MyRomanceStory Blog

Distracted By Sexy Men

2010-04-16T08:29:00.003-04:00

This post has been hijacked. I planned to talk about mad scenes and the 19th century belief that women were hysterical, unreasoning creatures. Lucia di Lammermoor has her famous mad scene. Elvira in “I Puritani” has hers. My latest example was Ophelia’s mad scene in “Hamlet,” the opera. We don’t see mad scenes in romances anymore because—well, because they all must have happily ever after endings today. It would have been interesting to talk about the “dark night of the soul” moment that romance heroines experience today instead of mad scenes. But that post was not to be, because something else happened as I watched “Hamlet.”

“Hamlet” is not what I’d call a romance, nor is it a story I seek out deliberately. It’s most famous as Shakespeare’s superlative revenge tragedy. Imagine my surprise, then, when I fell in love. Oh, not with the story. It’s still a miserable tale of adultery, murder, suicide, and more murder, although the majority of the deaths in the Shakespeare play do not happen in the opera. Polonius gets to live, for instance. No, I am newly in love with Simon Keenlyside, the baritone who plays Hamlet. Of course his singing was top quality, but he did such a terrific acting job and looked so good doing it that I wondered why Hollywood has not come calling. Or does Hollywood not bother anymore? Can sing, can act, looks great, plus has a cool British accent and an intensity that is perfect for film. During the intermission interview, as he was nonchalantly wiping huge amounts of fake blood off his face, he impressed me with his intelligent approach to the role. This is a serious artist at work. But I’m not the only one who noticed that this guy is hot. There’s a site called Barihunks that proclaims its interest in “The Sexiest Baritone Hunks from Opera,” and lists Keenlyside as a top contender. I agree.

Which got me thinking about Jonas Kaufmann. This opera hunk has been hanging out in Europe throughout his career, but next year is finally coming to this country. I got a sneak peak at him by going to a movie theater that showed “Carmen” live from La Scala via satellite. (The very same technology that brought Miley Cyrus live to multiple movie theaters.) Jonas Kaufmann is the warm and fuzzy, sympathetic lover type. Carmen, the spirited gypsy, makes mincemeat of him as Don Jose (until the final act, of course, when he kills her). Kaufmann has been acclaimed for his interpretation of the doomed Don Carlo and I’m excited that it will be another HD simulcast next season at the Met. But I’m also excited because he is hot.

John Relyea caught my eye when he played Mephistopheles in “The Damnation of Faust,” an otherwise boring piece that’s more about the chorus than it is about acting. Leather pants make the man.

Erwin Schrott, diva Anna Netrebko’s main squeeze, is yet another operatic stud who’ll willingly show his pecs in the cause of drama and great singing. He looks so sensitive and sincere in this pic, but that's because he's playing that famous seducer, Don Giovanni. Don Juan, to those of you who've never been inside an opera house. He looks considerably more threatening at other moments, but you won't see them unless you see the show.

There are some amazingly good-looking men currently singing operas. Maybe you should check out an opera house, or a movie theater that does opera simulcasts or satellite broadcasts, and enjoy all this male beauty.

An Embarrassment of Men

2010-04-01T11:08:00.003-04:00

It should be an embarrassment of riches. A typical romance heroine—a virginal young woman with a big problem that keeps her from enjoying love and life—suddenly finds not one, but three boyfriends. Yes, Sookie Stackhouse, the Louisiana barmaid heroine of Charlaine Harris’ paranormal romance series now on television as “True Blood,” definitely starts as a standard romance heroine. She’s young, she’s attractive, but she’s a telepath. That totally kills her relationships with men because she can hear exactly what they’re thinking. (Ick!) Until she meets Bill the Vampire, whose mind is a blank to her. She loves it, and soon loves him, too. And they become lovers. That ought to be enough to make a young woman happy, you’d think, but these days, not so. It is not enough to have found true love. There must be some potential next boyfriends in the picture, too. Just as Sookie is getting involved with Bill, her boss, Sam, starts to show interest in her. He’s a shapeshifter who likes to take animal form as a collie. But wait, there’s more. Eric, an older and therefore more powerful vampire than Bill, also thinks Sookie is attractive. Although maybe as a snack, not a long-term love. Vampires do tend to think of humans as food. But he’s managed to steal a few kisses, too.

Isn’t it just typical that there’s a long drought in Sookie’s life, and then too many men? There’s something attractive about a woman who already has a lover, perhaps. The “Jessie’s Girl” syndrome of longing for the woman who is taken. But what about the heroine’s feelings? In romances over the last fifty years, there has been the standard of the heroine having to choose between two men, one of whom offered a life of wealth but shallow pleasures, and one who offered a life of work but the virtue of sincerity. Naturally, the heroine always chose the poor-but-honest young man. Then we had a long period in romances in which there was only one serious candidate for the heroine, even if he acted like a domineering jerk most of the time. Her only other choice was a far less manly type of man, one who was never described in attractive terms. Of course she always chose Mr. Big. And then romances morphed into tales in which there still was only one man, but he was a nicer person, so the heroine did not seem to be acting like a cretin when she chose him. But in all these scenarios, the heroine definitively chose just one man.

Now, although we still have books being published that are exemplars of all these prior romance situations, we’re seeing something different. In Twilight, the heroine falls for a vampire but also meets a werewolf who likes her. And she has other boys after her, too. In the Sookie Stackhouse novels, Sookie’s attractiveness increases as she gains more vampire blood and becomes stronger and more beautiful. It’s logical enough, but it leaves her with an incipient dilemma, which man to choose? Author Charlaine Harris makes it easier on Sookie by having the other men take advantage of her and surprise her with their advances. I haven’t read the entire series, but I am beginning to wonder just how far such surprises will go. The surprise aspect keeps Sookie from suffering moral ambiguity over the event itself, but it leaves her with guilt—which she conveniently decides to examine later—over responding to being kissed by Sam or Eric instead of by her lover Bill.

This is a new romance situation, that of the lover-in-waiting. It isn’t merely that it tests the limits of sexual fidelity, which it of course does. It also tests the limits of being able to sustain multiple serious relationships. Humans do not mate for life (more or less) by mere chance. We do it because life is too confusing otherwise. Power being equal between men and women (the women not being economically dependent on the men, which is the case in most polygamous situations), the vast majority of people choose single relationships, not multiples. Why is this? Because you are a different person with each person you know. Sometimes slightly different, and sometimes vastly different. Your interactions are different, and your reactions. With one man, a woman might get along very peacefully, while with another, she’s always in a fight, and so on. By choosing a mate, we are choosing the reflection of the person we want to be most of the time. And by changing mates through divorce, we’re changing our minds or acknowledging that the relationship has changed and the reflection no longer works for us. In societies with easy divorce, serial choices happen, but each choice is still a single choice.

