Since I feel strongly that anybody who signed up for my newsletter should get something that nobody else has, in every issue we’re going to give you a link for a page that’s hidden from anybody who just surfs the site, but YOU, oh smart newsletter subscriber, will have access to the goods. At least for a month, then it will disappear again. Most of it is going to be stories and essays that are probably not of much interest unless you like Crusie books, which we’re assuming you do because, hey, you signed up for the newsletter. (Well, either you like the books or you were just grubbing around for the teapot and chocolate cookies, which I totally understand.  If so, just ignore the following because it’s all about Crusie writing.)

In this newsletter we're including a link to a short story called “The Day My Sister Shot The Mailman And Got Away With It, Of Course,” and there’s a story behind the short story. Many years ago, I was in the MFA program at Ohio State and Ron Carlson came to teach a week-long seminar.  Ron wrote the wonderful “Bigfoot Stole My Wife,” among other great short stories, and he was an incredible teacher. Terrifying, but really great.   He assigned us a project I now call the ABC Story (because I’ve been assigning it to my classes ever since). It’s pretty simple: you write a story that’s twenty-six sentences long, the first sentence beginning with A, the second with B, the third with C, and so on. I thought he was nuts, but as I said, he’s not a guy you cross, so I did it.

Well, he wasn’t nuts because it turns out that structure, any kind of structure, frees you up to concentrate on storytelling. Mine was about a fifteen-year-old girl named Quinn who was overshadowed by her older sister, Zoe (thereby using up the Q and the Z) and I loved it.  I loved it so much I turned it into a short story and then because I couldn’t stop thinking about those characters, I aged them twenty years and wrote a book about them called Crazy for You. So if you’ve ever wondered where Quinn and Zoe came from (How do you get your ideas, Jenny?) well, now you've got the short story as well as my ABC story.