Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

This is the third in a series of Three Goddess Chats, brought to you by Krissie (aka Anne Stuart and Kristina Douglas), Lucy (Lucy March aka Lani Diane Rich), and Jenny (Jenny Crusie), who meet in a chat-room called ThreeGoddesses to talk about everything. Lucy and Jenny tend to write heroine-centered books (heroine as protagonist) like Lucy’s newest book, A Little Night Magic, in stores on January 31, while Krissie tends to go for hero-centered books, as in new series about fallen angels, The Fallen (Raziel, Demon, and Warrior, out in April 2012). So once again we got together in our Three Goddesses chat room to talk about what we know about heroines, heroes, and protagonists in general. First up: Heroines.

Jenny: What do you think is essential in a heroine?

Krissie: Hmmm. Heroines need to have an inner strength. Can’t be a dishrag. They need a certain bravery in facing life without being foolhardy or TSTL. read more >>

I was looking for something in the Argh archives and found this from 2009. It’s amazing how much this is EXACTLY WHERE I AM NOW. I never learn. Although I’m grateful because it reminded me of the notecards in Scrivener which is where I’m going now. So here’s a draft from three years ago that I never published. No idea why. I’m not deep. But you can pretty much substitute Lavender’s Blue for Maybe This Time and get exactly the post I’d have written if I’d written it today.

So I have about fifty thousand words on Always Kiss Me Goodnight and probably twice that much in notes and diagrams and research, and I’m looking at massive amounts of information and false starts and raw dialogue, plus two collages and a stack of books on ghosts, and I start to panic because I am definitely [expletive deleted] because this book has to get done. read more >>

This is the second in a series of Three Goddess Chats, brought to you by Krissie (aka Anne Stuart and Kristina Douglas), Lucy (Lucy March aka Lani Diane Rich), and Jenny (Jenny Crusie), who meet in a chat-room called ThreeGoddesses to talk about everything. Krissie has been writing supernatural romances for a long time, and now as Kristina Douglas she’s started a new series about fallen angels, The Fallen (Raziel, Demon, and Warrior, out in April 2012). Jenny came to the supernatural late with The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes (written with Krissie and Eileen Dreyer) and Dogs and Goddesses (written with Krissie and Lucy) and Wild Ride (written with Bob Mayer). Lucy’s newest book is also a supernatural romance: A Little Night Magic, in stores on January 31. This time, we got together in our Three Goddesses chat room to talk about what we’ve learned writing the things that go bump in the night. The chat has been heavily edited to cut out excursions into TV criticism, moaning about the business, and a short argument we had about French Kiss, but otherwise, this is what we said:

[Lucy and Jenny got to the chat first, so we started without Krissie]
Jenny:. So, Lucy March, what made you decide to write supernatural in A Little Night Magic?

Lucy: I wanted to stretch out, work in that fantasy space. I felt like I was treading the same water writing what I was writing. I wanted to write a first person series, with Liv as the protagonist, do some long form storytelling, but that’s not what the publisher wanted. So, I caved, because they said, “We’ll pay you,” and at heart, I’m a whore. Eventually, I want to do a long form first person series, though. read more >>

This is the first in a series of Three Goddess Chats, brought to you by Krissie (Anne Stuart), Lucy (Lucy March aka Lani Diane Rich), and Jenny (Jenny Crusie), who meet every now and then in a chat-room called ThreeGoddesses to talk about everything. Krissie doesn’t write romantic comedy so this is actually a Two-Goddess post, but she’ll be here tomorrow for the supernatural romance chat. This one is Lucy and Jenny trying to synthesize everything they learned watching romantic comedy movies for nine months for their Popcorn Dialogues podcasts, although they tend to veer off into talking about writing romance in general.

Jenny: So what have we learned from nine months of PopD, Lucy? First: character. Character, character, character.

Lucy: Character is sacred. Always.

Jenny: In a rom com, it’s because it sells why we should want these two characters to be together, and why we care desperately if they’re not. In It Happened One Night, you really want them together, especially after the scene in the motel where they pretend to be married. I think that’s key, making the reader really need for these two people to be together.

Lucy: Absolutely. And how is the humor handled. It should come from character, not from jokes. That’s a comedy with a romance tacked on. read more >>

We’re starting the new Popcorn Dialogues mystery series with The Thin Man, and I’m still discovering my way through Liz’s first murder mystery, so now is a good time to go back to the roots of Golden Age Mystery Fiction, classic mystery fiction, and see what the rules were. (We’ll be doing other forms of mystery–noir, romantic suspense, supernatural, etc–but to begin with, we’re looking at the classic form.) There are two classic rules lists, one by Ronald Knox in 1929 and the other by S.S. Van Dyne in 1928, and although times have changed and so has the mystery, there are still some keepers on there. From those lists I came up with five basic classic mystery rules:

read more >>