Here’s the inside stuff if that helps (click to enlarge):

COLUMBUS, OH
Tuesday, Sept. 7th 7:00 PM
BARNES & NOBLE
1739 Olentangy River Road
Columbus, OH 43212

DAYTON, OH
Wednesday, Sept. 8th 7:00 PM
BOOKS & CO.
350 E. Stroop Rd.
Dayton, OH 45429

CINCINNATI, OH
Thursday Sept 9, 7:00 PM
JOSEPH BETH BOOKSELLERS
2692 Madison Rd.
Cincinnati, OH 45208

LEXINGTON, KY
Tuesday, September 14th, 7:00 PM
JOSEPH BETH BOOKSELLERS
161 Lexington Green Circle
Lexington, KY 40503

CHICAGO, IL
Monday, September 20th, 7:00 PM
ANDERSON’S BOOKSHOP
123 W. Jefferson St.
Naperville, IL 60540

MILWAUKEE, WI
Tuesday, September 21st, 7:00 PM
Next Chapter Bookshop
10976 N. Port Washington Road
Mequon, Wisconsin • 53092

PITTSBURGH, PA
Friday, Sept. 24th, 7PM
Mystery Lovers Bookshop
514 Allegheny River Boulevard
Oakmont, PA 15139

Library Journal:

“Andromeda Miller is finally ready to get over her ex-husband, North Archer, and marry again, when he asks her for one last favor. He’s been appointed guardian to two children and can’t seem to keep a nanny—the house the children inherited is supposedly haunted, and the children are, well, odd, causing nannies to flee. Andie agrees to live with the children and tutor them for one month to get them back on track to move in with North and return to school. She discovers that the children aren’t really all that strange, but the house may indeed be inhabited by several ghosts. There are other complications—a crazy, hostile housekeeper; a ghost-hunting TV reporter; and North’s still strong feelings for Andie.
VERDICT: Fans waiting for Crusie to return to her original style of sassy, witty romances after her collaborations with action writer Bob Mayer (Wild Ride) might be a little disappointed with this foray into the paranormal, but her sense of humor and knack for fun characters are all here.” [150,000-copy first printing.]—Rebecca Vnuk, Forest Park, IL

Also, I love Ellen Degeneres.

Now I just have to figure out how to use “I’m on a horse” in real life.

Top Pick, ****1/2 HOT: “After six years without a solo project, Crusie roars back onto the scen with a marvelous new tale that inclueds her patented brand of humor and human foibles. Crusie takes lucky readers into a gothic and ghostly adventure set in 1992, filled with the offbeat and the wacky. Nevertheless, the emotions ring true as this indomitable heroine fights for the children–and second chances. Crusie is brilliant as always and this novel is well worth the wait.” Jill M. Smith

You know, I wouldn’t have labeled this hot. But what do I know. Thank you, Romantic Times.

There’ll be a picture of the cover to the left, and on the right we’ll have the title, the pub date, the tagline, and one line from a review.

Under that will be “The Story” which will be a paragraph or so describing the story, more of a teaser than a synopsis.

Under that will be a link to the first chapter.

Under that will be The Story Behind the Story, a one paragraph bit on writing the book.

And under that will be links to the “More Stuff” part of the website to specific pages that showcase details about the book, to blog posts from here on Argh that talked about the book, and to interviews and other info about the book on the web. The tentative topic list for the More Stuff section is:

Animals
Collages (Paper-and-Glue and Computer)
Covers (North American and Foreign)
Lists
Objects of Interest
Quotations and Allusions (Books and Movies)
Recipes
Reader’s Guides (for Book Clubs) (Warning: Contains spoilers).
Reviews
Settings (Photos, Maps, and Floorplans)
Soundtracks
Research Sources (Secondary Bibliography)
Titles
Very Old Stuff

We’re still pondering the Buy buttons, but I’m leaning toward them because the poll votes were so overwhelmingly in their favor and because I’d want them on another author’s site. We’d have to have Amazon, B&N, Borders, but at least one independent should be on there, I think. Books & Co. doesn’t have a buy link on their website, but Joseph Beth does. I’ll have to call both and check to make sure that’ll work. Four choices should do it, right? Small buttons?

Really trying to get this into shape before the book comes out, but this novel I have to write keeps getting in the way. Argh.

The only unqualified successes we’ve had so far have been It Happened One Night and His Girl Friday (the Popcorn Ratings Page has ratings for all seven; podcasts for all seven explaining how we got there are up under “Show Notes” for each movie) although Bringing Up Baby was so strong on comedy and writing that it ended up at four pops in spite of the very flawed romance. But I have high hopes for Hepburn/Tracy. For one thing, Tracy couldn’t play a dumb, meepy hero if he tried. For another, it really is romance-centered. And then there’s Katharine Hepburn. Really, fingers crossed.