So what does a romance heroine do when faced with the possibility that she can have a serious relationship with more than one man, right now? She acts like Scarlett O’Hara and decides to think about it in the morning—or never. She waits and sees. She lets each man show her more of who he is, so she has a better chance of determining which one offers her the most possibility of a lasting, happy relationship. But she does not pursue deepening the relationships on offer. She remains steadfast with her original lover. For a while, anyway. Perhaps I need to read more of Sookie’s adventures, to see if she decides to try to manage multiple relationships at once. My money is on it not going smoothly, if so. Most people have enough trouble just negotiating the potholes of one primary relationship. Add in more, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Or a trashy television talk show.

The Romance Reader’s Hot Cowboy Doctor

2010-03-16T08:14:00.005-04:00

A study of Harlequin romance titles from 1949-2009 has been published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology. The title of the journal article is “The Texas Billionaire’s Pregnant Bride.” Cute. The researchers are undoubtedly proud of their analyses of these book titles. You can read about it in a popular press story on it entitled “Romance Novel Titles Reveal Readers’ Desires” by Tom Jacobs.

One of my problems with this study, which is interesting regardless of the conclusions it draws, is that it makes the claim that the prevalence of certain words in titles proves what women want. But readers do not write the titles. Editors write the titles, with marketing input. Readers buy the books because of or in spite of or with indifference to the titles. And we never know which it is. Only very specific sales information can determine if a title, by itself, causes someone to buy a book. Maybe the artwork on the cover did. Maybe the book was part of a subscription the reader bought to an entire Harlequin line. Maybe the reader read the inside excerpt or the back cover blurb or the first chapter of the book before buying it. Maybe the reader bought the book because she likes that author regardless of the titles on her books. And so on. Market research and focus groups can help, but at best it’s a guess as to what causes someone to buy a book. If it wasn’t a guess, then all books published would sell 100% of their print runs, wouldn’t they? And they don’t. Harlequin does more market research than any other publisher I know of, but their romances do not sell out.

The authors cite cowboys and doctors as the most popular (i.e. prevalent) hero types in the sixty-year span of Harlequins. But wait a minute. Although cowboys were wildly popular through much of the 20th century, most of Harlequin’s romances featuring cowboys were published long after cowboys went out of mainstream fashion. When twenty-one television series about cowboys were aired per week, and every Hollywood star acted in western movies, Harlequin was not publishing western romances. It was publishing straight westerns by authors named “Tex Holt” with titles like Canyon of the Damned. Harlequin has published most of its western romances since the 1980s, not before. Not unless you count Australian rancher titles as westerns. Or South African diamond miner titles as westerns. Or any other exotic Harlequin locale as a western. Presumably the hit TV show "Dallas," which debuted in 1978, was the cause of this resurgence of interest in cowboys--and modern ones, at that. What is remarkable is that the western myth lives on in romances (albeit in a less heroic incarnation than that of the lone lawman à la “High Noon”) even though it has all but died elsewhere in the mass media. There still may be strong markets for westerns of any kind in Harlequin's worldwide markets, so that might influence initial buying decisions a bit. But with "Lonesome Dove" about the only romantic period western in decades that made any mark in wider culture, the popularity of cowboy heroes in romances is surprising, a fact the researchers serenely ignore.

Turns out doctor/nurse books were the number one type found in this study. They’ve had a steadier history, perhaps. Dr. Kildare sold movies for decades. And doctors have had periods of being very much the mainstream media fashion. In the 1960s, “Ben Casey" and "Dr. Kildare” on television produced not one but two teen idol actors, Vincent Edwards and Richard Chamberlain. A slew of doctor/nurse romances were published around that time by virtually every American paperback house, not just Harlequin. Since then there have been other television doctors who engendered similar excitement, such as George Clooney in “ER.” And we still have hottie docs on TV in “Gray's Anatomy,” “House,” etc. Given this history, I am willing to provisionally accept the notion that doctor/nurse romances have been longtime staples in romances. But is it because doctors are caring and have stable, high incomes, as the study claims? Or is it because doctors became cutting-edge heroes in the early 20th century where previously they had been uncertified, low-class hacks who usually poisoned their patients to cure them? Once doctors rose in social status, and once they routinely used medicines that worked, doctors became heroes. That might account for their 20th century glamor. Not the money angle. But still, how are we to know what attracts a woman to a doctor? Doctor romances aren’t titled “The Rich, High-Class Surgeon of Palm Beach,” or “The Caring Clinic Doctor Who Donates His Services.”

When the study speculates about “what women want” based on the titles of these books alone, I think the researchers are on unsteady ground. As one commenter on the Jacobs article noted, women don’t buy books about crimes because they want to commit crimes. It’s foolish to assume that they buy romances about cowboys or doctors or any other type of man because they want to marry them. The researchers have not asked even a sample of romance readers about their opinions and their buying habits. Are women reading romances as “how to” guides for landing billionaires? Doubtful. Most women will never meet a billionaire. And most billionaires are not young and attractive, like those in romances. I don’t know about you, but when I see a photo of a wizened old billionaire, even the nice ones who are philanthropists, my hormones do not tell me “I must bear HIS child.” So I have major doubts that romance readers are taking the hero figures in Harlequin romances—at least, the types this study cites—as face value role models for their future husbands.

Do readers buys these books because of or in spite of who is in them? Is the vision of the open space and freedom of the American west what lures readers? Or is it the vision of a man who works with his hands but is not a blue-collar worker? If you own your own ranch, you’re the boss of you, a capitalist, not the working stiff who takes his lunchbox to the factory every day. And yet the brutality of the daily grind is about the same, isn’t it? Yep. So there’s a status element involved, for sure. And what about those doctors as love objects? Is the appeal that of attaching to someone who is heroic? Or who is powerful? Doctors are notoriously despots in their medical world. Are romance readers attracted to despots as men to marry? Or are they attracted to those stories because they like to see the plucky heroines bring the arrogant doctors to their knees? Sadly, themes don’t seem to be explored in this research study. Only titles.

I think a study of the use of possessive terms would have been more interesting. The "owned like a sex slave by this rich guy" theme that Harlequin has been using for the last few years has outraged, appalled, and amused some people, but it surely is selling books or Harlequin would have stopped it by now. Or does it make any difference at all? That’s the big if. Harlequin does market research, so Harlequin knows, in theory anyway. Or does it? Are books like “The Texas Billionaire’s Pregnant Bride” selling at 100%? Didn’t think so.

