Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

The other half of the discovery/prompt/world-of-the-book process for me is the collage. It’s not just putting together placeholders in one picture, it’s the colors and the words and the motifs and generally finding out what happens when you put all the random visual elements of the book together to see what the juxtaposition does. Lavender’s collage isn’t done yet, but it’s changed in detail from where it was in the beginning (click to enlarge):

read more >>

Welcome to the Twelve Days of Lavender’s Blue. It’s been hell here this week and today was not a whole lot better, but we’re getting it together which means I have to get really serious about getting this book done. Well, I’ve been serious all along but Trouble Ensued and then More Trouble Ensued and then . . . But now, Trouble is just going to have to play with itself because I have a book due in . . . eleven days. The book itself is in good shape, I just have to get my head back in it. Which means two things: soundtrack and collage.

The soundtrack took a big leap forward when I realized that most of it was going to be country. Liz, the heroine, has her own theme for this book, Terri Clark’s wonderful “Bigger Windows, Bluer Skies” and there’s some more Clark in there, too–”Easy on the Eyes” and “Three Mississippi,” and I’m pretty sure that Liz’s theme for the series is “No Fear,” but the artist I’m using most is Roseanne Cash. No surprise, I’m a longtime Roseanne Cash fan, for many reasons not the least being that she’s such a storyteller in her songwriting. Plus she did “Rules of Travel” which is on my list of Top Five Albums of all Time. For “Beautiful Pain” alone I’d love her. For Lavender, I’ve got “Burn Down This Town,” “Down on Love,” “God Is In the Roses,” and “Will You Remember Me?” There’s more but they’re iffy at the moment; those are ones I’m sure of, the ones I’ve written the scenes to already. read more >>

So we’ve had the Week from Hell here, but now tonight we’re starting the Popcorn Dialogues with It Happened One Night, so nothing but good times ahead. In the meantime, here’s a post I wrote for the day that life got so crazy that I couldn’t post anything except snarls and meeps:

I live with two little girls. We are all about da cute and da bright. With that in mind, here are some Cute, Bright Things.

From Arlette’s Polka Dot Pineapple blog, instructions for felt gift bags with lots of step-by-step photos and clear directions: read more >>

Like everyone else, I’m sick and angry about what’s happening in the Gulf. Greenpeace is doing something visual about it, saying “[BP's] nice green logo doesn’t really seem to fit them too well, so we’re running a competition to find a logo that we can use to rebrand BP.” You can get more information about the contest on their website, but the Flickr slideshow of entries is already huge and sobering.
Like this one:

And this one:
read more >>

Remember how much trouble we had coming up with a title for Maybe This Time? You should have seen the hell we went through trying to get a cover. It had to say “romance” and “supernatural” and “quirky” and “fun” and “dark” . . . It had to practically babble, in other words. We got a lot of stuff that was too dark, too chick-litty, too young, too . . . well, you should see for yourself. So here are just some of the cover concepts we went through. Click on the thumbnails to see them up close:

read more >>