If you want to play along, we start the movie at seven Eastern, cued to the beginning of the studio logo (Columbia Lady, MGM Lion) and then tweet during it at #PopD. Podcast goes up usually by Saturday afternoon, although this week we are having a special Saturday lunch and movie with Sweetness and Light because they are going on vacation with their grandparents (YAY) for a month (YAY) so we’re seeing Despicable Me (YAY) and the podcast may be late going up. I’ll let you know how Despicable Me plays as a romantic comedy later. Mostly I just want to see minions.

Except the hero’s name is Vince and there’s a dachshund named Veronica. Lotta V’s there. So, two questions:

1. Is that too many V’s? Will having Liz thinking about Vince and Vi be too confusing. Vi and Veronica?

2. If so, what other decent, non-nuts name that goes with Blue can the kid have? I really like Vi, but I recognize that reader clarity is more important than my likes. The only thing I can come up with is Periwinkle, and her mom calls her Peri, but that’s not exactly a normal name.

Help. Thank you.

And I said, “Oh, dear god, not that pink. Walter would pee in that suitcase, that’s how much he’d hate it.” (Did I mention my Walter was a dachshund? But the dachshund-in-the-suitcase picture was too dark. Argh.)

So it’s going to be one of the ones below. I don’t know which one. I’ll probably be as surprised as you are in November, although I’m grateful to Bantam for working so hard on this and especially for letting me write Walter in. In living color, evidently.

Publishing. Where it helps to be odd before you start working here because that way the trip to crazy is shorter.

Edited to add:
Final cover:

JC: So you came in from the cold of your ICE books, and now you’re writing hot historicals about rakes and virgins. How did that happen?

AS: I adore rakes and virgins, though unfortunately Elinor is no longer a virgin when she runs afoul of my decadent hero. In a perfect world I would write dark romantic suspense and lighter historicals (and this is lighter than the ICE books — Rohan only kills two people and both of them are in a duel). I started out writing gothics, then regencies so I have a weakness for other time periods, and I love love love historicals.

JC: Why? You’d have to pull me through a hedge backwards to make me do all that research. Plus, they talk funny. What’s the draw of days gone by?

AS: Ah, it’s not research if you want to read about it or know the stuff already. You’d never worry about writing a character who was an artist. You know that stuff. As for the draw, it’s the appeal of different rules, different lives, different times. Whether things are a matter of life and death, as in the medieval period, or social ostracism, in the Regency or Victorian period, it’s not something we tend to worry about. The men are exotic simply because they come from a different time, and everything is totally divorced from the shit we have to go through daily.

JC: The center of the series is the Hellfire Club (and Tearoom). Why did you pick something so scandalous as the thing that ties your series heroes together? Because it’s so not LIKE you to be scandalous.

AS: Well of course I picked something scandalous, though to keep nitpickers at bay I call the Hellfire Club the Heavenly Host. I first created that variation in an ancient Regency, LORD SATAN’S BRIDE, so I continued with it, going a bit over the top but keeping to the truth of it. The Hellfire Club didn’t sacrifice babies, etc. They were just a bunch of bored aristocrats playing dress-up and having orgies. Since some of the dress up involved nun’s habits of course it spoke to me. But I threw in the phalllus-shaped goblet (still exists, probably on view in the Hellfire Caves Tearoom, a real tearoom). Next trip to England I need my picture taken by that sign.

JC: Maybe Elinor started the tea room. Tell me more about Elinor, the heroine of Ruthless (although it’s really a shame her name isn’t Ruth).

AS: if she were Ruth she wouldn’t be in it, coz it’s Ruthless. My heroine is Elinor Harriman, early twenties, no great beauty. Her once beautiful, narcissistic mother is in the last stages of syphilis, her beautiful younger sister is like catnip to every male, they have a coachman but no coach and a cook with very little food, and they live on the edge of the slums of Paris, with the money running out. Elinor will do anything to protect her family, and has in the past, when her mother sold her virginity when she was seventeen. She’s certain Rohan wants her beautiful sister and is determined to keep her safe, and when it becomes apparent that he wants her she’s determined not to fall under his spell. Easier said than done. He’s pretty damned luscious. As for Elinor, serving tea to the wicked members of the Heavenly Host is just the sort of thing she’d do.

JC: Enough about men. Why a series? Do you like writing them? What does a series do that stand alone books don’t?