Fireworks Over Toccoa Sweepstakes

2010-03-10T13:00:00.011-05:00

We know you love romance fiction and the chance to win romantic prizes, so we wanted to tell you about a new sweepstakes sponsored by St. Martin's Press that combines both of these passions. Take a sneak peek at Fireworks Over Toccoa, by Jeffrey Stepakoff, between March 10 and 30, for your chance to win an advance readers' edition of Fireworks Over Toccoa and a grand prize of a Gourmet Romantic Picnic Basket for Two that includes caviar, crackers & cheese, cookies, chocolates & truffles and more.

At www.FireworksOverToccoa.com, you can also read a note from the author, an excerpt from the book and listen to an audio excerpt.

Fireworks Over Toccoa is described as story that reminds us of what it's like to experience love for the first time-against the odds, when you least expect it, and with such passion that it completely changes you forever.

Jeffrey Stepakoff has been writing professionally since receiving his MFA in Playwriting from Carnegie Mellon in 1988. His credits include the Emmy-winning The Wonder Years, Sisters, Major Dad, Disney's Tarzan, and Dawson's Creek (as co-executive producer). This is his debut novel. He lives with his family north of Atlanta, Georgia.

This Just In

2010-03-01T07:52:00.002-05:00

A UK newspaper, the Telegraph, has a hot news story—“proof” that Anne Boleyn was guilty of adultery after all! Nearly 500 years ago! A scholar has decided to give credence to a vicious contemporaneous poem which most other scholars have discounted as mere character assassination. You remember Anne Boleyn, of course. King Henry VIII of England broke with the Pope and most of Europe to put aside his first wife and marry Anne, hoping to get a male heir. Instead, he got the first major queen regnant, Elizabeth I. Of course, Henry did not know how great his daughter would be, so he had Anne arrested for multiple adulteries while she was married to him and pregnant most of the time. And then he had her executed, the first queen England ever treated so, even though other queens had been openly unfaithful. This new claim is nonsense, of course. Anne Boleyn was framed, and well-known Tudor popularizer Alison Weir has just published a book, The Lady in the Tower, which goes over each accusation against Anne and shows how impossible or unlikely adultery on those dates would have been. Coincidentally, the novel that won the UK’s Man Booker Prize for literary fiction last year was Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, which is about Thomas Cromwell, the architect of Anne’s doom. What do you bet that this novel also goes over the same questions of guilt or innocence?

I’ve talked before about how wild it is that 500 years after these people lived, thousands of us still are interested in them, indeed, deeply curious about the truth of their lives. This was brought home to me recently when I saw a concert version of the opera Boris Godunov. In it, Tsar Boris is racked with guilt over his murder of the Tsarevich that led to Boris ascending the throne. But perhaps the boy is not dead after all, for a pretender springs up to supplant Boris. That historical event happened nearly 500 years ago. And what about the mystery of the Princes in the Tower? Over 500 years ago. Is 500 the magic number? No, but it is proof that when a mystery is compelling, people still care about finding the truth, no matter how completely the story was covered up at first.

Perhaps we want to know if Anne Boleyn ever loved Henry VIII. We know he had loved her enough to move mountains. But then why did he have her judicially murdered? She was framed, no doubt about it, despite the Telegraph’s bland claim. But why do we care?

These mysteries never really go away. The people who destroy the evidence and hide the truth may get what they want. They topple governments or murder enemies, and sway multitudes. But the multitudes are always, always aware that the official story is a cover-up. And if the truth does not come out, then one by one, over the next years, decades, and centuries, every person involved in these tragedies is trotted out as the guilty perpetrator. There are people who are convinced that Lyndon Johnson ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy. There are others who think Fidel Castro ordered it, and still others who think the Mafia did it. And on and on and on. And every once in a while, we get a lurid headline about new “proof.”

Was Anne Boleyn guilty of adultery with four men and incest with her brother while she was queen? Very unlikely, and yet people are still taking sides on it. Did Boris Godunov murder Ivan the Terrible and/or his son? Did Lee Oswald shoot a magic bullet that killed JFK or was there another shooter on the grassy knoll nearby whose better angle made his aim true? Did Richard III have the Princes in the Tower murdered, or did Buckingham do it? Or Henry VII? We still want to know the truth.

Is this the real romance of history? Not whether people loved, but what happened when love failed? What happened when people were willing to kill to attain their power goals? As much as romance today is viewed as upbeat, happy storytelling, romance historically has been about great events and tragic endings. And we still are searching for the whole truth about them.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

2010-02-16T09:40:00.005-05:00

Someone used the word “camp” in a novel I just read. The novel is The President’s Daughter, by Mariah Stewart. It’s an irresistible thriller, full of intrigue relating to Washington, DC in the 1970s. But the word “camp” became fashionable in the 1960s, and then quickly faded away. It’s strange to see it used in this novel without any definition, because “camp” is not understandable by context. No one uses that word anymore in public discourse, whereas it was all over the place back then. Susan Sontag, the famous French intellectual, invented it as an ironic term to describe things that are fashionable because they are absurd. The Urban Dictionary provides some interesting slices of meaning that might argue with my definition, and suggests that the term now has been co-opted as referring to gayness. But I was there, and I remember everyone flinging that term around. Comic books were high camp in the 1960s—so bad they were good. For the very first time, popular culture—that which was supposedly bland and meaningless—assumed serious artistic significance.

That’s why Andy Warhol did his famous soup can, although there was a good deal of artistic blather that accompanied it. And that’s why his fellow traveler, Roy Lichtenstein, got rich and famous by taking outright swipes of DC Comics romance comics panels and turning them into paintings, even including the dot pattern that was the printing method of achieving color in a comic book. To the casual viewer, comic art is bland and featureless, one crude drawing style indistinguishable from another. But to anybody who pays real attention, it is clear that every artist leaves his or her signature indelibly on the work. Even today, I found an Internet site that blatantly swipes the art style of Johnny Romita and is selling a poster by someone who probably scanned a panel and then just recolored it. The girl even has Mary Jane Watson’s hairdo.(That’s Mrs. Spider-Man to you.) Compare a comic book cover Johnny drew years before, for Girls' Romances #95, and you can see how the eyes are drawn exactly the same, even to the tears dripping out of them. Johnny is the true artist of both pieces. But someone casually looking at comics might not realize how distinctive the creator's styles are. Someone who thinks they are merely camp, amusing and basically worthless, who imagines that no effort went into their creation.

It has always bothered me tremendously that Roy Lichtenstein made a career out of swiping romance comic panels. Camp translated into dollars and sense, and much fame, and yet the true creators of the images are not credited. Deliciously, David Barsalou has gone to the effort of tracking down every single comic page that Lichtenstein swiped from, and presents them side by side on his site. Thanks, David. We needed this truth to be displayed to the world.

So perhaps we ought to add another definition for camp to the Urban Dictionary: blatant theft of images for commercial purposes. This brings up the sticky question of the images I cull from various sources and present to you. Many of them are under copyright and their creators retain the rights to them. This blog, being a mere commentary on the world, is not a commercial enterprise. Even though it appears inside one, the MyRomanceStory.com site. This blog is a fan site. It sells nothing. I hope to keep it amusing and informative. But I’ll leave the swiping in the name of high art and in the spirit of low commerce to others.

