Jennifer Crusie | Argh Ink | Blog

I spent my day at LaGuardia, trying to fly out on Delta, which for some reason was having weather delays when none of the other airlines seemed to be having a problem. And now I’m in a Marriott, having been bumped to the next day. This gives me time to think, usually an iffy proposition but tonight a good thing. And what I think right now is, change is good, especially sudden and unexpected change.

Thursday, I went to the Met with Krissie to meet my friend Dale for lunch, and as I said in the last post, Dale brought John Saul and Mike Sack. I hadn’t talked with them for months, and when I saw them there in the light-filled lobby, I felt everything lift, just the sheer joy of seeing good people I loved, and I opened my arms to them because who wouldn’t? and hugged them and then hugged them again, and laughed, and then went to lunch and laughed again, just delighted to be with such wonderful people, my friends. But the thing is, if I’d known John and Mike were going to be there, I’d have been just as happy, but I wouldn’t have had that soaring moment in the Met lobby while security searched my bag and I laughed out loud to see them. That moment of sheer joy when everything changed . . . wonderful.

Friday, I went for drinks with my agent, Meg, and when I saw her sitting at the table behind a pillar, I knew something was wrong. She looked so strained, and Meg never does, she’s always who-loves-ya-baby upbeat. I sat down and said, out of the blue, before I even knew what was happening, “You’re firing me, aren’t you?” And we talked about what we both knew, that I wanted my career to go in a different direction than she did, and she said, “I think you should find a new agent.” And I thought, This can’t be happening, but I said, “Any suggestions?” not “Wait, we can work this out.” And we talked and hugged each other because she’s truly one of my best friends, and then I went back to the Village and thought, Everything’s new again. That moment of sheer panic when everything changed . . . liberating.

Last week, out of the blue, I had the inexplicable urge to finish my PhD. It’s been hanging fire for over ten years, but suddenly the need was there. And because I am impulsive, I e-mailed good people at OSU and said, “Can I come back and finish?” and by the end of the day, I had half of my committee and a welcome back from the head of the English Department. Then I had a moment of doubt. What the hell was I doing? I have novels to write and I need to write them fast because I’m behind again, and people are expecting a lot of me, and I have no time . . . but underneath all of that was the certainty that it was the right thing to do, finish the unfinished past and move into a new future. And then I began to think of a new diss topic and realized why I wanted to finish now: I want to research collaboration, why creative people come together to make art instead of pursuing inspiration in solitude; I realized that collaboration is more than just fun for me, it’s part of a creative evolution, changing me and my work, forcing me to grow and I want to know why. That moment of impulse when I e-mailed OSU and everything changed. . . illuminating.

So today, when I tried to fly out of LaGuardia and sat through delay after delay, I thought about the week, so many things had happened, so much laughter with Lani and Krissie and Mollie, so many good friends to have lunch and dinner with, so many surprises and so much change. And when my flight was cancelled five hours after it was supposed to have left, I walked into the quiet of a hotel room that wasn’t Ohio or New York, where I had no responsibilities and no one to come to my door, crawled into an amazing bed, and thought about the future–the trip to Australia and New Zealand, going back for the PhD, finding a new agent, writing Always Kiss Me Goodnight and Dogs and Goddesses—and knew there would be surprises, gifts from the universe and reversals, too, some things will be wonderful and some won’t, but all of it will be interesting.

Which reminded me of the best death-bed story I’d ever heard, about a wonderful guy dying of AIDS who’d lived his life well, and who, right before he died surrounded by loving family and friends, looked past them all as if he saw something in the distance, and said, “Well, this should be interesting.” Which reminded me that my favorite Tarot card is Death. Change. The idea that there is something new around the corner which is what keeps us going around the corner. And I knew that I am one lucky woman.

It’s been a good week on the road.

Whoa, I had that footed bowl once, too. Wonder what I did with it?

So today we went back to the cafe where Krissie had the tentacles and had a marvelous breakfast, only to realize that we were finishing at eleven and we all had lunch dates at noon. As Krissie said, “Whoops.” So Lani went off to have a great time with her agent, and Krissie and I were late to meet Dale at the Met. (You remember Dale, the woman who got her fake gold tooth and her accordian late at night and met her son to film the obscene video.) Big surprise when we got there: John Saul and Mike Sack were with her (the collaborative team behind the John Saul novels) and since these are two of the guys I love most in the world, we had a huge reunion in the lobby of the Met, hugging over the velvet ropes while security searched my bag. Then we had lunch in the cafeteria and gossiped and laughed and gossiped again and I made Dale tell the story where she slept with the famous person again which is great but which Saul and Sack and Krissie hadn’t heard before. We were raucous, but we were in the cafeteria so we didn’t get thrown out.

