Jennifer Crusie

You all probably haven't noticed this because Bob and I have been so quiet about it, but our latest novel, Rocky Start, is now on sale. Bob's distracted by moving, but I'm panicking as usual. It's different from the Liz and Vince books. The protagonists are older. It's a lot more violent (Bob was so happy). It is NOT like the movie RED although we both love that movie (Bob wrote that it was like RED), I've been kidding myself that I can write, the first twenty-three books were a fluke, I'm going to go eat worms and die.

I assume all writers go through this on pub day. Minus the Bob inputs.

Anyway, we have a book out. Hope you don't hate it.

So we're under a lot of stress here which makes Bob terse and me scatty, or business as usual, just more so. It's gonna be like this for awhile.

Max also has thoughts . . .

So Rocky Start is coming out in a couple of weeks and I'm supposed to be pulling quotes from it for PR, so here's one of Rose's thoughts, right after Max tells her they need to talk (they've known each other about a day):

"Why is it that “we need to talk” is never good? It’s never “We need to talk, you just won the lottery,” or “We need to talk, you’re getting a raise,” or “We need to talk, I think we should have great, headbanging, kinda rough s*x—”

"Yeah, it’s never stuff like that. "

We're working. Nothing very amusing but here's something that proves we're still on the job, in this case, it's arguing about foreshadowing which Bob graciously gave in on. Because I was right.

We're slowing down some--Bob's moving in the next couple of weeks--but I'm doing the last read through on the Rocky Start PDF, so that will absolutely be up and running on the 21st. And we're finishing up Very Nice Funerals, although I'm not speculating on when because of Bob's move and my own long list of Things That Must Be Done That Are Not Writing a Book. But I have high hopes that The Honey Pot Plot will go fast because we've done so much brainstorming on it. And then we're taking a break, I swear. (And somewhere Bob is saying, "No, no we are not.")

Bob just reminded me: the digital version of Lavender's Blue is $.99 from now until the 7th.

So how am I spending this lovely afternoon, after a great lunch with Pat Gaffney? Arguing about hearses with Bob. There are two funeral directors in the Rocky Start trilogy, and I found this great 1959 Cadillac hearse online for the hearse that was going to end up in the hands of one of the characters. Then Bob took that one as the one he was going to wreck, so I had to get a DIFFERENT cool hearse for my character to end up with. I decided on a 1956 Miller Landau Cadillac Ambulance Hearse. Evidently Cadillac made a lot of cool hearses in the 50s. And that was my afternoon. Hearse shopping online.

The Romancing the Vote auction begins tomorrow (July 1) and they just sent me the link to the critique Bob and I are offering (click the picture below for the link):

Collaborative Critique by Crusie & Mayer Auction item 'Collaborative Critique by Crusie & Mayer' hosted online at 32auctions.

One of the many things that's difficult about writing a series is that each book has to stand alone, so you have to set up the stuff from the first book at the beginning of the second. But you can't just lay it out there, that's boring for the reader who HAS read the first book. The opening of the second book in the Rocky Start series begins with my heroine being significantly annoyed with the hero because he's leaving her which of course he has every right to do. Or as she puts it, "You know what I hate? I hate being mad at somebody who hasn’t done anything wrong. It makes me look bitchy."

And that's a worry for me, too, because she's repressing a lot of anger in the first two pages (as she recaps briefly what's gone before) because she knows she shouldn't be angry BUT SHE IS. Nobody likes a bitchy heroine. So here's the first three paragraphs of Very Nice Funerals. Tell me in the comments if you think she's too awful or if you think the recap is too heavy handed.

"I was not upset.

"I was perfectly fine with Max Reddy leaving Rocky Start. I’d only met him two weeks ago when he’d come to town, looking dangerous, dark, and gaunt, mostly cheekbones, so we’d hardly had time to bond. I had a whole new life to plan, I had a future again for the first time since I was eighteen and threw mine away, so I had to make plans, good plans this time, a better life, so I didn’t have time for Max anyway. I mean, I was grateful for all he’d done for us, especially saving my daughter’s life, I would owe him forever for that, but I was fine with him leaving. It would be good if he’d tell me WHEN he was going to go, but it didn’t make any difference, really. It was fine.