The Man With the Weird Beard

2010-02-01T00:17:00.003-05:00

That’s a song title, by the way.

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about beards lately. We expect female hairstyles to be of the moment, but male facial hair is surprisingly defined by passing fashions as well. Many men today affect a look that in other times has been labeled scruffy. Okay, truth? It is scruffy. But since hot guys in the media affect this currently fashionable look, nobody wants to say how weird it looks. Instead we tend to call out other beard styles as strange.

Think of the classic 1970s mustache as seen on Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I. Although disco is now retro, the 'stache still hasn’t been revived. It's still an object of scorn. Actor Tom Selleck shaved his for a while, but now, as Jesse Stone, he’s got it back, plus a weird beard.

Well, that doesn't seem so remarkable, you say. He's an old guy; weird facial hair comes with the territory. But what about Henry Cavill playing that rogue of the Tudor court, Charles Brandon? He sports a very modern several-days-old beard, neatly trimmed in anticipation of growing longer.But it never does. Look at this pic in close-up and you'll see that it's an almost-beard. How does a guy keep a five-day-old beard look, anyway?

By contrast, look at the real Brandon’s portrait. He’d grown up in a clean-shaven, long-haired age, but when his pal the king decided to grow a beard, and fashion changed, Brandon grew a serious beard. Not my romantic ideal, but it could be yours.

Not feeling the love? Perhaps ZZ Top, who have better beards than Bin Laden, are more your style. But I can't quite picture this kind of beard in a romantic bedroom romp, can you? I'm hearing "Ouch, ouch!"

I know, I'm getting silly. But it occurs to me that men play with their beards the way we women often play with our hairstyles. Beard and mustache. Beard with no mustache. Mutton chops. Handlebar mustache. Van Dyke. Pencil mustache. Hitler mustache. Here, Justin Timberlake affects the not-quite-there beard. Which I have also seen on middle-aged or jowly men who are trying to disguise a little too much flesh under their jawline.

The good thing about all this facial hair is that it tends to be distinctive. Baldness, the current rage for guys who don't want to look at their receding hairlines, is the same on every man. Beards often are a different hair color as what's on top, or a different texture, or whatever. The bad thing is that kissing or even snuggling up to a man who is growing a beard is a prickly experience. More "Ouch, ouch!"

I Did It My Way

2010-01-15T23:29:00.002-05:00

Did you ever read a romance so wrongheaded, so annoying, so stupid, you wanted to re-engineer it? Possibly from beginning to end? A romance with such a domineering hero and such a wimpy heroine that you couldn’t decide which one you wanted to slap around first? Him for being a bully, or her for being so passive and self-hating that she lets him bully her?

Of course you have. Twilight. I’ve read innumerable comments about how utterly creepy Edward is, how stupidly passive Bella is, how terrible the writing is, how disappointing the sequels are, and more. People hated this series. Hated it. And some of us are rewriting this tale in our heads even as I am writing this post. They’re thinking, “What if the first time Bella sees Edward grimacing at her, she challenges his attitude?” “What if he starts trying to eat her in science class cause she’s so tasty?” “What if she slaps him hard and he goes away like a whipped dog?” “What if he just stays in Alaska and she begins to notice the virtues of normal human boys?”

That would be fun. Tell the Twilight story from the point of view of a boy from the high school who sees Bella arrive, thinks she’s gorgeous and tries to woo her, and then sees her fall under the thrall of those weird Cullens and that creep Edward. Maybe that boy—Mike, or Eric, or Tyler—would end the story before any of its terrible sequels by staking Edward out in the sunshine and turning him into a crispy critter. Not exactly a happy ending for Edward, but after all, he kills people.

Or what about something even more Gothic, from classic literature? Wuthering Heights. I longed to have someone tell Cathy to snap out of her selfish haze, and just live her life. To be nice to her husband. She married him, after all. Treat him right. And as for Heathcliff and his household of nasty males, I have an entire novel written in my head about how Heathcliff’s sinned-against wife Isabella beats them all into shape. Yep, she kicks butt, cleans house, and turns those brutes into civilized family members. Who end up happy. Yes, happy. We are happier when we behave well towards each other, and that’s why these stories with mean bullies and passive heroines don’t sit right.

Of course I feel no need to rewrite Jane Austen, because her subtle wit avenges all readers even as she describes overbearing, prideful fools such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. In my family we have taken to heart those famous words about Lady Catherine’s daughter being a piano virtuoso if only she had learned to play. Right. If only.

The “if only” books we’ve read stick in our mind. They had a chance to be good, but went the other way. Into cliché, into sodden sentimentality, into stupid brutality. If only they had not. That’s why they outrage us so. These books get us excited, make us hope for a terrific story, and then they disappoint us. If they were boring books to begin with, we wouldn’t be so outraged. But no, they all contain a seed of something special: a great setup, an interesting plot, the potential for grappling with genuine compatibility issues instead of the superficial, and more. But the authors didn’t pull it off. Or didn’t even know what they had, and did not try to write the better story that we saw tantalizing glimpses of before the rotten plot events that dismayed us so.

Writers sometimes don’t have the vision to understand the possibilities in their stories. They’re following an instinctive tradition by creating certain cliché twists and turns. Sometimes they’re influenced by commercial concerns: Will they be able to sell a Brutish Billionaire Buys Beset Beauty tale if they do not make him overbearing? Will readers expect or demand that the hero be a macho male, an alpha male, an abuser type in all but name? Romances are fantasies, after all. It’s a fantasy that a demure, wallflower heroine can tame the wild passions of a lordly tycoon. Sometimes the melodramatic plot seems de rigeur. And yet who is truly happy when one person domineers over another?

The best romances are those that set convention on its head and tell us something real about human nature. And because this is romance, something positive. That’s why the heroine has to prevail, after all. We want her to find happiness, hoping that if she can, so can we. And that’s why we mentally rewrite disappointing stories. We know which way these characters should have gone and the happiness that should have ensued. So we mentally tinker with what is printed. Most of us don’t go beyond the daydreaming stage, but some people take it a step further and write down their alternative plot ideas. From this impulse has sprung many a new author, who often writes the equivalent of an “answer song” to the book that annoyed her. Maybe some day I’ll get around to writing my much better version of Wuthering Heights.

