Jennifer Crusie | Argh Ink | Blog

I caved on the demons. But no soul-eating.

Veronica and Bob regarded each other with deep suspicion upon meeting and avoided each other after that. Milton follows Bob around like a . . . well, a puppy. I can’t keep him out of the upstairs. Bob sat with Lucy on his lap while we watched TV (actually part of our research) and she was so happy she could hardly contain herself. The other three sat on my lap: Veronica watched his every move, Wolfie fell asleep, and Milton yearned to go to him.

But most of the day, aside from a field trip, we worked. So far I have googled Etruscan deities, fortune telling machines, and the route to PA. We have come up with at least four plots and then stopped and said, “No, too complicated,” and started over again with our original premise. We have one now that has the illusion of simplicity which we will inevitably complicate up as we write it, but at least we’re starting simple. I love my heroine, Bob’s got his hero completely, we have a terrific sidekick already and some of the best bad guys of all time.

And ten hours on the road tomorrow to argue it out some more. After which we will check into a motel and argue about it in the restaurant. After which we will go to our rooms and e-mail each other to argue about it again. A full day, in other words.

But Bob is happy because after watching me flash my iPhone all day, he went to the AT&T store to get a new recharger for his phone and decided the recharger was so expensive he might as well get an iPhone. Yes, I realize the iPhone screams “Yuppie” all over it, but that’s only to people who don’t have one. If you have one, it’s a gateway to the world. I sat in the cellphone lot yesterday and went on the internet to check Bob’s flight status, read my e-mail, and then watched part of an episode of Supernatural before he called from baggage claim. And that’s not including the maps and the camera (I took 97 pictures today, none of Bob) and . . .

So the first thing Bob says after he powers his up? “It doesn’t have a voice recorder.”

He’s fighting me on part of the back story, too. Some guys you just can’t please.

And tomorrow he wants to start on the road at 8AM which is a compromise for him since he prefers to leave BMNT or whatever that acronym was. So I’m doing everything tonight, and then he can get up and make his own coffee (as usual) and empty out his own grounds (what are the chances?) and then come bang on my door to wake me up, after which I will stumble to the car and sleep until 11AM like a normal human being while he greets the rosy dawn.

But the important things are, we’ve got a terrific original idea/heart of the story, and Bob has an iPhone.

The snow melted. I went to the airport and picked up Bob and took him to iHop where I ate everything on the menu since I’d been living on nosh food while I finished up my part of Dogs and Goddesses. Then we went home and Bob did not bond with Milton although Milton ADORED him. It’s a good thing I’ve been writing with this guy for three years because he failed the Milton Test.

And then we sat in front of the fire and argued about the book we haven’t started to write yet. I ask you, a demon stealing souls? IT’S BEEN DONE. At one point, Bob brought up Predator. I said, “I never saw it.” He said, “You never saw Predator?” in the same tone of voice he’d use to say, “You’ve never bathed?” I said, “You never saw The Lady Eve.” He rolled his eyes and we went on. But even really tired, we did some good brainstorming work. I know a lot more about my character now. And his. And the antagonist. And they all have goals. They’re a little short on motivation, but by damn, they all have goals.

Tomorrow we go to the grocery, the bank, the post office, and some place for lunch, and during the entire time, we will be arguing about this book.

Just like old times.

We got slammed again and the dogs love it. I’m praying that it melts before Tuesday afternoon when I have to pick up somebody at the airport. It’s supposed to be 46 then. Fingers crossed.

Well, southern Ohio got hit with a load of snow–Krissie in Vermont is sneering–and I’m trapped in my house again. I freaked because I had to get out to go north to the Ohio Valley Romance Writers meeting tomorrow (Saturday), but then the brilliant Amy Foley e-mailed and said, “Six to twelve inches, let’s not kill anybody on the road,” and we have an alternate plan: She’s going to put a homework assignment from me on the OVRWA website and then Sunday night I’ll meet with people in the OVRWA chat room to answer any questions about the homework. Then at the April OVRWA meeting, we’ll talk through the central idea of the novel and how to open it. I don’t have the URL or times yet, I’ll post that here later, but I wanted to get this up so that people who were planning on making a long drive wouldn’t start out tomorrow (Saturday).

Stay home! Go to the OVRWA website! Drink hot chocolate and do your homework!

How much snow did we get? These pictures don’t show much because they’re taken in a place partially shielded by the deck . . .

. . . but Veronica and Milton are enjoying it immensely.

OVRWA People: See you in April!

I’ve been obsessed with this Liz Danger stuff, probably because I’m at the point in my real book where I want to club it over the head and make it go away, but I can’t let go of it until it’s done. I’d almost rather clean the house than work on it. Almost. Instead my head keeps going to designing faux covers for the books written by a character I may never write a novel for (four books down the line, five if you count the one I’m slogging through now). But it’s all been an excellent exercise is building character, both Liz Danger and Rosie the writer.

I already knew the basic things about Rosie and the VERY rough outline of her plot, and I knew she’d have a website. So I asked Mollie for a cheap website building program to use just for brainstorming and she said, “You already have one. It comes with your Mac.” And there it was: iWeb. The lovely thing about programs like this is that they give you templates, in the case of iWeb, twenty-six templates. It’s like collage: you go through and say, “No, that’s not Rosie, that’s not Rosie,” and end up with the one that fits. In Rosie’s case, the comic book template leaped out and said, “Hi, Rosie would love me.” Building her home page and her bio page really gave me her public persona; it’s the shield she puts up for the world. And of course it fits Liz Danger, too.

The big surprise has been how figuring out the titles and covers and now the blurb copy for those books gives me more of Rosie. The Liz books are tongue-in-cheek, over the top, first person mysteries about a woman who, in the beginning books, does a Modesty Blaise and sleeps with a different guy in each story as she solves crime! But as I skipped around in the series figuring out plots based on the titles, I realized that Liz was going to need best friends and love interests and other commonalities that keep people coming back for a series. Knowing readers, they’d attach to the first guy Liz slept with, and Rosie would hate that and try to keep switching Liz’s guys and finally give in, but only when the readers started asking for a second love interest they liked. Then she’d alternate those guys in a couple of books along with new men. The books with the new men wouldn’t be as popular and she’d finally give in. Rosie also gives Liz a best friend, Jill, who’s in trouble in the first one because Jill’s problem gives Liz a reason to investigate a murder. I didn’t know how our middle-class Liz was going to mix with blue bloods, so I gave her a rich former college roommate named Molly Blue who called on Liz when she had trust fund trouble. And then I started doing the blurbs and realized that I will inevitably do turning points for these stories because they’re starting to grow in my head.

The best thing about them is that Rosie writes them, not me, so any writing inhibitions I’d have are gone. Rosie has no writing inhibitions. She and Liz just swing for the fences. So while I’ll be footling around with these things for years, literally, they’ve really already accomplished what I needed: They’ve given me Liz and through her Rosie. And when I go to write Rosie’s story, I’ll know who she is because I know what she writes and how she writes it and why she writes it.

So it looks like I’ve just been playing around–okay, I have been playing around–but it’s the fastest I’ve ever gotten a character.

Here’s a rough draft of the first of the blurbs:

I haven’t had so much fun writing since we started Dogs and Goddesses. And now I must go finish Dogs and Goddesses.

Or clean the house.