AS: I never used to like series, either to read or to write. If I read something out of order, as I invariably did, I felt like I was at a party where everyone knew each other but I knew nobody. However, I fell into it with the ICE series, which started as a stand-alone, and I became quite entranced with creating a world and then exploring it from different characters’ viewpoints. I also loved the chance of seeing how my previous couples were doing now that normal life had returned. This series is generational. Rohan, his son, and his son’s daughter, so I get to play with three very different historical periods, while still living with the Heavenly Host and the wicked Rohans.

JC: Hot Rakes Through the Ages? Works for me. But as I said, enough about men. What’s your favorite thing about Ruthless?

AS: Francis Rohan. I’m completely in love with him. He’s mad, bad and dangerous to know, wicked and shattered and worthy of redemption, and he’s got mad skills (is it skillz?) in bed. What’s not to love? Plus he can be taught – Elinor gets him to behave, though he’s reluctant.

JC: Okay, let’s review: ENOUGH ABOUT MEN. Give me a BRIEF (one sentence) description of the rest of the books in the series, and lets talk about some heroines here, okay? Sheesh.

AS: RECKLESS is the story of Miss Charlotte Spenser, curious spinster and best friend of the scandalous Lady Whitmore, who attends a meeting of the Heavenly Host in disguise and runs afoul of her longtime crush, the charmingly wicked Adrian Rohan, who proceeds to deflower her most thoroughly, then finds he can’t get enough of her when they return t London. .
And BREATHLESS is classic Beauty and the Beast. The beauty is Miranda Rohan, headstrong and socially ruined daughter of Adrian and Charlotte, and the beast is a scarred, manipulative, vengeful man known as the Scorpion, who finds Miranda to be the perfect combination of irresistible beauty and instrument of revenge against her older brother. Kidnapping, forced marriage and fabulous sex ensue. The only attempted murder is when Miranda bashes the hero on the head with an old oar.
Yeah, not one sentence. Have you ever known me to be brief?

JC: It was worth a shot. So that’s Ruthless on August 1, Reckless on Sept. 1, and Breathless on Oct. 1. Good. No waiting. Now what’s in the future? Historical romance or romantic suspense, or something completely different?

AS: Well, something completely different is already written, but that’s coming out in disguise so people will have to guess.

JC: In disguise? It’s coming out as a French maid? Explain, please.

AS: A mysterious new name that I’m not allowed to talk about.

JC: Okay then. So after the French maid, there’s . . .

AS: There’s another Rohan book, plus I’ve got a steampunk/gaslight romance series I’m playing with, not to mention a killer romantic suspense idea. Mira has nixed the idea of more ICE books, but my imagination is boundless. I’ve got a million things I want to write, including a fairy tale book with you and Lani, where, believe it or not, I wouldn’t do Beauty and the Beast, but Cinderella in love with the wicked vizier. But we’ve all got too much work right now. Our time will come.

JC: Yes, it will because I need to write Red Riding Hood and Lani’s Rapunzel falls for Robert Downey Jr. But first . . . THE ROHANS! Check out the cool cover (click on the image and you can see it bigger (no comments, Krissie). And also there’s a FREE DOWNLOAD. You can get it for Adobe, Microsoft and Mobipocket here; for Kindle here; and for Nook here. Because Anne Stuart loves you, that’s why.

I tend to be a binge-writer. In the beginning I jump right in, write a few chapters and then figure I’ve got a good start, now I can play. So in general I shop, I quilt, I wander in and out of my office and my manuscript for the next month or so, writing a chapter here and a chapter there. Then the deadline looms closer, and I work harder, getting to the big turning point where everything explodes and the final act of the book takes place, usually taking about 50 to 75 pages. I always tend to do those in one swell foop, quite often packing up my computer and heading for a motel so no one will bother me.

I tend to be much more of an intuitive writer than Jenny is. She’s all about the left-brain, revise till it’s perfect, beats and TPs. I only go there when I’m having trouble with the mss. Most of the time my pacing is instinctive, and while it’s not as pitch-perfect as Jenny’s, it works for me. When Jenny finishes a draft the work’s just starting. When I finish it the rest is a piece of cake.

So RUTHLESS, my first historical in a few years, was due in a week, I had to deflower the heroine, kill her initial abuser, more sex, escape to England, bogus marriage and a cliff-side confrontation where, spoiler alert, the bad guy dies and the hero and heroine live happily ever after. I could go to a hotel, when I realized, oh joy, oh, rapture, that I could pack up and go stay with Jenny and Lani in the magic house in the woods. They would leave me alone in the living room to look out over the Ohio River and write, they would feed me, I’d have dogs to cuddle and Steak ‘n Shake to indulge in. And the airfare would be cheaper than the hotel.