Pretty Comic Books and Long-Suffering Girlfriends

2010-01-01T11:59:00.003-05:00

I've been looking at a wealth of comic book covers drawn by Bob Brown, and thinking about what art needs to be on the cover of a book. Why are there people on the covers of books? Why aren’t they all paintings of sunsets, or flowers, or big honking weapons, or fangs? It’s not that such covers don’t exist. (Although I haven’t personally seen one with fangs, someone has undoubtedly done a cover like that.) Nonrepresentational covers have been tried many times, and while they can look rather classy and sometimes even intriguing, there’s nothing like a piece of representational art to attract a reader’s eye. Strictly speaking, even a drawing of a flower is representational. But not really, when the story inside is a romance and not about floriculture. I don’t know how the online future of the book will take advantage of the appeal of cover art, but I do know that back when I was collecting comic books, every time I saw a girl on the cover, I bought it.

The cover of Green Lantern #16, for instance, drawn by Gil Kane, with its dazzling villainess, Star Sapphire. She was actually Carol Ferris, the girlfriend of Hal Jordan, the hotshot test pilot who was Green Lantern then. And she was kind of annoying as a foil for his secret identity shenanigans. But somebody has to be. Where’s the fun in having a secret identity unless someone starts asking why you never see Superman and Clark Kent in the same room? Still, that wasn’t a good enough use of a secondary character, so after a while the writers upped the ante and gave Carol a secret identity as Star Sapphire. A villainess, naturally. Comics must have conflict. This is probably my all-time favorite Green Lantern cover, strictly because of the strong and pretty female depicted.

When I was reading comic books as a kid, there were about three standard stories with girls on the cover. (I say girls, not women, because that’s how they were spoken of back then; women was meant.) The first type was a straight female-in-jeopardy story, such as this one featuring Space Ranger’s girlfriend, Myra. Which also attracted me because the villains were living jewels. Sparkly! For a while, Tales of the Unexpected put Myra on every cover, along with a little pink alien. Then both got dropped. No way of knowing which creature was least attractive to the mostly boy audience.

The second type of girl cover was some version of dating or a wedding. The best example is when the hero appears to be marrying, and all his fighting buddies are dismayed that he’s essentially leaving the Boys Only club. A great example is the cover of Blackhawk #155, in which Blackhawk appears to marry Zinda, Lady Blackhawk. (That’s not an aristocratic title; it’s her mascot name.) Of course these marriages did not happen. Only much later in comic books did anyone ever get married for real. But I was always a sucker for that kind of cover. I lived in hope. Yeah, me and Lois Lane, who perpetually sought to marry Superman. (I’m not citing Lois Lane’s own comic book because she was always on the cover. Of course I bought every issue.)

The third type of cover with a girl on it featured her as some kind of super being. Either she had suddenly gained superpowers (temporary, of course, since she could never be allowed to overshadow the hero), or she had become a supervillainess. The heroine-as-villainess was never more pronounced than in Blackhawk, a war/adventure comic about a band of quasi-soldiers that originated in the early 1940s fighting World War II enemies, and years later was fighting aliens and monsters and, of course, supervillains. Poor Lady Blackhawk got turned into Lady Killer Shark, and she spent several stories sneering and being evil—and of course, wearing standard villain colors, purple and green. (Why are they standard villain colors? Because the heroes are usually in primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. So that leaves purple and green to contrast. Bet you didn’t know that’s why Spider-Man’s arch enemy, the Green Goblin, wears purple. Now you do.)

What you notice about all these covers is that there is no attempt to make these depictions of women into pin-up art. They are not semi-nude. They are not contorted in the manner of pole dancers. They are not the victims of bondage fetishists. All of which you can find on comic book covers of the very far past, the 1940s, and the present. But these women are G-rated. And that’s another reason I bought these comics. As silly as some of these covers are, they do not degrade or laugh at women. Some of them feature strong women, even if the strength is to be temporary or they'll need the male heroes to finish the job. And some of these covers are downright romantic. You know me, crazy for romance. That’s why I always buy romance novels with weddings on the cover.

But that’s another blog entry, for another day.

Happy New Year!

Killer Sequels

2009-12-16T00:53:00.002-05:00

The world and characters an author creates can be tremendously seductive. When we finish a novel we love, we hate to leave that world. And thus is born that abomination, the sequel. If “Son of Kong” or Spider-Man 3” springs to mind, you might as well know that Hollywood did not invent the sequel, nor the series. In the 19th century, Louisa May Alcott wrote sequels to her classic bestseller Little Women. Fifty years before, Sir Walter Scott wrote direct sequels to his novels, and related novels in series. The 20th century was littered with novels that had sequels or were part of series. Today, Sherrilyn Kenyon and J. R. Ward write sequels and series, and so does just about everybody else.

Including Stephenie Meyer. I spent too much of today laughing myself silly on sites devoted to tearing apart and analyzing Meyer’s Twilight, both the first novel and the series of sequels. And I have to admit, most of the criticism made sense. My personal favorite is the chapter-by-chapter exegesis called Mark Reads Twilight So You Don’t Have To.

I finally read Twilight this weekend and liked it very much. Why? Because it reminded me of old-fashioned romances from years ago in its sexual restraint and in its celebration of innocence. The heroines of those romances often were mere teenagers (Bella), and they fell in love with men who were much older both in age and in worldly experience (Edward). Those men wrapped the heroines in the comfortable luxuries of a rich man’s life, and were obvious wish-fulfillment figures. But there was a downside. The men were utterly controlling and did not allow the heroines to make any decisions for themselves. Harlequin of course was a major perpetrator of such romance novels, but other publishers produced similar tales featuring weak-minded, helpless young females who were very glad to have their lives ruled by strong-willed, older men. No romance hero of that ilk ever was poor and domineering; they always were rich and domineering. Apparently, that was their excuse. They ruled vast estates or ran huge corporations, and they expected to rule women, too. Harlequin still carries on that tradition with their laughably but irresistibly titled books about The Billionaire’s Secret Virgin Pregnant Bought Mistress, or whatever. The titles provide the thrill that these stories will have the unequal power dynamics of the bad old days. But if you actually read those romances, you’ll find that their heroines are modern, strong-minded women who don’t go for domineering men at all. Times have changed the romance novel world.

Another common element of romances many years ago was the hero blaming the heroine for her sexual appeal, claiming that she was seducing him—even though of course back then the heroines were all innocent and virginal and had no clue what these horny men were going on about. This shows up as a major element in Twilight, and is rightly criticized as classic abusive behavior. I always thought those old romances with the blamer heroes were abusive. I’ve never understood why anyone could read Margaret Way’s novels. (If you think it is unfair of me to mention her, remember Morgan Wade’s Woman by Joan Hohl, the classic spouse-abuse-as-love romance that I’ve discussed before. Joan learned better and wrote far more enlightened books later. As far as I know, Margaret Way’s men are still blaming everything on the women.)

