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.