Then Saul and Sack left to catch a plane and the three of us went up to the Mesopotamian exhibit and had a near-religious-experience looking at the bas reliefs which are so beautiful and which are a huge part of Dogs and Goddesses. And we looked at the cylinder seals–which Lani and I are both bananas about–and the jewelry which we all were bananas about, and then Dale left to go work on her class notes and Krissie and I went to see the Japanese exhibit because she’s Krissie. Lani came in late because she forgot about us, and we went back to the Mesopotamian exhibit so she could see the cylinder seals and were amazed all over again, and then went to Krissie’s favorite place in the museum, the gift store. I bought a children’s book on Mesopotamia (research tip: always start with kid’s books to get the overview, then move on to the heavier stuff) a children’s book on archeology, and the pop-up book of warriors which will probably end up with a friend of mine. Ninjas and mongols and knights, oh my. And a scarf for my mother. And jewelry. It was good.

Then we cabbed it to Pizza Fresca where I was met Jen, and the food and service were fabulous. Jen brought Matthew and Anne Marie (you remember Anne Marie from “Frenching Anne Marie,” right?) and they brought me a copy of Agnes and the Hitman hot off the press and it’s an AMAZING package, just the best book cover I’ve ever had. And then we laughed really loud and ate pizza and laughed some more. When dinner was done, Lani and Krissie and I cabbed it back to the Village, bought junk food, and hunkered down until we’d blocked out Act Two of D&G in post-it notes on the kitchen cabinets. At two AM, Krissie said, “We got a lot done here. We should go shopping tomorrow.” Of course, we also have to block out Act Four tomorrow (Act Three we may punt until October), but the Hello Kitty store, the store that sells Clairefontaine paper, and the Japanese store call.

So we did a lot of different things, all career-related, and it was one of the happiest days of my life, good conversation with wonderful people and lots of laughing. And the weather was beautiful. And my feet hurt, but hey, well worth it.

Tomorrow: It can’t possibly stay this good.

That screaming you’ve been hearing is me in New York trying to find an internet connection. But it’s gorgeous here, really the prettiest I’ve ever seen the West Village, and the weather is perfect or at least it was today. I got in yesterday, had dinner with Meg at The Spotted Pig where we had wonderful food and better conversation, then came back to the apartment to chat with the landord who told me that Kate and Leo had had tumultous sex in the upstairs parlor as part of shooting their next movie. Since Timothy Hutton had been an architect in the kitchen, the downstairs apartment really can’t compete with the upstairs, but it’s still a wonderful place to stay. Except for the internet which keeps getting screwed up by the turnbuckles that were installed to keep the stairs from pulling away from the wall which created a Faraday box which also screws up the cellphone reception.

I don’t care. This is my favorite place to stay in New York, not to mention the best place to collaborate on books.

Then today Lani and Krissie came in. We were supposed to get started right away working on D&G, but instead we sat and gossiped about the industry and traded opinions and caught up with what was happening in general. And Lani gave Krissie magic socks which she’d knitted. Then we played Mac Addict for awhile–it’s so much fun to show somebody Spotlight and watch them gaze in wild surmise as they see the New World opening up for them–and went to dinner where Krissie didn’t listen as the very nice waitress described the seafood plate and became disconcerted when she ended up with squid and little octopi. She kept holding up tiny little tentacles and saying, “What is this?” Exactly what it looks like, Krissie. Do you mind? I’m eating here.

And then we came back and Krissie said, “So. Mesopotamia,” and we worked on the book which is ostensibly why we’re all here, but the truth is, we just want a good time in New York with good friends.

Tomorrow: We get thrown out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for laughing too hard in the Mesopotamian exhibit.