Why am I citing the specifics of these old school romances, instead of about sequels? Because if there is no sequel, the reader does not have to see the sorry results of domineering and abusive male behavior. And the equally sorry results of women deciding to be passive, manipulative, shallow, and selfish. (Oh, yes, Bella comes in for her share of criticism, too.) The first Twilight novel ends without a specific solution to the vampire/human love affair, because Bella after all is a teenager, and at only 17 is too young to participate in an adult relationship with Edward or with any other male. She also has time to grow more gumption, to decide that perhaps she does not need a superhuman to keep her safe from everything life offers. To tell Edward that he should not act like a creepy stalker and watch her secretly as she sleeps. And so on. If Twilight, like a standard romance, were just one book, the reader could put it down and imagine happiness in the future. Whatever the reader construed as happiness.

Instead, the vast success of Twilight and the unfinished nature of this near fairytale teen story were too tempting. And so readers have to suffer the torture of seeing beloved characters run into the ground in sequel after sequel. Just as moviegoers have had to suffer through too many “Lethal Weapon” sequels, too many “Star Trek” sequels, etc. That’s the depressing negative to sequels. Years ago, I read a bang-up Gothic novel by Virginia Coffman, Moura. It was a terrific book. But the author was enticed to write a sequel to Moura that basically threw out every attractive or distinctive element of the original. And then she wrote more sequels. Sigh. She was perfectly within her rights, but as a reader, my sense of ownership of the characters in the first novel was outraged. According to many people, that is what has happened with Twilight.

I haven’t heard the same criticisms of the Harry Potter series, but that was written for a younger crowd, and did not pit a helpless girl against a powerful vampire. All series have their ups and downs, but the key problem with sequels is that readers have different ideas from the author about what should happen. And since readers get invested in the characters, they can get very disappointed if the events of the sequel feel wrong to them. That’s why sequels can be killers. The question is, are any authors listening?

Feathers Ruffled in Romance Land

2009-11-27T23:01:00.002-05:00

You may have heard that Harlequin has inked a deal to steer authors they reject to a press to which they had subcontracted the name Harlequin Horizons. It all blew up a short while ago. Such was the outrage in the romance community, Harlequin quickly realized the harm this move does to its well-known brand. It has since renamed the proposed press DellArte. (Which might cause the Bantam Dell Publishing Group to demand they change the name yet again, but that’s another story.)

Why did Harlequin move so fast? There were hundreds of negative comments all over the media, and especially on influential romance blogs like SmartBitches and Dear Author. And the Romance Writers of America promptly tossed Harlequin off its list of recognized publishers, declaring this supposed self-publishing venture was nothing more than a vanity press. Meanwhile, several other influential writers’ organizations said they viewed the situation with alarm and might consider similar moves. Additionally, Harlequin’s own authors publicly expressed their fury that writers whose work was not considered good enough to be published by Harlequin could soon claim that they were Harlequin authors anyway. Many people concluded that the Harlequin brand was tarnished. Now, Harlequin is distancing itself from its deal, though it has not renounced its plans.

Huge amounts of money are at stake here. Large established publishers feel very much under attack by the new technologies that are changing the way reading material is sold and delivered. Rather than resist all knowledge of Kindles, Sony Readers, and the Nook, of CreateSpace and Lulu and iUniverse, of Samhain and Wild Rose Press, publishers are frantically seeking revenue streams that make use of new technology. Harlequin has already stuck a toe in epublishing, and now is committed to a separate epublishing press, Carina. Harlequin is by no means the first publisher to link itself with some sort of vanity press or self-publishing venture. Thomas Nelson previously announced similar plans.

As to quality, although there are plenty of badly written romance manuscripts that get rejected, the truth is that there are plenty of quite good enough ones (that could use some editing) that for various reasons are not published by Harlequin. They all get submitted to Harlequin, because it’s the largest publisher of romance novels in the world. These rejected stories may not fit the Harlequin image, or they don't follow the latest angle, or they have known sales killers such as pets and sports teams, etc. But people might read them in modest numbers. Anyway, whether readers will or not won't matter to Harlequin, since the authors will pay to be in print and Harlequin will not be responsible for selling these books.

The reason Harlequin can do this at all is that the younger generation of would-be authors expects to pay to publish, not finding it unethical, and is comfortable with the idea of self-publishing, plus expects to self-market. Paying to get published may be the wave of the future. Authors already are expected to pay for their own publicity by the major publishing houses. That has only happened in the last five to ten years; it went from voluntary to mandatory. Will paying for their own editing and printing be the new paradigm? Perhaps.

I guess it all depends on the hopes of the author. Who's to say that if you can self-publish your book and sell 150 copies that it's a failure? In the bad old days, rascally printers charged a fortune and conned you into huge print runs of thousands of copies. Then you were stuck with thousands of unsold copies in your garage. Now your risk is much lower because your initial buy-in is a much smaller dollar figure, and your publicity on the Internet is free. So you arrange to print on demand, or you order a small print run because these are quite economical now, and then you promote it yourself. Thus entirely cutting out the publisher as the middleman.

You will not sell nearly as many copies of your vanity press or self-published book as a conventional publisher can. Authors who imagine that they can outdo the sales of a mass market paperback printing--even a very small one--are in la-la-land. The statistics are against them, as this excellent breakdown of probable costs and sales from the L’esprit d’escalier blog proves.

But even so, what if in the future, all authors self-published? Then conventional publishers would have no authors. This is another reason why publishers are in a panic. They know they can sell more copies of your book than you can, but only if you are willing to come to them. Publishers don’t write books. They edit, produce, and market them to stores, or sell them directly. So it is not surprising that Harlequin and Thomas Nelson and other publishers will continue to investigate offering new versions of the services that as conventional publishers they already do. They have to stay in the game. If the action shifts, they have to go after it.

Many feathers have been ruffled, even though not everyone is free to speak out publicly about Harlequin’s current move. Perhaps ten years from now no one will raise an eyebrow at any of this because publishing will be very different. But today, while the publishing industry is in flux, the prevailing standards and the new standards are rubbing against each other uncomfortably.

Romance or Soap Opera?

2009-11-16T01:08:00.003-05:00

Quick, explain the difference between a romance and a soap opera.

Can’t figure it out? Try a concept from college or high school English. What is the underlying view of the world in a romance, versus a soap opera? (Or a real opera, for that matter?) The world view in a romance is optimistic. Sure, bad stuff happens, but the really awful things usually happen before the story starts, not during it. During the present action of the romance, the heroine is on an upward curve even when she might think she’s hit bottom. Once she meets the hero, no matter how hairy things get, her life is on the path of improvement. And most of the time nothing really bad happens to her during the romance. Or will ever happen to her again, because there is always a happy ending.

