Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

As we’re gearing up to start the PopD Mystery series (and we’re all sick right now, so take “gearing up” with a grain of salt), it’s a good time to talk about what we’re going to do and invite comments and suggestions, starting with our definition of “mystery.”

For the purposes of PopD, a mystery is a story where the goal of the protagonist is to solve a crime, preferably murder. The protagonist thereby becomes the detective even if he or she is not a private eye or on the police force. If it detects and solves crime, it’s a detective. This usually means that the antagonist is the criminal which makes plot analysis so much easier than in a rom com. It also makes sense because mysteries are plot-centric while romcoms are character-centric. So for once the good-guy/bad-guy description of protagonist/antagonist is going to work. Three cheers for a just society. read more >>

Edited to add: And the lightning round is over. You guys move swiftly. However Mollie really does want to clean out the inventory so we’ll be doing this again. No idea when yet, but soon. Moll wants a clean house.

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Mollie’s put up a form to give away copies of the trade pb of The Cinderella Deal to the first five people with US addresses who fill out this form: read more >>

So we’re getting ready to start PopD up again, drawing on all the work you did in coming up with the mystery movie list several months ago, but we’re changing a few things. (This is cross-posted on PopD, too.)

First, we’re abandoning the chat-during-the-movie. It was too distracting for us and we ended up doing less-than-stellar analysis because we weren’t watching for content. That means that you can watch the movies any time you want (we’ll post the entire list ahead of time).
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So I woke up late today, read my e-mail, and found out that my interview with Sarah Wendell has provoked some controversy which means it’s only a matter of time before somebody posts somewhere that I did it on purpose to improve page views. This is because the internet is full of conspiracy theorists, conclusion jumpers, and general all round shallow thinkers, none of whom are us. (That’s a joke. I have to say that here because I’m going to get flamed all over the internet about five minutes after I post this, so it’s good to point out the jokes to the humor-impaired. Yes, that’s mean. New here, are you?) read more >>

Steve Jobs died today. I’ve been pretty blatant about my passion for all things Mac. It started with my first Mac, a MacPlus back in the mid-eighties, the first machine I ever drew on, and continued with the laptops that made writing stories possible for me. I didn’t write fiction until I found the Mac, and now I can’t imagine writing on anything but a Mac. The iPhone was the first phone that made sense to me. The iPad freed me from finding an internet connection on the road. Steve Jobs and his design team have informed and enhanced my professional life for twenty-five years. I usually don’t care deeply when a public figure dies aside from a general human regret, but Jobs’s death is different. Something exciting is gone from the world today. He made the world a better place because of the way he made things. His insistance on excellence made excellence a benchmark. In today’s world, that’s pretty remarkable. read more >>