Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

There are pitfalls in any creative endeavor, those things that you know you shouldn’t do but they’re just so . . . seductive. Excessively long guitar solos in music. The amnesia story in fiction. Purple in the sunset in painting. And when it comes to yarn, it’s the variegated stuff.

I’m not talking about handpainted yarn, that’s a fiber of an entirely different color. I’m talking about the cheap-ass machine-made variegated yarn that crowds the shelves of craft stores everywhere. It calls to me. I yearn for it. And it makes up into the ugliest fabric you’ve ever seen.

It’s just so pretty in the skein, all those colors calling to you. And every time I think, “This time will be different.” [Next week, a post on my love life.] “This time, things will work out, this time . . .”

It never does.

It’s like that time I thought, “What if a woman overheard a guy making a bet he could get her into bed and decided to pay him back?” It called to me, I thought of all the things the woman could do, it was was colorful, it was exciting, it was gaudy but appealing. But I couldn’t get it to work (or anybody to buy it). Then, ten years after I wrote the first version of it, I looked at it and thought, “What kind of a dickhead makes a bet he can get a woman into bed?” Yes, it only took me ten years to remember that my hero had to be a decent human being. And then I had to tap dance around that premise for the rest of the book. “He didn’t make the bet, okay? She just thinks he made the bet, HE DIDN’T MAKE THE BET.”

Same thing happens when I crochet with variegated yarn.

First of all, I keep missing the big picture: machine-made variegated colors are regular (made by machine) and so will work up with regulaly spaced splotches of color instead of blending subtly. There is nothing you can do about this. And yet I kept working with it. Like these hats:

If those aren’t the Ferd and Louise of hats, I don’t what is. And this is after I fixed them. Before the brims went on, the hats were pretty much a lump of this:

The dog’s breakfast of yarn. Like the amnesiac story which I yearn to write–she doesn’t know who she is! she has to find herself literally and metaphorically!–no matter what you do with this yarn, you’re always going back to be dragged back to the same point: It doesn’t work.

Unless you embrace it totally, open your arms to the absurdity of the thing, and just run with it. Amnesia stories aren’t believable? Yeah, so? What’s your point? Believability is overrated. The same thing happens with a color pattern like this: it’s so over the top ugly that you just have to embrace it with the same trailer park sassiness of the yarn itself: beauty is overrated, I’m in this for the thrill. I made two hats with this stuff before I realized there was going to be no way to make it beautiful, so it was going to have to be Fun. The capital “F” fun, as in Fun Fur and Fun Ribbon and Oh-My-God-I-Can’t-Believe-You’re-Wearing-That-Hat Fun. Thus the green fun fur on Lousie. Still not great, so I did a mix of a purple slub yarn and purple fun fur on Ferd. That’s a beautiful hat brim, I’m here to tell you. Hat’s still ugly though. Even the ribbon can’t save the basic fabric of that variegated yarn.

So with the rest of it–never say die–I paired it with a finer cotton yarn (Senso) in the turquoise color in the vari and got a fabric I think it getting close to good (it’s the hat to the right of Ferd; I’m thinking of calling it Sally):

I think it’s because there’s one color uniting it, one theme pulling it together. Reminds me of the variegated plot threads in Don’t Look Down, where we started with the bridge, the emotionally stunted director, the randy Green Beret, the Russian Mob, Finnegan, the endangered sister, the lonely little girl, and then looked at each other and said, “Oh, hell.” Lotta bobcats in that bag. So we found or added the same thematic thread to all of the plots and subplots to weave them together, one theme attached to everything–committing to others leads to fulfillment–and the different threads of the story blended. Same thing with the turquoise Senso crochet cotton, it softened all those colors into one color family. And then I did the hat brim with a thin furry yarn that blended with the vari and softened the garishness there, too. I like Sally. She’s a quiet little hat, but she has an understated sass about her, a little “I don’t think so” under that pale turquoise hum. She works.

Have I learned my variegated lesson? Of course not. I bought this after that blue/purple/green debacle:

I look at the yarn now and think, “What was I thinking?” The light must have been different at Hobby Lobby. On this one, all I could do was bury the awful fabric under a really wide brim and a bigass pompom with a ruffle. It’s the “Look over there, it’s Haley’s Comet” theory of redirective design. I’ve tried to save books like this. You Again is this hat. No matter how many times I try to fix it, the basic form is still butt-ugly. I’m going to have to unravel that story and start over, that’s all there is to it.

