http://www.arghink.com More than you ever wanted to hear from Jenny Crusie. Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:42:33 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Sarah Palin resigned from her governorship about six hours ago, effectively dumping the news in the dead zone of Friday night before the fourth of July. I will leave it to others to determine the political implications of that; what fascinates me is the speculation her announcement is generating. ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/07/03/theres-a-story-there/ So I am back at work on AKMG, and revising what I've written and thinking about the Wild Ride copy edit (which went to Bob yesterday, so now it's his nightmare) all of that has made me think about punctuation. I used to be an English teacher, which meant ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/07/01/your-semi-colon-aint-like-mine-maybe/ You have to go see this wonderful blog, written by Pam Epstein who's writing her dissertation on marriage, drawing on personal ads from mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers. The ads are fascinating--there's a novel in just about every one of them--and the discussion is great, too. ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/06/29/good-blog-advertising-for-love/ So Milton and Veronica and Wolf were all screaming at the door onto the screened porch this afternoon, and I went down to see what was up, and there were three large birds in the porch. (The doors were open because little birds kept getting in and then beating themselves ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/06/22/bird-help/ You know, when I started getting all the annoyed comments on the Copy Editor rant post, I figured some of them were coming from the copy editing class. Then a pal told me she'd forwarded the URL to a copy editor listserve, which I think is great. Any ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/06/20/copy-editor-revenge/ A friend of mine--you all know Rox, right, huge celebrity on Ravelry?--posted on a list we're on this list of pseudonym generators (we have a mutual friend who's choosing one now). (Rox says she found it on another web site that had found it on another website, but I'm ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/06/19/pseudonym-pservice/ So I'm working on the copy edits for Wild Ride, and the copy editor is annoying me. For one thing, she loves m-dashes. It's bad enough that she deletes my ellipses and puts in dashes--they're not the same thing, okay?-- but she also takes out my ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/06/18/copy-editor-rant/ You know, you could do this. Believe me, it wasn't hard. The graph from the pig (see below) was one square to one inch, and most suitcases are standard sizes, so it would probably be in proportion to your suitcase, although if you have pockets on the outside ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/06/12/fix-the-pig-fourth-day/ We're getting close to the end now. I need to go over (and over and over) the black Sharpie and decide if I want to add the lettering or not. I tried to keep this close to the drawing (which, by the way, was one inch to one ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/06/09/fix-the-pig-third-day/ I didn't say the days were going to be consecutive, did I? No. So back to the pig. Previously on Argh: My pal Krissie has the ugliest suitcase on the planet, a dingy pink monstrosity she affectionately calls the Pig. We’ve travelled all over the world with the Pig, and ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/06/03/fix-the-pig-second-day/ One of the worst things about being a professional writer is that you have to write synopses so that people know what your book is about before they act on it. I can sell without synopses now, but I still have to write them for catalog copy so booksellers ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/05/30/story-in-four/ When Lani was coming to visit a few weeks back, I was cleaning the kitchen and notice that my fridge kind of . . . smelled. I took everything out, and it was all fresh, so I scrubbed the whole thing down with disinfectant cleaner, put my groceries ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/05/25/frigidaire-knows-the-real-you/ A long time ago, I read a book called Chancing It, about taking risks, that had a big impact on the way I made decisions. Then I read a book called We the Lonely People that helped me codify the things I'd been writing about community. Then ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/05/19/im-a-fan-of-ralphs/ Jen, our fabulous editor, has asked for a prequel to Wild Ride to be used as a teaser on the SMP website. She said it didn't have to be very long, but as you may have gathered during the convulsions we went through writing the novel, the back story ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/05/19/wild-ride-the-prequel-argh/ Worth1000.com has a display of contest entries that put classic two-dimensional cartoon characters seamlessly into classic paintings. Not surprisingly, Dali and Picasso get quite a workout. It's fun to flip through all the entries, but the successful ones go beyond fun; they make you look at both the ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/05/13/new-art-in-old-paintings/ Just go see it. It's amazing. http://www.arghink.com/2009/05/12/review-star-trek/ You probably thought I was lounging around while Argh and the website were down. Ha. Among other things, the construction guys putting in a new bedroom in the attic stepped through the rafters and put a hole in my bathroom ceiling. I was not happy, but they ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/05/09/three-feet-through-the-ceilings/ We've been talking about the look and the feel of the new place, so I thought you might like to know how we got here. We started in February using a project center that Joelle set up that was very efficient and really easy to use. She ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/05/06/more-ta-da/ So we spruced the place up a bit. Okay, a lot. Joelle Reeder of Moxie Design Studios took my incoherent visual suggestions and Mollie's very clear web design suggestions and came up with something that was vastly better than either one of us could have imagined. So all our ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/05/05/ta-da/ The beta version of the new website is going up (may be up if there's a monkey at the top of this page) and Mollie is switching servers, so the blog may be down for short periods of time while we put up the new version, which will be in ... http://www.arghink.com/2009/04/17/change-is-good/