Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

Maybe This Time has been in stores twenty-four hours now, and yet my life has not changed. Oh, well, I like my life the way it is anyway. But Jennifer Weiner did a great interview with me–she’s so smart–over on her blog. And the book cover’s still beautiful:
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Gawker recently ran a bit on Twitter shorthand that for the most part was just plain internet shorthand, and commenter J. Henry Waugh added a link to the Onion shorthand guide (posted after the jump because some of it is offensive which means I love it but you might just want to pass it by). All of which made me think: why doesn’t Argh have shorthand? Like NM (No Meeping) or IOAH (I’m On A Horse). There are probably a million catchphrases that have developed naturally here over the years–okay, a dozen maybe–so all we have to do is identify them and reduce them to acronyms like WTF (Why The Face [I thought that was the funniest line in the Modern Family pilot]). And to inspire you, here’s the Onion list:
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So I’ve been kind of all over the place this summer (you may have noticed the “12 Days of Lavender” only lasted eight days), and I thought I should tell you why.

Moving:
When I found out Lani was moving in, I cleared out the third floor and renovated it into an apartment for her and the girls. It made good sense from a real estate point of view–there was a lot of wasted space up there–but it meant that everything I’d had stored up there, fifty years of stuff in three different rooms, went down to the first floor in stacks. A year passed and I decided for many reasons to move from the second floor (main floor) to the first floor (the dachshunds shouldn’t be climbing stairs, I wanted a smaller space for my stuff, we could share the second floor as community space with the big kitchen, living room, and dining room, my old master suite would make a great guest suite, etc.). Then I went downstairs and realized the scope of my folly: fifty years of stuff down there. I moved down anyway, read more >>

So my life is a little hectic lately and I’m complete failing at the 12 days thing although I am gangbusters on getting the MTT promo together and working the Popcorn Dialogues (tomorrow night: Ninotchka, which Lani hasn’t seen and I’ve forgotten so that should be interesting) so when Molly and Jill reminded me that we’d talked about a survey of gothic romance, of course I said, “Hell yes, I’d love to do that.” Yes, like the PopD blog, only on Cherry Forums and on books not movies and run as a bookclub. This wouldn’t be an academic study of the gothic, although we’d end up doing some of that, it’d be an analysis from a reader/writer point of view: what makes the gothic powerful, what do readers respond to in it, how has it evolved as readership has changed, etc. Also, some side discussions about the marriage of romance and horror with nods to Buffy, because, that’s why. One book a month for a year. We’re still in discussions with the book club mods about all of this so it’s just a lets-put-on-a-show-in-the-barn project for right now, but the mods are pros and I think this is going to work out just fine.

This was my first pass at the reading list and here’s some good news: The first seven are available for free on Project Gutenberg, so many thanks to the very good people there: read more >>