Jennifer Crusie | Argh Ink | Blog

I was really looking forward to this trip, a week in NYC, no business to speak of, a lot of walking through galleries and around the West Village which I love. Then the phone rang this afternoon and woke me out of a deep sleep and I leapt to my feet and snagged the bottom of my foot on a nail sticking up from the ancient floorboards here. Hurt like hell. So I hobbled into the kitchen and saw Bob dozing on the sofa bed and turned to go back to the bathroom to hunt up a bandaid and saw how much blood I’d spattered getting from the bedroom to the kitchen, which is when I sat down and looked at the bottom of my foot and it was gross and dripping blood. By then Bob was sitting up, saying, “What now?” until he looked at my foot and then he said something else. After which I washed it off and he put antibiotic stuff on it and strapped the only bandaid I had on it and then he said, “That’s deep.” Which for Bob, the original “Oh, wah” guy, is like “Have you made out your will? Am I in it?” Thank god I have a blood disease that makes me clot a lot.

And I’d had such a good lunch with Meg, too. I showed her the collages and visual outlines I’ve been doing for the books I’m working on/want to work on, and she said, “Show these to Jen,” so tomorrow I will haul my computer with me to lunch and flash my editor with Curio pages. It could be a whole new way to pitch. Or just a fun thing to do with my editor and agent at lunch. Either way, Curio is working for me once again. Unlike my foot.

But since Bob is asleep in the kitchen–yes, at eight PM at night, my writing partner is sacked out already, worn out from mopping up blood all over the apartment–and my walking days are curtailed for awhile, that gives me time to go back to the short story with the inventive ways to get rid of the body–I told Meg all about you and your ideas at lunch, probably not the best time to mention pouring Coke over a body in a bathtub, especially since we were both drinking Diet Coke at the time–and to continue on with the community paper. I still haven’t gotten my head wrapped around what I want to say yet, but your comments are clarifying things beautifully. I do think there’s some self-selection going on here, but the feedback is so rich that it’s helpful anyway. So thank you very much.

Now does anybody have a big bandaid? Because I think my foot’s still bleeding. If you don’t hear from me again, it’ll be because I bled to death in the West Village and my writing partner got rid of the body.. Thanks to all of you, he knows how.

That’s the title of an essay I’m working on. Well, actually it’s a paper and I have to deliver it at a conference fairly shortly. My thesis is that one of the most powerful aspects of the romance novel is the community that it makes in the reader’s mind. There’s a lot of theory out there about the internet as a replacement for community, that it gives us the connection we need without the intimacy we fear, and I think a lot of successful romance novels do that, too, through several relationships beyond that of the lovers (although that’s a community, too): groups of friends, workplace communities, neighborhoods, etc. So far, I’m talking about Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Stars books, especially Match Me If You Can and Natural Born Charmer, but I’m open to others.

So I’m working on this and it occurs to me that besides knowing how to get rid of a body, you all probably know romance fiction and/or women’s fiction pretty well, too. And that I would be pretty dumb not to ask you what you think.

So is the community in a romance novel important to you? Obviously the core of the story is the romance, but do you want or need a community aspect, too? In romance novels that are heavy on community–most SEPs are, most of my work is–does the community enhance the story for you or detract from the thing you came to the story for? And most important for my purposes, why do you think that?

Thanking you in advance for allowing me to exploit you again.

I’m sitting in the Miami airport, having just come from a literary festival in support of a terrific library in Broward County. The event was beautifully run and I met lovely people. Many of them asked about Bob, especially what he looks like. I don’t know, he looks like Bob. This is what happens when I travel without him. Plus I’m so tired, I’m yawning about every minute or so. They say travel broadens a person, and my butt is definitely getting wider, but I’m thinking that after last year, I’ve been broadened enough. It’s something that a lot of writers have been talking about lately, how much time we spend on the road, on the internet, promoting books instead of writing them. I haven’t written a word for over a week because of business, promotion, traveling, and I’m starting to think there’s something fundamentally wrong with that, aside from the fact that I’m starting to twitch because of it. Or maybe I’m just cranky because I’m in the Miami airport and Bob’s on Hilton Head instead of sitting beside me, saying, “Living the dream,” and snickering. What I know for sure is, I have to write something pretty soon. Maybe that short story now that I have ten million ways to get rid of the body, and don’t think Agnes and Lisa Livia aren’t going to bring up some of them. I owe you.

