Argh Ink

A long, long time ago, I put up my first website using a program called Home Page (I think, it was a long time ago) and it was pretty cool for its time (now people would spit on it) and one of my friends who shall be nameless–let’s call her Pat–wanted one, too. Because in publishing, you’re nothing without a website, even back then. So I told her to send me some content and I would put up all her books on a website just for her. And she did, in the form of a conversation with a rabid fan.

[Full disclosure: This author and I had, at the time, devised pseudonyms that we would use when our careers tanked. She picked Edith Peach Pitt and I chose Passion Ann Heet. You can tell already she's the lady in the friendship. Then she added Cinnamon Luust for her American sales. I tell you this so you know where the names came from.]

Anyway, that was many websites ago, and Pat just got her already lovely current website updated by my genius daughter, and the new website is incredibly beautiful, but in will never replace in my heart The Passion Ann Heet Fansite for Patricia Gaffney. So in honor of Pat’s new gorgeous elegant professional website, I give you Passion Ann’s monument to fanhood, the only time Patricia Gaffney and I ever collaborated on a piece of fiction.

Although I’m pretty damn sure the purple was her idea.

Besides Always Kiss Me Goodnight, (aka The One With The Ghosts), I’ve been working on a Fun Book for awhile now. It’s like nothing I’ve ever done before, completely over the top. The heroine is the embodiment of ecstasy, but her family forgot to tell her. The hero sleeps with everything that moves. My dog Wolfie is in it. In fact, there are nine dogs in it. They talk. I cannot tell you how much fun I am having with this book. Every time I say, “I don’t know if I can get away with this,” one of the other writers says, “Jenny, we have talking dogs. You can get away with it.”

Oh, right, and it’s another collaboration. I love collaborating, I do things when I collaborate I’d never do alone, and I learn so much. It’s the treat I give myself for sticking with the day job of writing solo novels. Which I’m also doing. Always Kiss Me Goodnight now has 10,000 damn fine words. I’m on it.

But oh, the Fun Book.

However, the Fun Book has had, in its own way, more grief than any other project I’ve ever worked on. The stars are aligned against it. Things just aren’t working out. And so the three of us–that would be Anne Stuart, Lani Diane Rich, and me–looked at each other, all three of us with solo books we needed to write, and said, “It’s okay if you don’t want to do this.” And then all three of us said, “Hell, no, I’m in.” Which is when it really got fun, because we realized that not only had the three of us bonded–our Google Group is ThreeGoddesses and sweetie, we are–but we were all rabid about the book and its nine talking dogs. (Rabid. Get it? I crack myself up.)

So we began to think about doing Exciting Things. Like self-publishing. (This is probably where I should mention that no editor has seen this book yet. It has not been rejected. It’s just probably death to our careers. I’m telling you, nine talking dogs and my hero sleeps with six women the first night of the story. The book has Issues.) Then we thought, maybe we’d put up a website and self-publish it there.

And then we got side-tracked and decided to put up a blog instead.

I know, I need another blog like I need another talking dog, but we started thinking about what we could do there. Like workshop the scenes from the first act of the book. And put up pictures of dogs. And publish the transcripts of our Sunday chats. And get other people who have collaborated to post about how they do it. And put up posts about goddesses we love. (I’ve got a thing for Cloaca, the Roman goddess of sewers. Yes, she’s real.) And do drive-by posts about stuff we’ve dug up researching the book, like cylinder seals and Mesopotamian jewelry. But mostly talk about writing the book. Sort of like reality TV, only not. It isn’t the kind of blog that would appeal to a lot of people, we figure. Just to people who would like a book with nine talking dogs.

Knowing you guys, I figured you’d want in.

You are invited to the opening of the Dogs and Goddesses blog–that’s the title of the book, we love it–hosted by us: Anne Stuart, Lani Diane Rich, and Jenny Crusie. We have no idea what’s going to happen with the blog, the book, or with our futures. It’s very exciting.

Pray for us.

I’ve been working on AKMG (that’s Always Kiss Me Goodnight to those of you who just arrived) and I’m pretty happy with it. I’m dreaming about it, the scenes are coming out fairly strong in rough draft–they’re a mess but they’re a good mess–and I’m really enjoying the research. Which is on ghosts.

It’s a tribute to how little atmosphere my house has that I can research ghosts in the middle of the night and not feel spooked, although I am going to save re-reading The Haunting of Hill House until a nice bright sunny day. I want to get the theory of this as correct as possible since one of the characters is a parapsychologist, but I also want to get the spook factor right, thus Shirley Jackson. But my editor said something that’s making me think. She said that she thought ghosts might put off my readers because they think of Crusie books as grounded in reality. I’ve never thought of my books as grounded in reality, they’ve always taken place in Crusie World–write what you know, people–but I think that’s exactly what she meant: Are there ghosts in Crusie World? More to the point are the Bad Ghosts in Crusie World? Or as she put it, “There are an awful lot of ghosts here, and they ain’t Casper.” (Have I mentioned I love my editor?)

Of course my position is that if I write ghosts, there are ghosts in Crusie World, but that’s just me being stubborn. I do have to write the book the way it needs to be written, but how I write those ghosts, how they come across, is going to have a major impact on reader satisfaction. There are still some people bitching about Crazy for You because “stalking isn’t funny.” Okay, first, I don’t write funny stories. I write stories and sometimes parts of them are funny, but I am not a laff riot, looking for the joke on every page, I do not consider myself a funny writer. Second, did I write it as if stalking were funny? No. I made the bastard pay. But that ignores the point that people are still upset about that. They tuned in for a laff riot and got a stalker. Short of having my publisher put “Not A Laff Riot” on the front of my novels, I’m not sure how to deal with this misperception that everything in a Crusie will be Light and Humorous. it never was.

On the other hand, there haven’t been ghosts before, either. So I’m thinking of it as widening my parameters. Because the story has to be what the story has to be.

And because I want to write ghosts.

So here’s a question:

What do you think of this site?

http://www.earlyink.com/

It just went up at 6PM ET today (Sunday) so you’ll be some of the first checking it out.

We still don’t have a good tagline for Agnes and the Hitman, and since many of you have been reading bits and pieces of the book or reading about us writing it on various blogs and therefore have a good grasp of what it’s about, and since a tagline contest just worked beautifully for another of my collaborations, Bob and I are running a contest, too. Yes, come up with the best (we get to decide the best) tagline for Agnes and the Hitman and you can win a signed ARC. Put your taglines here and on Bob’s Updates blog and we’ll each pick our favorite (so that’s two winners, one here and one over at Bob’s place). Enter as many times as you like right here in the comments (or in Bob’s comments, or both). Contest closes at midnight ET on Saturday, May 26. The winning taglines will belong to us although we will thank you profusely. Decisions of Bob and Jenny are final.