I have many more varis in my yarn stash. I can’t seem to help it, it’s like making a romance hero a professional murderer, or deciding to make a heroine a professor of Ancient Mesopotamia History when you don’t know anything about Mesopotamia, ancient or otherwise except that we should get the hell out of there now, or setting a book in a theme park even though you haven’t been to a theme park in ten years and hated it then. Some of us never learn.

Thank God I don’t play guitar.

So Mollie and Mara have been working like madwomen, and now the merchandising designs are done and we have logos for both Agnes and the Hitman, the real book, and Mob Food, the fictional cookbook that Agnes writes in the real book. (We gave up on a tagline for the Cranky Agnes column; it just wasn’t working with the graphic.)

So first of all, a huge thank you to Charlene Teglia for the Agnes and the Hitman line which became this logo:

And then an equally huge thank you to–TA DA WE HAVE A WINNER–Absolute Cherry who gave us the Mob Food logo:

Absolute Cherry, if you’ll send your address to Mollie at mail@jennycrusie.com, we’ll get that ARC right out to you.

And along with that address, both of you need to tell Mollie which piece of merchandise you want with your logo on it from the Shop Cherry store. Yes, folks, many weeks after we all hashed out the idea of merchandising, Shop Cherry is now open for business. You’ll be the first ones through the door. We’ve got Agnes and the Hitman stuff, Mob Food stuff, He Wrote She Wrote stuff, and Cherry stuff. Basically, we got Stuff. And there will be more Stuff because we’re going to go slowly through the back list and add things from the older books (like bumper stickers that say “Tucker For Mayor: More of the Same.”) So there will always be new Stuff to look at

And I am now solidly hooked on tagline contests because these were amazing, so there will be more contests in the future. The distant future. When I finish another book. Now that I’m finished shopping.

Taglines. T-shirts. Typing Always Kiss Me Goodnight. Life is good.

Eileen Dreyer, Anne Stuart, and I have a collaborative novel coming out this week, and the cover journey for it was fraught with drama, probably the toughest cover process I’ve ever gone through. The design for this one was really demanding because
It was a mass market paper back which means the cover is small.

It had a long title plus three author names, and the subhead “A Novel” had to go so people wouldn’t think it was an anthology. And it’s a mass market so the cover is small.

It had to communicate the strange nature of the book, funny, sexy, poignant, paranormal romance about three sisters–did I mention the cover is small?

And that’s even before you take into consideration that a mm has a completely different audience and sales approach from a hardcover, and the fact that SMP was trying to sell it to the audiences of three different authors–romantic comedy, straight suspense, and romantic suspense. Nobody thought this was going to be an easy cover, but I don’t think anybody had any idea of how hard it was going to be.

The first one they showed us as a starting place was. . . well . . . it was a starting place.



It must catch the eye across a bookstore.
Harsh colors; hard to read type face; no strong image, so, no. I really didn’t like the font they used, and since there was so much type, that was crucial.

It must be pick-up-able when the reader gets close.
Generic cartoon details that did nothing to make the book distinctive. It looked like a YA book crossed with I Dream of Jeannie.

It must capture the mood and the content of the story.
We needed magic, funny, sexy, dangerous, sisterhood . . . Nope.

So we went back to the art department with some descriptive things about the book–the green/blue/violet of the book’s theme colors, magic, sexy, powerful women, fun–and our editor suggested some more concrete ideas, so the next batch came closer to capturing the idea of the book. These are roughs, the sketched ideas, not by any means what the finished covers would have looked like, and Mollie’s favorite is still the idea of the three sisters in front of the moon.





And then they did a more finished version of the Girls-In-The_Moon idea:



It must catch the eye across a bookstore.
The moon and the silhouettes would do that, and we could fix the colors so they weren’t so much like a bruise.

It must be pick-up-able when the reader gets close.
We never really knew what kind of texture and detail would be on these because these were just roughs, but I didn’t like the font; it just didn’t say “magic” to me.

It must capture the mood and the content of the story.
I loved the three women silhouetted on the moon, but they were anorexic cookies that looked like teens. Josey and the Pussycats girls. And the women sitting on the moon, through several different tries, just screamed, “Hey, Big Spender.”