So off I went. I turned the recliner around to face the river, watched the water flow by and wrote a ridiculous amount, because of course more things ended up having to happen in the book than I realized. It was about 120 pages (new courier double-spaced, but still) … and whenever I emerged I got to play with Jenny and Lani and Sweetness and Light, and Wolfie and Milton and Veronica and Lyle and Mona. Sheer heaven!

The only downside was when Lyle decided to attempt ritual suicide by stealing my empty package of Whole-Grain goldfish and dive in headfirst. We found him in the basement, the bag around his head, sweaty and exhausted but happy from eating every last crumb and then breathing in the fumes. We removed the bag from and decided to go with the giant economy side box of goldfish in the future, plus keep a closer eye on Lyle.

When I finished it was Halloween, and Lani had taken the girls out to trick or treat (I politely won’t mention that she closed the car door on Light’s finger). Jenny and I went to Olive Garden to celebrate (hey, we know how to party!) and then I had to slog my way back to Vermont and revisions, with Jenny and Lani consumed with jealousy that I got to type “the end.” Actually I don’t type “the end,” I just stop, but you know what I mean. Anyway, jealous as they were, they said I could come back any time, which of course I did, but that’s another book, written under another name, and another story.

RUTHLESS is everything an Anne Stuart historical should be. A dark, decadent, deliciously elegant hero who thinks he’s seen and done it all, Francis Rohan survived Culloden to live in exile in France. He’s gotten to the point where orgies bore him and his dissolute playmates are a drag, when who should be thrust into his life but the upright, proper Elinor Harriman barging in, searching for her mother. Once he has his hands on such a charming plaything, how could he let her go? Particularly when he makes the mistake of falling in love with her, try as he might to resist her. For her part, Elinor simply wants to protect her beautiful younger sister and keep her ragtag family together and safe. She has no time for Rohan’s games, even if she finds them irresistible. Romance, adventure, obsession, redemption, lovely sex and a happy ending. What more could you ask for?

Choose Your Weapon Writing Exercise Contest

The Preamble: “In books and in life, choice of weapons often differ depending on if you’re a man or a woman … a woman who picks up a frying pan or a lid or a hall rail is something I understand …”

The Task (thanks to Forest Jane):
. Write 150 – 200 words (a mini scene) showing your hero or heroine using that object to defend herself or kill someone.
. Post in the Choose Your Weapon Writing Exercise Contest Thread in the Writing Craft forum by August 1.
. Voting will take place the following week. (We’re not sure how yet.)
Prizes
In addition to being declared a Cherry Winner, Jenny has generously offered an ARC of Maybe This Time for the runner up, and a hardcover copy of Maybe this Time to the winner. The hardcover copy should arrive slightly before the release date, but no guarantees.

Have fun unleashing your inner killer!

Go here to learn more and to enter.

In the meantime, here’s that list of books you were asking for (click on the image to get a full screen chart). They’re all in order, but most of the category novels don’t have dates on them because I can’t find them yet. They used to be on the site but they disappeared in the remodel.

Let me know if I’ve left anything out. I did that fairly late last night.

Category novels from Harlequin are in red, from Bantam in yellow. Solo single titles are in blue, collaborative single titles in green. Dates are under the titles. There weren’t that many crossover characters, but I think I got them all.

See? Ask and ye shall get a nice Curio chart.

And tonight, Born Yesterday.

Cover
Title
Tagline
Blurb
The Story
Notes and Stuff/Book Notes: interviews, back story, character note, animal note, music note, movie note, prop note (china, juke boxes, etc.), reader letter for reissue, just a lot of stuff that needs to be organized better
Praise and Reviews
Chapter One

Each book on the Crusie-Mayer site has:

Cover
Blurb
Reviews
Story
People
Places
Miscellaneous stuff that needs to be organized better (mythology, outtakes, Cranky Agnes columns)
Readers Guide
Chapter One (and in the case of Wild Ride, the prequel

So what I’m thinking is, we go with:

Cover
Tagline
One review
The story
The story behind the story (how I came to write it) OR Reader letter
Some new category for whatever it is that was interesting in the story–art deco china, the dog, the juke box, whatever
Links to interviews, movie lists elsewhere on the site, soundtrack lists elsewhere on the site, etc.
Chapter One (and any prequel short stories)
Reader’s Guide

What do you think? Keeping in my mind we’re trying to keep this short, what you delete? Would you keep the elements in this order? Is there anything you’d like on the page that isn’t listed above? Speak now because I’m only doing this once, kids.

