Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

I just wiped out my past. I’ve been trying to get my computers switched over to the new high speed system which involved switching e-mail providers which involved making sure the new e-mail account worked just fine on both computers, and then without thinking I deleted the old account from both computers. And lost every e-mail I ever sent or ever received on that system including every single e-mail Bob and I exchanged during the last year. The e-mails that were going to remind me what really happened for the book we were going to write based on the 2006 He Wrote She Wrote Blog. The e-mails that I was going to put into the book to show the behind-the-scenes stuff. Those e-mails. They’re all gone. I deleted them. There were hundreds of them. Most days we’d do fifty or sixty. Even if we were on the road together, there’d be twenty or thirty once we were in our rooms for the night, working on something, catching up on things, trying to figure out what city we were in. Most of them weren’t memorable, but some of them were. All the stuff we didn’t put in the blog, every negotiation, every fight, every minute of brainstorming Agnes, every detail was in those e-mails. I deleted every damn one of them without thinking. In fact, I think I just deleted our book. I e-mailed Bob. Yes, I see the irony. He e-mailed back, “Nothing but good times ahead.” I think maybe he’s thinking, “Thank God.” A lot of that stuff he probably didn’t want to relive, and he probably didn’t want me reliving it, either, sending him e-mails out of the blue, saying, “Oh, yeah, now I remember THIS, you rat bastard.” Maybe I don’t, either. That was a tough, tough year, worth every minute of it, but still it damn near killed us. Maybe stumbling down a memory lane full of craters from all the bombs that went off the last time we went that way wasn’t the best idea to begin with. It would have made a hell of a book, but on the other hand, who really wants to know what two writers did for a year? We thought it was fascinating but it was about us, of course we thought it was fascinating. And now that’s something else off my To-Do list. I haven’t read over the blog, maybe there’s still a book there without the e-mails, but I doubt it. Anybody who wanted to read it, read it the first time through. There probably wasn’t a market for it anyway. And I have fiction to write. My subconscious probably made me delete it since I did it on both computers in the space of about thirty seconds. I cannot believe I deleted our book.

I’m staring off the new year with a new e-mail address. Well, I had to. A wireless high speed system finally became available in my area (THANK GOD) and I had to change from my old dial-up provider, so I sent out e-mails to people telling them. And because it was the new year, I sent real e-mails, saying “Happy New Year,” thinking that would be nice, forgetting who was in my address book. I got several invitations to dinner and drinks the next time I was in various cities, that was lovely. I got two requests for book quotes, but I was asking for that one. I got one “you never write, you never call,” but that’s what I get for sending one to my mother. And then there were the ones like my pal, the producer whom I adore and to whom I had promised a story:

Darlin,
Congratulations on your new email address and HAPPY NEW YEAR! Hope 2007 brings you as many smiles and belly laughs as you can handle and that it brings me YOUR SHORT STORY in the first quarter. I can’t wait.
Big, fat, juicy, wet kisses to you.

Hollywood. You can’t trust them to have a moment without a motive.

And then there was my pal on the West Coast. I’m chalking this one up to too much salt in the air where she lives:

“Well, that makes me feel so special that I’m sending you this fabulous new year’s diet tip:”

Don’t think about that one too long.

And finally, from one of my favorite authors who is also an award-winning quilt maker and the publisher of a small press. After she thanked me for the new e-mail and wished me a happy new year, she caught me up to date on her life by saying:

Apparently my face is warmer than the feather-bed mattress topper so Critter has taken to just crawling up there and sleeping. Apparently he doesn’t understand that if he smothers me in my sleep that there will be no more catnip:

Apparently she has also not realized that both her cats are possessed. I told her I was going to post this on my blog as a Guess the Author Contest (made her scream in e-mail), but then I realized I’d have to mess around with tabulation and mailing prizes, so this is just here for your pleasure. In fact you can try to guess all three, although that first one is going to be a stumper. (Hint: he was working as an agent when we were in Maui a couple of years ago).

So this’ll teach me to send out change of address notes. Next time, they can just find me on their own. But I did laugh.

I have such great friends. There’s a resolution: Take very good care of very good friends in 2007.