Reissue Note from Jenny

Dear Readers,

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 and not the brains 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 worse. 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 awhile 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.