But over there is another book. It’s winking at me. It has a taut plot line and perky characters. It’s flexing its motifs and batting its subplots at me. I want it like I’ve never wanted any other book before.

But I made a commitment. I signed a piece of paper. I said, “I will be with you to the end.” It wouldn’t be fair to cheat on the book I’m in now. I loved it once. I wanted it desperately while I was writing the last book. “It’s not you,” I want to say to it. “It’s me.” And I drag myself back to it, yearning for the thrill of the new, stuck with the commitment to the old.

Maybe if I throw something new in the mix we can recapture that first passion. “How about a cat?” I say to it and it recoils. Some stories just aren’t cat stories, I understand that, but now it’s sitting in my computer muttering and casting me dark moments. I can’t have dark moments in this, it’s a comedy. You’d think I’d asked it to try an aardvark. “Lots of books have cats in them,” I tell it, but I know the trust is broken.

Meanwhile that other story would be all over a cat. I can tell. It’s got that look in its eye.

Serial monogamy is a lot harder in writing than it is in real life.

Then there are characters who compel you because you don’t understand them at all.

Sylvie Woodruff falls squarely into the second camp – I knew I wanted to write about a politician’s wife, the kind of woman who’d stand stoically by her man while he gave a press conference confessing to some manner of bad behavior, because she knew that her place – her job – was to be at his side.

I knew I wanted to write about Sylvie, and I started imagining her specifics – where she’d gone to school, what her family was like – but it took me a while for me to get her voice, and her motivations, because she’s very different than I am. But I was fascinated by the questions her character raised: what kind of woman would choose to be the power behind the throne, instead of a power in her own right, with all the risks that implies? Are there women who choose to be good wives instead of good mothers, and what are the consequences of that choice? What do you do when your personal life and your work are so entangled that when one piece falls apart, the whole tower crumbles? And what do you do in the wake of that kind of disaster?

Jenny:
There’s a great short scene toward the middle of Fly Away Home where a lone reporter stops Sylvie and asks her why she did what she did (being deliberately vague here because I don’t want to commit spoilers). Sylvie’s answer is beautifully brief, but it encapsulates the conundrum that all of those political wives were faced with, the choice between personal pride and family. I thought Sylvie’s choice was interesting (and a good one for the start of her arc) but I was also with the reporter. Are you divided on that choice as I am? Since that choice of personal vs family pretty much fuels all three POV characters’ journeys, is that the central thing you wanted to explore in this book?

Jen:
Public versus private, family life versus public life were absolutely big themes, and, for Sylvie, the question that young woman poses is unanswerable in that there’s no right thing she can say, no answer that will satisfy. That was a tough scene to write because my heart was with both characters – the poor reporter, who feels that she’s owed not just an answer but a certain kind of behavior from a woman who’s had Sylvie’s advantages, and Sylvie, who knows that there’s nothing she can say that will satisfy.

Jenny:
Sylvie’s older daughter, Diana makes some, uh, interesting choices in Fly Away Home. She’s probably the least sympathetic character with her condemnation of addiction in others while she’s being dragged under by her own obsession, but she’s completely understandable; you never think, “Why did she do that?” and most of the time, I was thinking I might be making the same choices, too. Was it difficult to make her somebody that readers could relate to, given her prickliness and her very high standards (among other things)?

Jen:
Oh, I do like writing about a good villain, or a good unsympathetic character who’s undone by her own choices and toppled from her pedestal!

I think that Diana, harsh as she is to her husband, and the world around her, is harshest on herself – she holds herself to impossibly high standards, gives herself crazy lists and deadlines and then, suddenly, after she’s sworn off the world of sex and passion, finds herself undone by her own appetites.

Because FLY AWAY HOME is a story about women remaking themselves in the wake of a disaster, I wanted to have Diana fall, and fall hard, to lose everything that she believed made her who she was – her job, her home, her tight grip on herself. Once all that is gone, she’s able to be a little gentler with herself – a better person, a better friend to Gary, a better Mom. I hope readers will be able to relate to her, detestable though she may be. I mean, “step away from the blog and go for a jog?” Who says stuff like that?

Jenny:
Sylvie’s younger daughter, Lizzie, is much easier to like because she’s so much more easy-going and loving, but she has her own demons, too. Why did you choose an addiction/recovery story for her?

Jen:
I’d been reading a lot of memoirs about addiction – for some reason, the Times is, ahem, addicted to them, and feels it necessary to review every book about drugs and recovery written by a white man of a certain age.

One of the books I read was called THE ADDICT. It wasn’t written by an addict, but by a doctor who treated them, but one of his patients really stuck with me. She was a young woman, attractive, intelligent, upper-middle-class background, stable, married parents, but she’d just never felt like she fit into the world, and she started swiping painkillers to cope with those feelings.