Contrast that sunny attitude with a soap opera (or a real opera), in which the world view is much more negative and realistic. In English teacher terms, it is naturalistic. Think about what happens in a soap opera: everything. The kitchen sink and then some. Missing brides, twins who steal each other’s identities, abortions, birth defects, job loss, alcoholism and drug addiction, crimes of all sorts, fatal car accidents, fatal diseases, miracle cures of fatal diseases, and more. The soap opera world is the real world with all of its flaws. There are no holds barred. And it never ends. New plot threads begin as others are being resolved, and there never is a happy ending.

Why is the term soap opera named for opera? (We know it’s named for soap because the original radio sponsors were soap manufacturers.) The answer is because they’re both highly dramatic story types that can turn tragic. Additionally, just as all of the adventures in a soap opera might be taking place in a mythical town like Port Charles in “General Hospital,” most operas, because they were written during periods of heavy censorship, tend also to be transposed from the real world to someplace less identifiable. That can make an opera very romantic, because real world events are softened, or very tragic, because real world events are happening to a symbolic figure. And once we have symbolism, we usually have big tragedy.

Despite all the drama and misery of the soap opera (and the opera), romances today are more optimistic than ever. Why? Because romance heroines no longer are passive. In olden days, a romance heroine had to be modest, chaste, and willing to wait. Her role was to remain pure and hold on until chance informed the hero that any blot on her reputation was an error, or fate brought the hero back to her because he’d finished his daring mission, or the hero finally decided he’d prefer to marry a nice girl instead of an obvious tramp. Or whatever. There always were some feisty heroines who pushed along the course of events to make their own happiness. But mostly, it was up to the hero. Today the heroine of a romance is not passive at all. She acts to improve her situation, or even to save the hero and the world. And she always wins. A romance still ends with a happily ever after.

But surprise, romances used to be much more soapy. I’ve read a lot of romances—mostly antique, but not always—that poured on the suffering in soap opera style. The heroine has lost her money, and must choose between the poor-but-honest man she loves and a rich man whom she doesn’t want to touch her. Or the hero has lost his money and there are many scenes of farewell before circumstances improve by sheer chance. There’s a lot of talking about going to work, but not a lot of working in these stories. But then, the heyday of such soap opera romances seems to have been between the world wars. So maybe they’re terribly out of date and not worth discussing. That must have been a rather depressing time to live. The old order was changing, financial insecurity abounded, and men and women found themselves seeking different lives from those of their parents—wait, it’s just like today.

Well, then. I guess those old soap opera romances are a little more relevant than I had thought. Many were based on rigid social standards that were then in the process of crumbling. For instance, a number of them were about the usually taboo subject of the heroine being in love with a married man. He of course hates his wife, but honor keeps him trapped in the loveless marriage. At the end, some force of nature gets rid of the wife in a manner that keeps both hero and heroine pure. Fatal car accidents abound.

The poverty theme was popular. I can remember a heroine who’d lost her fortune repining about how she could no longer wear silk. She hated how rough cheap clothing felt against her very upper class, refined, sensitive body. As someone who has always hated the feel of silk, I found this amusing. But also kind of sad. As if this heroine, raised on such fine things, had had her feet bound. There was no hope that she could adjust to such common garments because she had super-delicate skin. And her only choices seemed to be rich man’s wife or shopgirl. Naturally, there was a nice-but-dull rich man available to sell herself to. But she really loved the young man who could not support her in the style to which she was accustomed, or who was busy being engaged to some perfectly practical and rather bumptious middle-class girl. One who wasn’t so refined and naturally sensitive as our heroine. And so on.

Was it a lot of hooey? Probably. Authors like Ruby M. Ayres, Denise Robins, Maysie Greig, and Olive Higgins Prouty could ring the changes on this kind of story and drag out the suffering for many chapters. The romantic leads did not merely suffer; they suffered at length. That also seems to be a hallmark of the soap opera. Of course the soap opera romance novel is different from a soap opera because it ends happily. Unlike, say, famous soap opera novels that aren’t romances at all, like Stella Dallas, Madame X, or Back Street. Talk about depressing. Let’s just say that these women do not find a happily ever after.

So now you know what the difference is, and you can impress all your friends.

Give Me Back My Enthusiasm

2009-11-01T09:25:00.003-05:00

There was a time when I enthusiastically bought every contemporary romance I saw in the bookstores. Then, so many publishers decided to cash in on the popularity of these romances that they started publishing huge numbers of them. At one point there were 150 contemporary romances being published a month. More than I could afford to buy. More than I could read comfortably in a month and still have a life. I had to start thinking about the authors. Did I know who they were? Could I trust the new names to have written halfway decent books, or were they just writing limp copycat tales? I got burned many times, which soon made me resist new names and stick with the tried-and-true originators of the genre. And that’s how a genre loses momentum and trails off. The readers lose their enthusiasm and their trust. Eventually, they start looking for something new and different.

Every time a new subgenre of romance builds, we have that enthusiasm, that secret zest when checking out the bookstores. Will there be another book like the one I read last month? Has anybody else figured out that this is what I’m excited about reading? (For that matter, have I?) What’s available? What’s coming? For the paranormal and erotica subgenres, the last several years have been one excitement after another. Vampires. Werewolves. Three-ways! Demons! Men/men & women/women. Succubi. Is it getting hot in here, or is it just Satan showing up as an antagonist? Or have I checked into a bordello? Shapeshifting, here I come. And lately there has been some notice taken of the Amish romances that even Amish women are reading. That’s a different trend because it’s not about more and more sex, or more and more outlandish fantasy worlds. It’s about a safer and cozier world that we’d like to think already exists right here in America.

But neither is quite right for suburban, sometimes urban, sometimes country me. I’m still looking. My major enthusiasm right now seems to be historical novels of the renaissance told from a female point of view. These are the types of stories I read as a teenager, that caused me to fall in love with the Tudor era. They are (usually) historically accurate and about real people. Although sometimes the authors invent twists (Philippa Gregory being the main perpetrator of questionable historical revisions), even these twists tend to be extrapolations of real historical events. Or plausible additions to what is, after all, a very sketchy record of what happened 500 years ago.

Contemporary romance, though, is my first love. These are the stories of today’s women that can be so empowering because they speak directly to situations we might encounter. I keep looking for something new. The Billionaire’s Bought Bride and that ilk are not it. I no longer find the fantasy of the overpowering male—even if the heroine brings him to his knees—much fun. I admire heroines with the strength to fight the good fight, and all. If you want some escapist fantasy, fending off the attentions of a billionaire certainly qualifies. So go for it. But I’m still looking for contemporary romances that offer insights into women’s lives that aren’t so filled with the battle of the sexes. If that’s possible. Chick lit at its best often conveys such possibilities. But when chick lit hit, the same thing happened to it that has happened to so many genres: overkill by the under-interesting writers. The bloom is also off the rose with paranormal. What little enthusiasm I could dredge up about that subgenre has been bludgeoned to death by lengthy battles between nonhumans. Who are these people and why should I care if the half-demons win against the shapeshifters? Or vice versa? Maybe such battles are metaphors for our country’s confused battles against terrorists and worldwide haters. But I am not feeling the romance in the paranormal genre.