Titles, like covers, are a marketing tool. That seems wrong, the title should be the author’s choice, encapsulating the theme of the book, but it really is one of the things that makes readers pull books off sheves, so when marketing says, “that won’t sell,” I roll with the changes. Welcome to Temptation started out as Hot Fleshy Thighs, but Jen told me they’d never get it in the catalogs, so I changed it (that was seven years ago, before the erotica revolution; it might fly now). My title for Tell Me Lies was Frog Point Wallow; yeah, that was bad. The key is to come up with a snappy title that sells the book while representing it: Faking It, Fast Women, Bet Me, Don’t Look Down, and Agnes and the Hitman were all my (or our) titles. The worst ones that were ever handed to me were Manhunting and What the Lady Wants. Okay, Manhunting had been Keeping Kate which was a lousy title for that book, but What the Lady Wants had been Whatever Maybelle Wants, which I love to this day. What the Lady Wants is just . . . wrong. And they nixed the Maybelle title because it made the heroine sound selfish. Unlike What the Lady Wants . . .

It’s okay, I’m over it.

But I digress. Titles are marketing. So I was reading the Walden’s Romance Bestseller list yesterday and noticed this trend in category romance titles:

THE FUTURE KING’S PREGNANT MISTRESS
CEO’S SCANDALOUS AFFAIR
THE BOSS’S DEMAND
THE PRINCE’S ULTIMATE DECEPTION
THE MILLIONAIRE’S BOSS’S BABY
TAKEN: THE SPANIARD’S VIRGIN
THE SICILIAN’S RED-HOT REVENGE

That seven out of the top ten bestselling titles with a possessive. On the other hand, the single title romance list had titles like The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever, Scent of Darkness, and Web of Love. Would a category editor have changed those to Miss Miranda Cheever’s Secret Diaries, Darkness’s Scent, and Love’s Web? Why does the apostrophe sound so . . . uh, low class and the preposition so hoity toity? Do these titles sound not quite so cringe-worthy:

THE PREGNANT MISTRESS OF THE FUTURE KING
THE SCANDALOUS AFFAIR OF CLEO
THE DEMAND OF THE BOSS
THE ULTIMATE DECEPTION OF THE PRINCE
THE BABY OF THE BOSS OF THE MILLIONAIRE
THE VIRGIN OF THE SPANIARD IS TAKEN
THE RED-HOT REVENGE OF THE SICILIAN

Nope, still cringe-worthy. In fact they may be worse this way. These are National Enquirer titles with promises of tabloid excitement–a pregnant king’s mistress, we’ve got the pictures!!!–mini-synopses with the good parts highlighted, so going for the fancy preposition is just swanning around. And they must be good marketing–again these were seven of the top ten category sellers at Waldens–and they’re definitely better than those one-word interchangeable titles like Splendid and Ravished and Forever, but still, there’s something reductive there. There are good authors on that list and I’m wondering what they thought when they were handed those titles, although for all I know they came up with them. Nah, those were handed to them. Which made me realize, if I were writing Manhunting and What the Lady Wants now, I’d probably have ended up with The Management Consultant’s Handyman’s Summer Quickieand The Private Detective’s Runaway Heiress’s Secret.

Okay, now that I look at it, those might have been better than Manhunting and What the Lady Wants There’s a certain lure to those titles. It really is the mini-synopsis on the cover.

So Bet Me would be Wagered: The Business Seminar Leader’s Actuary’s Virtue.

I’m getting into this.

Tell Me Lies would be The Accounant’s Art Teacher’s Daughter. (Maybe I should start choosing more glamorous occupations for my characters.)

The Green Beret’s Movie Director’s Ex-Husband’s Revenge

The Supernatural Sisters’ True Loves in Captivity

The Food Columnist’s Hitman’s Wedding Surprise.

Doing my own books is boring so let’s try the classics:

The Second Sister’s Proud Mistake

Branded: The Adulterous Wife’s Not-So-Secret Baby

Really. Try this at home. It’s addictive. I’d do more but I have to get back to The Hat-Maker’s Lawyer’s Ghostly Possession and Risen: The Ancient History Professor’s Divine Roommate.

I’m warning you now, you won’t be able to stop.

So about audio books . . .

I don’t listen to mine because I can’t stand to be read to, but I know I need to sit down and do that some day. Even then, I won’t be the audience for the books, so I won’t be a good judge. I’ve talked briefly to a couple of people who are the audience and who know what they’re talking about (hello, Molly and Jill) but this is something I really need more information on. I’ve heard that stage/screen actors are better than voice-over actors, and several people have said, “Yes, this actor,” or “Not that one,” but I’ve never really asked what makes a good audio interpretation.

So I’m asking now.

What makes a good audio?