car.). But I want a Cthulhu for Nita (I was going to add “Nita the car, not Nita the book” and then I remembered Cthulhu is all over that book and now it’s a creative imperative). So I went to Ravelry and found this guy:

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/libr...

Perfect size for the dashboard. I’m feeling much better about this car. I just need it to be more ME.

Oh, and the guy who designed that pattern also designed Book Rat for those of you who want a rat for a bookmark (I kinda want a rat for a bookmark):

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/libr...

And then I went back to Amazon and ordered a window sticker for the back window just because it was haunting me. I know I already had a mandala for back there. But there was just something about . . .

I’ll sort it all out when everything gets here. But I will definitely be able to find the car come March.

I told Krissie I was going to call the new car “Nita” in order to inspire myself to finish the book and get the money to pay for her. This e-mail exchange followed:
Krissie: I think you should call Nita Maleficent. Calling it Nita might curse it.
Me: And Maleficent wouldn’t?  “I’m sorry I can’t leave the house today, my car is out cursing a newborn.”
Krissie: Oh, yeah, good point.

Just found a great T-shirt: “There are two types of people in the world. 1. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.” I want it, but I’m on a strict budget now because of a new car. Rats.

OTOH, I’m going to the grocery now, and I’m fairly sure I’ll get there and back alive because this car has more safety features than a nuclear power plant. Car Nita wants me to survive, just like Book Nita wants people to be safe. I’m starting to think this was meant to be. (Yes, Jenny, a sixteen-year-old car in the northeast of the USA rusted out to send you a sign.) Whatever, I’ve decided I’m going to enjoy having a new car. And finishing the rewrite on Nita. It’s a plan.

Happiness Is Having a New Idea To Chase

So I’m back to working on Nita, but the whole Alice in Wonderland thing is getting to me. It doesn’t really fit with Haunting Alice because that’s ghosts and butterflies and magicians (slight of hand, not supernatural) and questions about what is real, and oh, wait, it does kind of fit. But not easily, not the way fairy tales slotted into Bet Me, so now I’m having to think, which means pictures and collage and music and how it all works together and I LOVE DOING THIS. So I have a bunch of collage stuff that won’t arrive until the end of the week, and I’m back to Nita now, but every now and then I get an Alice nudge from the Girls and make another note. Happiness is having a new project that challenges and excites me.’

How did happiness excite you this week?

This is a Good Book Thursday, February 17, 2022

After a bad week followed by a worse week, I needed something non-stressful to read and BookBub had Agatha Christie’s They Came to Baghdad for $1.99, and I hadn’t read it, so I bit. There’s no sex, very little violence, a rapid plot, and her usual anemic romance, but this one has a protagonist, a heroine, who was really fascinating. One of the characters in the book describes her as aa nitwit with common sense, but I don’t think that’s right. She rushes into things, and she’s about as deep as a puddle, but she has an excellent sense of self-preservation and an openness and enthusiasm about life and people that means she has zero angst. She thinks, “I want that,” and then goes about getting it: following her crush to Baghdad, pretending to be somebody she’s not, escaping from a locked room, if Victoria wants it, she’ll get it. She’s also an expert liar because she enjoys lying, improving on reality to make it more interesting or to bend it to her needs. I loathe liars but by the end of the book, I admired her. She’s not stupid, she’s just not good at thinking, but she’s great at noticing and remembering and acting in the moment. She was a great escape for me after a run of bad time.

What did you read to escape this week?

Working Wednesday, February 16, 2022

I’ve been putting off getting back to work on the book, but I now I have to since I have a new car sitting in my driveway, and a new crushing debt at my bank. Why do I have a new car? Because my old one died. Horribly. Monday morning I was awakened by the godawful blare of a car alarm, which never happens in my neighborhood. We barely have cars. I looked out the window but there was no one around Agnes (my car, named after the book that purchased her). After about five minutes, she stopped and I thought, “Maybe it was just a burp in the system. Three burps later, I was driving to my service people (who are very good), where I had one of those conversations with somebody who was trying to downplay the problem and promising to fix whatever it was. While I tried to make him understand how awful it was, Agnes went off again. He understood. An hour later he came in and said, “I have very bad news,” and told me Agnes was dead, not just because of the burps from hell but because her brake line was almost rusted through along with everything else under the car. (Did I mention I bought Agnes new in 2006. Bob and I toured in that car. I loved that car. I wanted to be buried in that car. And now she’s at the junkyard, but I don’t think she cares because she’s dead.).

Since they wouldn’t let me drive the car home (evidently you need a brake line), I bought another car. Here’s a tip: DO NOT BUY A CAR DURING A PANDEMIC. There are no cars. The very few used cars out there are up 40% in price since the pandemic started so that they’re nearly as much as new ones. Which generally can’t be found. My dealership had one, so now I have Nita, who’s like Agnes on steroids. She has a sun roof, a thing that beeps if I cross the center line, another thing that does the car equivalent of “Slow down, you moron” if I get too close to the car in front of me, and a windshield that darkens at the top if lights hit it at night. Which is a little creepy. But then so is Nita. There’s also a charging pad for my iPhone, but no GPS. It’s going to take me longer to learn this car than it did to learn to drive.