Again, art departments can’t read all the books, so it’s up to authors and editors to get the ideas across. So we tried again with the green/blue/violet, magic, sexy, powerful women, fun, and got six different versions of a new concept, two of which are below:





Great for dark suspense, very sexy, but not the Fortune sisters. Plus that sexy leg on the dark street thing pretty much screams “vampire novel” at this point. So no. We tried again and the art dept sent us a house cover this time:



This one had potential although it looked too much like a horror novel. But it had the colors of the book and it was mysterious and spooky, so we asked them to supernatural it up some by making the house more of a painting than a photo and maybe get some kickier colors in there and. . . well, see for yourself:



Gorgeous, dangerous, spooky colors, communicates family with the house, and just really, really well done.
.
It must catch the eye across a bookstore.
The colors, the dramatic house, the sky, oh yes.

It must be pick-up-able when the reader gets close.
There’s beautiful detail on this house, and we asked them to tweak it so that colored smoke was coming out of the windows and chimney, which was a nice detail. Very magic. The font was still static, but overall, good detail.

It must capture the mood and the content of the story.
It missed on “strong women” and “sexy” at least overtly, but it did everything else, and the title was going to communicate “women” so I was good with it. Some people felt it still looked too much like a horror novel, but it was so beautiful, I didn’t think so. I was happy.

And then for some reason, the art department did another pass at it and made it pink which is the cover that was on Amazon and our website for quite awhile.



I still am dumbfounded by this. Pink? When it came back, our editor rejected it without sending it to us. By then, everybody–the art department, our poor editor, and the three of us–were staring into the abyss. We were never going to get this cover right.

But then Mara and Mollie sent us the comps for the website, and they were jaw-dropping gorgeous. We sent them to our editor to show her what the site would be like, and she scrapped the house completely–we’d have been happy to just go back to the original blue version–and we began to work with the website elements. They sent us two roughs:



Colors are great, font’s okay although still static, but the vines look like they’re attacking the moon, and the grass at the bottom is just ugly and the subhead is overwhelming the title.



This was the second rough sent at the same time, so still with the ugly grass and the type that’s not quite right and the graphic just wasn’t integrated somehow. So the art department, with the patience of a thousand saints, went back and picked up the graphics and the type from the website and came back with this:



They also made the subhead smaller and in a stroke of genius, put blue shadows of the white vines on the moon, and Xan’s butterfly under the now smaller subhead. They type dances, the graphics are integrated, and this cover sings. We looked at it and said, “That’s it.”

It must catch the eye across a bookstore.
Beautiful strong color and great contrast with that moon will bring people over to look at it. And amazingly, the type doesn’t overwhelm it even though the cover is packed with words.

It must be pick-up-able when the reader gets close.
The detail on this is so exquisite, and the letters are foiled, but so delicately that they don’t scream at you. The details are like jewelry.

It must capture the mood and the content of the story.
It’s dark, it’s moody blue, it’s sexy, it’s female, and it’s magic. It doesn’t get the humor although that little bat of a butterfly is nice and quirky, and frankly, I’m not sure it’s possible to get everything that The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes is on a book cover. This does a damn fine job of coming close, right down to Xan in the garden of the girls’ lives, and besides it’s so, so beautiful.

And I have now seen the actual books, and they’re really, truly gorgeous.

Covers are not easy, and this one was the hardest one I’ve ever been through, but I think we got a great one.

How much do I love Always Kiss Me Tonight? I’m dancing all over the house to the soundtrack.

This is the part (well, one of the parts) that’s always a little tense because I have to keep roiling the book in my head, listening to the people talk (I LOVE THESE PEOPLE) and not rush to the keyboard, let them grow, get all gloriously tangled. Which means not much writing, which is scary. But it’s so, so good. In my head.

We were brainstorming the music for Dogs and Goddesses and I thought, “Haven’t done that for AKMG yet,” so I hit my iTunes and my CD albums and the iTunes store, trying to find character themes, major scene themes and–most of all–the heroine’s love theme.