And then there’s Zelda.

I really need to write. It’s like an addiction; if I don’t get to write fiction pretty soon, I’m going to start lying to people just because I need to tell stories. “Bob? He’s seven foot tall and when he gets mad, he turns green. The Incredible Bob.” “Bob? Looks kind of like a leprechaun. A serial killer leprechaun.” “Bob? Bob who?”

ARGH.

Wow.
I had no idea. But if I ever kill Bob, his body will never be found.

Sorry to be a tease. Here’s the full story of the story:

My editor e-mailed me and said, “We’d like to put a short story or two on the website as a teaser for when Agnes comes out. Do you and Bob have any ideas?” (You can ask Bob about his on his blog: www.bobmayer.org.)

And there’s a place in the book where Shane asks Agnes what happened to the father of Maria (Lisa Livia’s daughter, the girl who’s getting married that weekend) and she says that he disappeared. Which is why the body can’t be found, the book says he disappeared. And Shane asks if anybody looked, and Agnes says, “He was a missing person that nobody missed at all.” And Shane says something along the lines of “Huh,” because he’s not a Chicks fan, but I figured any Chicks fan would get the reference. And I planned to leave it at that. Subtle.

But when Jen said, “Any story ideas?” I said, “I can go back twenty years and tell the story of what happened to Johnny.” And she said, “Oooh, do that.”

So I started to write the short story and came up against some problems immediately, the first one being that since it starts out with Johnny in the trunk of Lisa Livia’s car, he’s not the antagonist. And since it’s a short story, I’m not going to have a lot of characters, in fact, it’s pretty much Agnes and LL, told from Agnes’s POV (so far) so that means LL is her antagonist. So I’m struggling with the plot lines of the central conflict, but I’m distracted by this body they have to get rid of while they’re arguing because how? Lisa Livia is pregnant and getting ready to go live with her mother, Agnes has the car packed to leave town the next morning for Ohio University, there’s a body in the trunk, but since I’m having enough trouble figuring out the conflict as I write the story, I do not have the spare brain cells to figure out how to get rid of that body forever. However, I do have a blog with some whacked-out commenters, so what the hell.

You guys are kind of scary. In a good way, of course.

I can now see Lisa Livia and Agnes having this conversation about pigs and acid and blue crabs. . .

Once again I have been distracted from You Again by something that needs to be done right away: a short story. Don’t ask.

Here’s the tasteless part: While I am still trying to figure out the plot and structure of this sucker, I am confounded by a plot point. The story is about two recent high school graduates, both girls. They have to get rid of the body of an adult male, fast, so that it will never be found. I have googled for “How To Get Rid Of A Body” but most of what I’ve found involves cutting the body into pieces. These girls don’t have the time or the stomach for that. They aren’t your average high school girls–one has a vicious temper and the other is the daughter of a mob boss and nobody to mess with, either–but they’re not sociopaths and they’re on their own on this one–can’t call in help from the mob–and about to leave town. It’s midnight, the body’s in the trunk of their car, they’re leaving New Jersey to go to Ohio where one of them will be starting college . . .

I’m trying to think of something original and quirky and funny which will also be deep and meaningful, but at the moment I can’t even think of a boring way for them to do it. No, I’m not going to do a collage for this, jeez.

There are no nearby building sites about ready to pour concrete; that’s too easy.

They’re in a dorm room in a boarding school, so forget lye in a tub.

They don’t have access to a boat so they can’t dump it in the ocean.

I’m thinking, I’m thinking . . .

Anybody got any ideas? (She asked, a little afraid of what might show up in the comments.)