Jenny:
I loved Selma. (Well, who wouldn’t?) With her in the mix and on the scene, you have three generations of mothers in this book, all of whom are making their own mistakes and then trying to make up for them. How important are mothers to your work (I know, I know they’re important, but I want to hear you talk about it)? You wrote your first book before your babies were born; how has your writing about mothers changed since you became a mom?

Jen:
I think I’m always going to be interested in the choices women have – whether, and when to marry and have children; how to balance work and children, how our choices are shaped by our own mothers and our experiences being mothered. GOOD IN BED, one of my pre-baby books, was very much a story about Cannie and her mother, and IN HER SHOES was about two girls struggling toward adulthood in the wake of a mother’s absence. Now that I’m a mom myself, I think maybe I’m a little more…flexible? Forgiving? Something like that…about the choices that women and mothers make. I think that even though there are blogs and books and first-person essays about the everyday exhaustion and dreariness and frustration of motherhood, the prevailing cultural view is still that motherhood comes with this rose-tinged blissful glow. In fact, I think, it’s much more complicated than that, a much more fraught and ambivalent undertaking that entails saying goodbye to many of the things that made up your single-girl life. So yes, the moment of becoming a mother (and understanding and forgiving your own mother) is something I’m very interested in continuing to explore.

Jenny:
Milo was an interesting choice: In a book about women, you made the only child not just male, but detached and repressed. In that, he’s an interesting bookend to Selma, his great-grandmother, whose family thinks she could use some detachment and repression. Did you see that as symbolic of how the family was gradually repressing itself to conform, the evolution from Selma to Milo, an evolution they needed to break, or was that just the way Selma and Milo showed up on the page?

Jen:
I think Milo is the end product of a series of reactions: Sylvie reacts to Selma by trying to be the perfect (and perfectly invisible) wife; Diana reacts to Sylvie by trying to be the perfect career woman, and Milo reacts to his mother and father by being his own prickly self. I think at one point one of my early readers asked whether it wouldn’t make more sense to have Milo be a little girl, because this is very much a story about women and women’s choices, but I thought it would be one of the first instances of motherhood thwarting and undoing and remaking Diana to have her get the opposite of what she’s wished for. She wants an adorable, bookish little girl; she gets Milo, who is, even she admits, kind of weird.

Jenny:
I thought the way you worked with food in Fly Away Home was fascinating. Not just the obvious Sylvie-can’t-have-cookies stuff, but the way Diana tries to protect her son with draconian food rules, and the way Lizzie sees food as a way to take care of her father, and the way Sylvie rediscovers herself through the recipes she finds in the house. Talk to me about food and storytelling, Jen, because you do it so well.

Jen:
I think food plays such an important role in womens’ lives – the kitchen can be a battleground, a place to nurture or score points or prove your own superiority or restraint. I love to cook, and I love good food, and I live writing about food!

With Diana, it was fun, because I got to satirize every nutty food rule that every mom I know has, in an effort to keep her own kid from developing his or her own food issues (or, god forbid, getting an eating disorder. Or getting fat). Showing Lizzie learning to cook was a way of externalizing the changes she’s going through as she belatedly makes the trip from childhood to young womanhood. And I loved Sylvie’s cooking scenes, as she learns how to take care of her daughters and herself (one of my first readers said it was gastro-porn. I do not disagree).

Jenny:
I also loved the clothes in Fly Away Home. Not just that waistband cutting into Sylvie’s stomach, but the way you returned to that when she tried to use her former work clothes as a Halloween costume. Lizzie’s using Sylvie’s old hippie-chick-freedom clothes to redefine herself. Milo’s hats. The way the clothes the men chose and the way they wore those clothes appeared to the women. How important are clothes to your storytelling (and to you)?

Jen:
It’s funny, because in my real life I am the least fashion-conscious person you’d ever want to meet. Maybe that’s not quite true – I love dressing up my daughters – but in my own life, I think about clothes as something that stand between me and public nakedness and shaming.

But when I’m writing, I have to think about clothes a lot. With Sylvie, image is important, and she’s remade herself, both surgically and sartorially, to fit the mold. Diana treats clothing like a uniform, until she falls in love, and Lizzie’s trying to establish connections by the way she dresses and build an identity – a common thing for a woman in her twenties.

I think my best fashion moments in FLY AWAY HOME are when Sylvie learns about her husband’s betrayal and feels three separate waistbands digging into her flesh and starts feeling like her own clothes are trying to kill her.

Jenny:
The book begins and ends at a highway rest stop. What’s with that?

Jen:
Hey, someone noticed! Rest stops (and public restrooms) often play major parts in my books. The big thematic answer is that rest stops, and airports, and train stations and places like them, are sort of places that float in space, untethered…they don’t really exist anywhere, in a way. Nobody lives there, and everyone passing through is on his or her way to somewhere else. I liked that idea of impermanence, of unreal places where anything can happen.

Also, my mother told me that my father was leaving at the Vince Lombardi Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike. So there’s that, too.

Jenny:
What did you set out to do in Fly Away Home, besides tell a great story? Are you happy with the novel?

Jen:
I wanted to write about a woman I didn’t understand, and get to the point where I, and, eventually, readers, understood her – so in that respect, yes, I’m happy with FLY AWAY HOME. I always want to bring my characters to a better place than where they started the book, and I think that FLY AWAY HOME achieves that, too. I want to make my readers think, but also keep them entertained, and tell a great story with characters who feel real.

Jenny:
What’s up next? Voracious Weiner fans want to know.

Jen:
Weiner fans. Heh. Well, I’m starting to put the pieces together for my next book, gearing up for a two-week cross-country tour (cupcakes! There will be cupcakes!), and enjoying hanging out at the beach with my kids. And reading MAYBE THIS TIME, and loving it!

Jenny:
You have such good taste. All that and a terrific new book, too. Everybody should read Fly Away Home!

As it turned out, excellent, because the writer was Jennifer Weiner and the book was the now legendary Good in Bed. I devoured Cannie Shapiro’s story in one reading, staying up late into the night, and then I met Jen and was just as charmed by the author as by the novel. We spent one day in St. Louis together, doing bookstores and media, eating barbeque and partnering up again for a big speaking engagement and booksigning, and not only was she unfailingly professional, she was also unfailingly kind, funny, and smart. It’s still one of my best tour days of all time, and that’s in seventeen years of publicity.

My favorite moment from that day is one I still remember vividly. We were doing a radio interview, and the interviewer said, “You two seem to really get along well even though you’re competitors.” Jen and I said almost simultaneously, “We’re not competitors” because we weren’t. Anybody who liked Jen’s Good in Bed was probably going to be pretty happy with Fast Women, and anybody who liked Fast Women was going to love Good in Bed. Reading good fiction begets readers who want to read more good fiction, and Jen, even at the start of her career, knew that as well as I did, one of the many reasons she was such a joy to work with.

I haven’t seen Jen since then—she’s a brilliant big city East Coast professional journalist-turned-bestselling-novelist and I’m a confused small town Midwestern professional ex-art-teacher and procrastinator—but when our mutual publicists pointed out that we had books appearing only a month apart this summer and asked if we’d like to talk to each other about those books on our blogs, I said yes without hesitation. For one thing, it would mean I’d get an advance copy of her latest book. I’m greedy like that. And my greed was well-placed because Fly Away Home kept me up all night, just like Good in Bed did nine years ago.

Fly Away Home is the story of a senator’s wife whose husband puts her in the Political Wives Club: he cheats on her with a younger woman and the media breaks the story. Sylvie Woodruff is smart, hard-working, and devoted to the husband she has loved from the day she met him, so when the news breaks, so does her world. As she moves numbly through the devastating first days, she tries to reach out to her daughters—Diana, an obsessive emergency room doctor, and Lizzie, a recovering addict—because she knows the betrayal is theirs, too. What she doesn’t know is that Diana and Lizzie are dealing with their own betrayals, old and new, and their father’s infidelity throws them into crises of their own. Jen Weiner’s genius in this book is never letting any of the three story lines descend into cliché while she works with archetypal themes, drawing these three very different women together as their lives implode and they begin to rebuild. The omniscient voice, very different from Cannie’s close first person tale, gives weight to the story along with a global view of these characters’ lives, past and present, creating a complete world within one family of very smart, very shaken people. Fly Away Home is an absorbing novel about three complex women you’ll come to care deeply about.

Jen’s going to be doing a Q&A here tomorrow (I do the Q, she does the A), and I’m not sure she’ll be able to answer questions from the comments since she’s on tour, but we can give it a try. The book is wonderful and so is Jen, so get thee to a bookstore and check out Fly Away Home.

Moving:
When I found out Lani was moving in, I cleared out the third floor and renovated it into an apartment for her and the girls. It made good sense from a real estate point of view–there was a lot of wasted space up there–but it meant that everything I’d had stored up there, fifty years of stuff in three different rooms, went down to the first floor in stacks. A year passed and I decided for many reasons to move from the second floor (main floor) to the first floor (the dachshunds shouldn’t be climbing stairs, I wanted a smaller space for my stuff, we could share the second floor as community space with the big kitchen, living room, and dining room, my old master suite would make a great guest suite, etc.). Then I went downstairs and realized the scope of my folly: fifty years of stuff down there. I moved down anyway, and I’ve been living in a landfill for about a month, moving stuff out as I could, scrubbing and painting and putting up woodwork. I love the space, but the mess is driving me crazy, so every spare moment, I sort and clean. Goodwill is about to get very lucky.

Writing:
Lavender is six weeks overdue and getting more complicated as I write it. I like this book a lot, and the complications are making it a lot richer, but I have to FINISH THE DAMN THING. I’m at the white board stage now, so it’s looking good, but jeez louise it’s taking forever.

Rewriting:
Some of you may remember the Trust Me On This cover post. I thought we were good to go and so did Bantam, but a major distributor hated the cover and cut its order by 35,000 copies because of that. Thatsa lotta copies, so we went back to the drawing board. The kicker: They liked the dog on The Cinderella Deal cover. They’d really like another dog. There is no dog in Trust Me On This. We thought about just slapping a dog cover on the book, but that would be dishonest. So instead, I edited the book and put a dog in. I know, I know, but you know what? I think it’s better with the dog. His name is Walter. Well, I like him.

Promotion:
Maybe This Time is out in six weeks, which means we’re in overdrive working on promotional stuff that will hit in about a month. (From the middle of August to September first, this blog will be Maybe This Time, 24/7. Fortunately, you’ll be on vacation so you can avoid it.) I perfected Andie’s banana bread recipe–at least Lani said, “This is the one,” but that might just be because she was so damn sick of banana bread–rounded up the soundtrack, did an interview with SEP on Amazon, wrote a piece on stealing from The Turn of the Screw, took pictures of the finished collage . . . well, you get the drift. I’d like to work on my current book, but my last book is vampiring all my time.

Popcorn Dialogues:
I love this project. I can believe how fast Friday comes around, but I’m learning so much from it. I want to do a summing-up podcast for the first six, but I have this book to write . . .

Kids and Dogs:
And then there’s family dinner and spending time in the sun with the pack and discussing Mega Jump and the Theodosia books and playing Uno and Go Fish, not to mention the trauma of slashing a dog while trying to groom her (she still trusts me, god knows why).

So my apologies if the blog has been uneven. I’ll get pics up for the downstairs as I finish the four rooms (they make the old office pictures look like a minimalist hospital). I’ll show you the new cover for the new Walter-added Trust Me On This. I will even show you the horrible job we did trying to trim Mona (she looks like Lyle chewed her up and spat her out). And I’ll keep you updated on Lavender (I’m rewriting the Mom scene now). So nothing but good times ahead.

Sorry for the disorganization. Argh.

Of course, I’m fascinated by this because this is what I did in Maybe This Time. I didn’t copy, I stole. That is, I didn’t copy The Turn of the Screw in its existing form, nor did I use it as a template just to be cute or cool. As Jeff Veen says, I looked at the principles behind the story, the things that made it fascinating, and I stole those: The precocious threatened children, the isolated heroine, the far-removed hero who nevertheless fuels so much of the action, the constant questioning of what is real and what is imagination. The key, as Eliot said, is to make the homage, the new work, utterly different from the source. The echos should remain to enrich the work, but you have to create something new or you’re always be the second best rendition of that story.

I like this concept, this idea of understanding why the artist/author created something and then using that as a springboard for your own idea, of paying homage while making something new. I hadn’t thought of it that way before I wrote Maybe This Time, but now that I’ve done it, and looking at it through the perspective of Veen’s Ignite talk, it seems both obvious and elegant.

What do you think?

Starred Review: The plan did not include ghosts, or working, even temporarily, for her ex-husband, North Archer. The plan was for Andromeda “Andie” Miller to march into North’s law office, return a decade’s worth of uncashed alimony checks, and depart to begin her bright new romantic future with writer Will Spenser. But somehow Andie ends up taking care of North’s two young wards. The kids have already gone through three nannies, one of whom claimed Archer House is haunted, but Andie figures she can manage for a month. Until she starts seeing ghosts herself. Six years after her last solo effort, Bet Me (2004), RITA Award-winning Crusie triumphantly returns with a bewitching tale. Graced with deliciously original characters (including a housekeeper who could give Mrs. Danvers a run for her money), imbued with addictively acerbic wit, driven by a wildly inventive, paranormal-flavored plot that offers a subtle literary nod to Henry James, and featuring two protagonists who just might get their romance right the second time around, Maybe This Time is Crusie at her very best.

— John Charles