Some of it was easy: Alice, the five-year-old girl obsessed with death, loves The Corpse Bride, so she’ll dance around to “Remains of the Day.” I can see Alice and Emmeline dancing down the hall of third floor where the nursery is, singing, “Give me a listen, you corpses of cheer,” while the ghosts lurk around them. Which Alice knows but Emme doesn’t. Yet. “Die, die, we all pass away, but don’t wear a frown, cause it’s really okay. You might try and hide, and you might try and pray, but we all end up the remains of the day.”

I love it.

Then there are the “eh, maybe”s. Imogen Heap’s “Spooky” is nicely electronic. I’m not sure it’s’ the book, though. I know a song’s right if I can see a scene in it, and I don’t see those yet. Same way with Dusty’s “Haunted.” Just not sure. Which probably means, “no.”

But the Drifter’s “Save the Last Dance For Me,” which I love, does give me scene, plus there’s the nice double meaning to “last dance.” Fleetwood Mac’s “You and I, Pt. 2,” is great since the hero is Emme’s ex-husband and the book’s about ghosts, real and figurative, about being haunted by your past: “And the phantoms crawl out of the night, hoping tomorrow will never come for you and I.” Heap’s “Goodnight and Go,” which is just so luscious anyway, is the beginning of the book. I’m sure about the Cranberries, “Just My Imagination.” I tried everybody’s cover of that, but the Cranberries are it. Well, Dolores is it. The exhilaration in their cover is so Emme, and since North, the hero, doesn’t see the ghosts and doesn’t believe they’re there, the words are lovely, too, in a lot of shaded ways. And there’s a haunted love scene that is definitely Sugababes’ “Too Lost In You.” “No one can rescue me.” Perfect.

Which still leaves me character themes. On those I’m still lost, BUT I have Emme’s love theme and it makes scene every time I hear it: “Nine Million Bicycles.” I play it and the story goes wild in my head. The words are so Emme, and she’s going to sing it to Alice as a lullaby, but it’s also the theme for her and North, and beyond that for the book, I think. The music is loving and spooky and the words, oh, I love the words, about believing in what you can’t see and knowing love. And I love it that it works as a lullaby for Alice and a promise to North.

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing
That’s a fact,
It’s a thing we can’t deny
Like the fact that I will love you till I die.

We are twelve billion light years from the edge,
That’s a guess,
No-one can ever say it’s true
But I know that I will always be with you.

I’m warmed by the fire of your love every day
So don’t call me a liar,
Just believe everything that I say

There are six billion people in the world
More or less
and it makes me feel quite small
But you’re the one I love the most of all

We’re high on the wire
With the world in our sight
And I’ll never tire,
Of the love that you give me every night

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing
That’s a Fact,
it’s a thing we can’t deny
Like the fact that I will love you till I die

And there are nine million bicycles in Beijing
And you know that I will love you till I die!

Katie Melua’s version works beautifully for the lullaby, but I could use somebody heavier for the North version. The only thing I can find is by Jenie Oliver, and she changes a crucial line (for absolutely NO reason) that throws me out of the song. So I need another cover.

But I’m telling you, you get the music right, the story soars.

So the guy I write with wrote a solo novel and it’s very good. At least PW thinks so (even if they can’t spell “Mayer”):

Lost Girls
Robert Doherty. Forge, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-7653-1127-6
An alias of prolific bestseller Bob Meyer—whose second novel with Jennifer Crusie, Agnes and the Hitman, is due in August (Reviews, June 4)—Doherty is a bestseller in his own right with his Area 51 books, among others. This terrific follow-up to Bodyguard of Lies continues to track the Cellar, a government organization whose task is to police rogue agents in the CIA, FBI and other U.S. bureaus. Maj. Jack Gant is called in from his South Carolina island home to oversee an investigation involving the abduction of Emily Cranston, daughter of Fort Bragg Special Warfare Center commander Col. Samuel Cranston. The motive for the abduction is revenge, and the perpetrators have been highly trained in how to carry it out—by the U.S. government. As related crimes pile up, Doherty delivers top-notch action and adventure, creating a full cast of lethal operatives armed with all the latest weaponry. Excellent writing and well-drawn, appealing characters help make this another taut, crackling read from Doherty. (Aug.)

Lost Girls is the follow-up to Bodyguard of Lies which was excellent. I’m sure this is great, too, although he never showed it to me. Not that that bothers me.

There’s probably a prologue.

Still, even if there’s a prologue, the guy’s good. You should read Lost Girls.