I am cleaning up the WIP page (see menu above) to bring it up to date (more on that later) so if there’s anything up there you want to read, some of it is about to disappear. Just wanted you to know.
My therapist, who is generally a goddess, makes me crazy by quoting Shel Silverstein’s poem about Melinda May and her damn whale. (Don’t get me started on what happened when Jamie (said therapist) made me read The Body Keeps the Score. Her reading lists are from Hell.)
Unfortunately, Jamie and Melinda May are right. The key is to achieving your goals is to keep taking little bites. (Jane also said this yesterday in the comments, which made me think of Melinda May, so she inspired this post, blame her if you don’t like me repeating the theme from yesterday.). (more…)
So it turns out that Blake Bailey, the author of the latest Phillip Roth biography, has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault along with predatory behavior when he was a public school teacher. If the accusations are true, that’s bad. The biography had been getting good reviews, but his publisher, W. W. Norton, pulled it and cancelled all future printings based on the accusations.
So here’s the question: Was that the wrong thing to do? (more…)
I think every reader picks up a book of fiction and thinks, “Tell me a story.”
Not “give me beautiful writing” or “give me the psychological profile of a character” or “describe a setting vividly” or “dazzle me with a theme.” All of those things are good and to be hoped for, but the overarching need of most readers who deliberately choose fiction is “Give me a story.”
I came to this conclusion while reading the opening page of a BookBub offering. (I learn a lot from BookBub samples.)
Never buy the five pound box of Twizzlers.
(Feel free to put any hard-learned wisdom of your own in the comments.)
I’ve been thinking about sex in romance novels lately. (This is going to ramble some. My Deep Thoughts often ramble.)
I used to get reviews that said my romances were pretty hot. I reread a couple of those books recently and compared with what’s out now, they’re barely lukewarm. That’s fine with me, but I’m wondering now what the blurring of the lines between romance and erotica means to the genre. That is, how is it redefining romance? I have no problems with erotica, but it doesn’t have the same aims as romance, any more than women’s fiction is romance-centered. I’m not even sure chick lit is romance, but then I’ve never really been sure what chick lit is. The point is, romance is the only genre that’s romance centered, so what happens to romance within the genre is important.
And I think sex is mugging it. (more…)
Jennifer Crusie is the New York Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly bestselling author and co-author of twenty-three novels, one book of literary criticism, miscellaneous articles, essays, novellas, and short stories, and the editor of three essay anthologies. She lives in a cottage in Pennsylvania, where she often stares at the ceiling and counts her blessings.
Find out more about Jenny’s published works by visiting JennyCrusie.com
Recent Comments