"I even understood when he got out of my bed every morning that week to get back into shape to go back to the Appalachian Trail; he was a man’s man who needed to stride alone across rivers and through forests as manly men do. Perfectly fine with that. I did notice that today, for the first time, he had his heavy backpack on. Knowing Max, it was so he could suffer more during his walk. He’d told me “pain is weakness leaving the body,” which is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Pain is a warning system. Pain is a body saying, “Sit down, you idiot, you’ve hurt yourself and you should stay where you are with that nice woman you’re having a lot of s*x with.”

It's been a hectic week in general. Bob's buying a house and I'm dealing with imposter syndrome and my own house trauma. But we keep working. Here's a general idea of where we are:

Yesterday I LOST INTERNET FOR A GOOD HOUR. It was hell. Meanwhile Bob was going through several hells of a different kind and neither of us got any work done. But we did do one good thing: We signed up to do a manuscript analysis for the Romancing the Vote auction, July 1-July 5. The auction doesn't go live until then so I can't give you a link, but here's what we said we'd do:

NYT Bestselling authors Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer have written six novels together (and many more apart) so by now they know how to analyze a work of fiction and discuss it in detail. That's what they're offering here. Each author will read the manuscript and do a short written critique outlining the strengths and weaknesses of the work. Then they'll go into a chat room and talk about the book in depth, analyzing it as they go, possibly changing each other's minds about their critiques. (It happens.) The writer will get the two short critiques and the exported discussion of the book. Please be warned: Bob is a fiend about plot and Jenny lives or dies on character, so the critiques will be vigorous and soul-destroyingly honest (they suggest drinking before reading). If you are a sensitive plant, this probably is not for you.

Starting bid: $100.

So as you can see from the three previous posts, things are pretty much as usual. We're working on three books at once, we're both frazzled from non-writing life things, and Bob still does not understand that mornings are not the time to mess with me. Bob will never understand that. Sigh.

So by now, you know more about how we work than we do. At least you must because we keep doing the same things over and over. This last week has been difficult for Bob and it's going to continue to be so because he's moving in July, but he put up with me moving last July so I am trying to be understanding. Just not in the morning. So of course, that's when he wants to work. Pity the man, he's away from home with no dogs. To get an idea of how it's going, here are three consecutive Facebook posts that pretty much sum up this morning.

I've been thinking about what makes a romcom funny because Bob wrote a line in Very Nice Funerals that cracks me up every time I read it, but if I just put the line here, it would just be a "Huh?" because it depends on everything that's gone on in that book before that, and to a wider extent, everything that went on in the book before that. I think that's the difference between comedy in general and romcom. The contract with a reader in a romcom isn't just that it'll be amusing, it's that the amusement will come from knowing the relationships between the characters, not just in jokes, but contrasts and reversals from stuff that has gone before, throwaway lines that suddenly reveal a lot about a character unconsciously. I think in a romcom, all the successful humor is an in-joke, based on the reader's expectations and growing familiarity with the characters. If the line is funny outside of the story, it's just a wisecrack. If it's funny because the reader has become part of the story, invested in the community and the relationships, it resonates because it's personal.

I think. I need to think more on that.

What do you think?

I worked until five this morning. Then I fell asleep until Veronica woke me up about an hour ago. Then I answered all the posts Bob had put up in Slack while I was sleeping because he's a crack-of-dawn guy. Then he answered me and began to talk about a pair of scenes that he was rewriting. And I tried to be intelligent, but five hours of sleep, Bob. (YEC is our shorthand for Yucky Emotional Content. Guess which one of us named it that and which one of us is responsible for it.)

Nora Ephron's Heartburn is on sale for $1.99 today, and if you haven't read it, you should. Yes, it is an old book about divorce, but it's also funny and heartbreaking and I do not get why it only has 4 stars on Amazon, but it's making me feel much better about my ratings, also on old books. Ephron is a marvelous writer, and Heartburn is a very thinly disguised, almost transparent, account of her divorce from Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame.