Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories
This is a collection of short stories Jenny wrote for her Master of Fine Arts in fiction at OSU to be released at the end of 2011 as an ebook. The finished collection is about three women (Quinn, Darla, and Stephanie) and their mothers, their sisters, and their daughters. Some of the titles are “Just Wanted You To Know,” “The Day My Sister Shot the Mailman and Got Away With It, Of Course,” “The Damn Goat Story,” and “I Am At My Sister’s Wedding.” (The characters in these stories became the basis for Crazy for You.)
Liz Danger Mystery Series
Liz Danger is a ghostwriter who left her hometown of Birney at 18 and never went back. Now she’s 33, and it’s time to go home again, even if she doesn’t want to.
- Lavender’s Blue ~ Liz’s car breaks down on the highway outside Birney and she’s sucked back into the town’s dysfunctional social life, including a wedding where the bride is something blue and a family dispute that goes a lot deeper than she’d ever realized. Distraction: There’s a new cop in town and he’s the only thing there that doesn’t have a lot of bad memories attached to him.
- Rest in Pink ~ Liz’s client drags her to Cincinnati, conveniently located 45 minutes from Birney, to a little girls beauty contest when the big girls are causing all the problems.
- Peaches and Screams ~ It’s county-fair time in Birney, and Liz is trying to help one of her pals with a pie contest when a rival ghost-writer shows up and tries to cause trouble.
- Yellow Brick Roadkill ~ Liz’s best friend Molly is directing Birney High’s production of The Wiz and sends out a call for help.
Works listed below this line are still in the planning and brainstorming stages. Could be years until they’re done. Could be never.
You Again
This is Jenny’s homage to Agatha Christie. Zelda gets trapped in a big house during Christmas week with the man who was the boy she loved when she was fifteen, as she’s trying to solve the biggest mystery of her life. Food, sex, death, dogs, Mexican folk art, snark, and Christmas carols. This one is on hold while Jenny figures out how to fix it.
Haunting Alice
Alice (from Maybe This Time) is thirty, a lepidopterist by day and a reluctant ghost expert at night. The grandson of a credulous client begins to investigate her at the same time that a parapsychologist asks to buy Alice’s ancestral home. Alice goes back to Archer House to get it ready for the sale and finds it’s not as deserted as she thought it was. As the house fills up again with potential buyers, that pesky investigator, and some uninvited family including her brother Carter and the flaky gallery chick he’s falling for, trouble ensues.
Stealing Nadine
Nadine (from Faking It) is thirty, running the Goodnight Gallery by day and painting furniture by night. When Carter Archer, a specialist in forgeries who’s also a comic book pop artist, shows up at the Gallery asking questions, Nadine realizes that there are still some Goodnight forgeries out there and the family will lose everything unless she does some fast thinking and even faster theft.
Fairy Tale Lies
This is the next Crusie-Stuart-Rich collaboration. Rapunzel’s finally gotten out of that tower and she’s not going back (Lani Diane Rich), Cinderella’s hit thirty and the Prince is not that Charming any more (Anne Stuart), and Red Riding Hood’s fifty, a grandmother, and still keeping quiet about what happened the second time she went into the woods. They all go into the woods together and trouble ensues.
How to Write Romantic Comedy
Jenny’s Guide to Writing. She has the notes for this. Copious notes. Plus her half of the He Wrote/She Wrote blog she did with Bob Mayer. Plus a ton of notes from Argh Ink. Plus her half of The Popcorn Dialogues blog she does with Lucy March. Tons of stuff. Now all she has to do it organize it.
Claire and Rosie
This is a book done in collaboration with a friend of Jenny’s that an epistolary novel, in this case done in e-mails, that’s about a third finished but still in Secret Mode (collaborator doesn’t want her name out there yet). So why is it here? Because Jenny’s heroine Rosie Malone writes the Liz Danger Mysteries which then turned into real books and it gets confusing.
Slow Men (working title)
Suze and Riley are holding down the fort at the detective agency, solving cases like The Big Nap and ChinaTown (fraud in a housewares store) while trying to solve the mystery of their relationship (what relationship, it’s not working out). This one is on hold because the other stuff above comes before it.
The Feminization of Enchantment: Women’s Popular Fiction in Late 20th Century America
This is Jenny’s dissertation for her Ph.D. at Ohio State, an analysis of how women’s popular fiction (romance in particular) has addressed the issues of women’s identity, community, love, and sexuality while rewriting toxic myths, legends and fairy tales.