I miss Agnes. She took my bumper sticker with her, the one that says, “Choose Love: Dogs Against Romney” and no you can’t get that version of that bumper sticker any more. Also gone: my Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack that was stuck in the CD player, which my new car doesn’t have, although it came with three months of Sirius so that’s something else I have to learn. I’m bitter. I didn’t WANT a new car, and I really didn’t want a car that looks like Dracula’s mom drove it when he was a baby (it’s black, all black, black exterior, blacks roof, black seats . . .). I want Agnes back.

On the other hand, sun roof. So I need to get back to work now to pay off the crushing debt in my mourning. I really loved that car.

Inspire me. What are you working on this week?

Happiness is Warm(er) Weather

We got a break in the cold for a couple of days, and I feel like I just woke up. It’s snowing again now, but next week is supposed to be wonderful again. At first I felt a little dumb for being so responsive to the weather, but then I realized that bad weather is like bad decorating, it just wears you down with the wrongness of the backdrop, so it’s not weird that I need my outdoor wallpaper to be sunny and warm. C’mon spring. I have books to write.

How did happiness warm you this week?

This is a Good Book Thursday, February 10, 2022

I just finished a book I enjoyed but really don’t want to recommend because I won’t be reading it again. It was good, I read it straight through, but there’s nothing in it that I’d want to revisit. That makes me think that the reason we reread is less about the quality of the writing or the plot and more about the emotional moments in the story, the parts that make us think (subconsciously), “I want to feel that way again.” An entertaining book isn’t enough, there have to be those moments . . .

Or maybe not. What did you read this week?

Working Wednesday, February 9, 2022

I’m still crocheting, mostly hats and scarves and shawls because they go quickly. I’m all about the quick reward, although as Carrie Fisher once said, “Instant gratification takes too long.” so I still keep wandering off in the middle. I mean, who wanders off in the middle of a hat for cripe’s sake?

Enough about me. What didn’t you wander off in the middle of this week?

Happiness is Something To Look Forward To

My fingers are ice as I type this, but it’s going to be in the forties here all next week starting tomorrow. I am so looking forward to that. Okay, what I really want is spring, and it will be here in about six to eight weeks but in the meantime, I’m happy just knowing my fingers will thaw out next week.

What made you happy this week?

I’m A Little Concerned About Romance . . .

NOTE: I didn’t mean to publish this. I was looking for an old post and republishing posts that had gone down in the hack and I thought this was one of them. It’s probably a year old and never got posted at the time. Now that it’s up, it can stay up (I still have hundreds of posts to re-publish, but I’m on it, I swear).

Romance fiction, that is.  This is probably just the cranky part of my brain talking (the nice side of my brain rarely speaks), but the blurbs on Bookbub are making me surly.  

For a while it was the “Can he protect her?” stuff that was making me crazy, the Navy SEAL who’s protecting the little blonde from her abusive ex, the tough cop shielding the single mother of an adorable moppet from the mob, the any-guy-with-abs flinging himself bodily in front of whatever woman appears to be threatened.  I kept thinking, “What happened to women protecting themselves?  Why are we all of a sudden an endangered species?”  I know it’s a big fantasy, having somebody to stand between us and the ten thousand jerks and creeps who haven’t gotten the #MeToo message, but why all the wimpy heroines?  It’s annoying that on some days every damn romance novel in the e-mail has abs on the cover and a cowering woman in the pages.

And then lately I’ve been scowling at all the her-high-tech-career-tanked-so-she-went-home-to-do-more-womanly-things plots.  These heroines all move back home (it’ll be a cold day in hell when I even drive by my hometown’s exit again) and then open B&Bs where they can feed people and snap sheets, or they redecorate neglected houses, or they open bakeries so they feed people bread and sugar, anything that’s based in Good Womanly Virtues instead of those nasty high-achieving goals they failed at.   Look, I love to cook and bake, but I wouldn’t give up my writing career to do it, or my teaching career when I had one.  And I love rehabbing old houses, which is why I’ve never made a profit on any real estate transaction in my life, but again, not as a career (obviously, see lack of profit above).  I have no problem with people changing careers, I just want to know why so many damn BookBub romance heroines are failing and returning home to fifties virtues.  

Here’s the thing that bugs me: I think that romance tropes answer to the prevailing social and political trends.  In the seventies, there were all those rape romances that told women that they could recover and even triumph over rape because the seventies were a really bad time when rape victims were put on trial as much as their rapists, and when date rape was still “you shouldn’t have had too much to drink.”  In the nineties when marriage in America really started to implode, suddenly we were inundated with baby romances, assuring women that they could find true love, even if they were toting diaper bags.  So now here we are in the tens and romances are assuring us that a guy will be there to protect us and we can go home again, especially if we’re leaving a business suit to wear an apron?  

Yes, I know, I’m overreacting.   It’s a specialty of mine.  But this is ANNOYING.