The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie [0]
I wrote The Cinderella Deal a long, long time ago, but it’s still one of my favorites because it was so hard to write and I learned so much writing it. I’d written six romantic comedies before this one and in all the commentary on them, there was one recurring theme: My stories were a little … cold. More comedy than romance; no heart, no soul. That was a fair assessment; if there was one thing I’d learned in my creative writing classes it was to avoid melodrama, to never be sentimental, to go for irony and detachment whenever possible, because otherwise I’d get killed in the critiques. But I think I knew all along I was wimping out, that if I’d had any backbone, I’d have gone first for the hearts of my readers, so I decided that for my first book for Bantam, I’d try something new, something different. Hearts would be touched, tears would be shed. By God, I was going to be emotional.
Then I sat down to write it and I’m here to tell you, writing comedy may be hard, but writing honest emotion is ten times more difficult. Every time I got near an over-the-top moment, I had to fight my knee-jerk tendency to step back into irony or even worse, to make a joke. After a while it got easier, and I can truthfully say that there are moments in this book that are downright weepers—well, I cried—but the important thing I learned is that tragedy is like comedy. You can’t add it to a book, you have to find both the humor and the pain within the story and then write both as truthfully as you can, even if it means that critics will accuse you of being sentimental or melodramatic. Good stories are about both hearts and minds, but the heart always comes first.
Here’s hoping you like the heart at the center of The Cinderella Deal.
Best wishes,
Jenny Crusie
BANTAM BOOKS BY JENNIFER CRUSIE
The Cinderella Deal
Trust Me on This
For Jack Andrew Smith,
a true hero and firefighter,
and the best of all possible brothers
ONE
THE STORM RAGED dark outside, the light in the hallway flickered, and Lincoln Blaise cast a broad shadow over the mailboxes, but it didn’t matter. He knew by heart what the card on the box above his said:
Daisy Flattery
Apartment 1B
Stories Told, Ideas Illminated
Unreal but Not Untrue
Linc frowned at the card, positive it didn’t belong on a mailbox in the dignified old house he shared with three other tenants. That was why he’d rented the apartment in the first place: it had dignity. Linc liked dignity the way he liked calm and control and quiet. It had taken him a long time to get all of those things into his life and into one apartment. Then he’d met his downstairs neighbor.
His frown deepened as he remembered the first time he’d seen Daisy Flattery in the flesh, practically hissing at him as he shooed a cat away from his rebuilt black Porsche, her dark, frizzy hair crackling around her face like lightning. Later sightings hadn’t improved his first impression, and the memory of them didn’t improve his mood now. She wore long dresses in electric colors, and since she was tall, they were very long, and she was always scowling at him, her heavy brows drawn together under that dumb blue velvet hat she wore pulled down around her ears even in the summer. She looked like somebody from Little House on the Prairie on acid, which was why he usually took care to ignore her.
But now, staring down at the card on her mailbox, appropriately backlit by the apocalyptic storm, he knew there was a possibility he might actually have to get to know her. And it was his own damn fault.
The thought gave him a headache, so he shoved his mail into his jacket pocket and went up the stairs to his apartment and his aspirin.
Downstairs, Daisy Flattery frowned too, and cocked her head to try to catch again the sound she’d heard. It had been something between a creaking door and a cat in trouble. She looked over at Liz to see if she was showing signs of life, but Liz was, as usual, a black velvet blob stretched out on the end table Daisy had rescued from a trash heap two streets over. The cat