I feel as if I am wandering in a very crowded place—the romance shelves of bookstores are spacious and crammed with new releases—without seeing what I want. Enthusiasm. That’s why most of the art I’ve used today doesn’t feature people. Instead, it suggests possibilities. Come on, romance writers and publishers. Try something new.

Set the World on Fire

2009-10-15T11:13:00.004-04:00

I just had an interesting thought. A romance usually is an intimate, even a domestic story. Often, it’s about women who are quite content to be anonymous in their world—known by relatives, friends, and coworkers, but with no ambitions to achieve the kind of significance on the world stage that would lead them to become best buddies, say, with Michelle Obama.

Yet the hero of the romance might be an international player, a famous man who has met the movers and shakers of the world and is known and even reviled by millions for his sharp business dealings. That’s an old-style Harlequin favorite: sheer power with no apologies. American heroes tend to be more PC. But my point is that, except for the occasional romance in which the heroine is a famous actress or model, she is usually a nobody. And she aspires to stay that way, even if she has some ambitions to achieve worldly success by running a business or effecting some important civic change.

Take a look at the Beyoncé photo. Is this a woman who needs a man to champion her because she has been slighted? To tell the world that she ought to have won a certain award? No. She’s at the top of her game, she’s got a billion-dollar smile on her face, and she is the epitome of a powerful woman. And she even radiates niceness, which makes her accessible to a very wide range of people. That’s a good-girl smile on her face, thank you very much.

But she’s not the heroine of a romance, is she? Why not? Because romance heroines usually are not presented as powerful, fully self-actualized women. They more often are shown to be women on the cusp, or women in jeopardy, or women who are lovelorn. Even if they have some measure of success. And often, they are losers who are one step from impoverishment, abuse, or death. Either the hero rescues this kind of heroine and gives her a better life, or knowing the hero empowers the woman to think more of herself, or it all is organic and they raise each other to a happy ever after that includes social and economic security.

Contrast this standard personality range with that of the typical paranormal heroine. Does she want to set the world on fire? You bet. She either has a mission or receives one that is so important that she must risk her life to save herself, her family, her tribe, her city, the world—or even the entire universe. Good versus evil on a big scale. It’s the opposite of the small-picture intimacy of the standard romance. What a vastly more important role the paranormal heroine has to play on the world stage.

In other words, in a paranormal romance, instead of Cinderella, the hard-done-by heroine who waits for a hero to rescue her from her misery, we have the Angelina Jolie-as-Lara-Croft heroine. Or even Jolie herself, carving her own unconventional life from out of some fairly miserable clichés of world celebrity. No wonder people are so fascinated. Powerful women are few and far between on the world stage. Those who openly work their sexual appeal without apology (such as Madonna) are both admired and derided. But they are not ignored. Imagine Madonna as the heroine of a typical paranormal: her best friend has been turned into a vampire and now she has to kick vampire butt to keep the entire town from turning into a vampire nursery. All she has are her stilettos (both knives and heels, of course), her incisive understanding of men (you go, girl), and maybe a hunky, leather-clad, semi-undead guy who’s hot for her (yeah). Is she going to kick vampire butt? You betcha.

Do you see why I am suddenly excited by the subtext of these paranormal romances? These typically are stories in which the heroine effects change directly because of her own powers. She’s not solely dependent on the strength of the hero to fight the bad guys. Even though she and the hero may be on the same team, she’s seen as a powerful member, not a weakling who has been brought along via the hero’s strength.

Of course most paranormal romances take the form of uphill battles in which negative imagery abounds. The outcome of a war between shapeshifters and werewolves and demons is never certain, or even (if the writer is doing a series) permanent. But the heroine is committed to the importance of the fight, and she is a key soldier. Unlike the standard sword-and-sorcery cover of years ago (epitomized in the original Star Wars movie poster), the man in a paranormal romance is not the all-powerful figure with the woman at his feet. (Considering that Luke was a tyro who needed Han’s help to do anything, that original image was a lie even then.) Nor is it the other way around. The hero of a paranormal has not been neutered or made weak simply to produce the effect that the heroine is powerful. It’s the real thing: each person has powers that contribute. We need a new visual for that. Currently, the covers of paranormal romances do not usually show men at all. But these stories are not about a female-only world. Paranormal romance plots are not resolved by practice of the domestic arts. Except as wicca can be so characterized (after all, magic spells are recipes), the heroine can’t bake a pie or nurse a sick child or perform other classic womanly tasks to win the day in a paranormal romance. She has to be a full actor on the big stage. She has to set the world on fire.

My Quest for (a) Romance

2009-10-01T00:04:00.005-04:00

When I used to read thirty romances a month (yes, I really did), I knew exactly which stores had the newest books, and what day of the month they were delivered. And I knew which books had been hanging around for months, and which were hot off the presses. I’m a little out of practice now, because I have a tendency to browse online. I read excerpts and reviews. If I find a book I’m interested in, I usually buy it online or—don’t hate me, fellow writers—see if there’s a nearby library system from which I can borrow it.

Recently I was on a mission to find a contemporary romance to read. I've been hearing on other sites that contemporary romances are falling out of fashion and losing market share. I wanted to find out if that was true. Since I didn’t have time for leisurely online shopping, I thought that I would be most efficient if I went to my nearby book outlets, to check out what they had.

There was no point in checking out the biggest romance publishers, because they always have space in their publishing programs for contemporary romances. Some even have whole lines of same. Reading one of theirs would not give me a sense of where the market is going. It takes a lot of time for a big publisher to change gears. No paranormals, either. Only a straight contemporary romance would do. You’d think it would be easy. But, constricted as I was by the requirements of my quest, I was soon in the romance reader’s version of hell: Books everywhere, and nothing I wanted to read.

To my surprise, I had to visit six stores to find even a few possibles. Six stores. Two were book superstores, two were big box stores, and the last two were a grocery and a drug store. You might think that I should have gone straight to the big bookstores, but actually there was a method to my madness. Bookstores carry back stock. They carry reissues, because they have lots of space. They can keep older titles on the shelf longer than a small venue can. I assumed that it would be easier to find a brand new romance at a store with a very limited area for books. That idea was clever enough, but I finally realized that it would never work, and here’s why: that rumor about the contemporary romance being out of fashion is true. And smaller book sections only have whatever is at the height of fashion, because, duh, that’s what is most likely to sell quickly. Bestsellers by mainstream authors, or by romance authors like Nora Roberts who have gone mainstream, dominated those shelves.

I could have bought any number of historical romances featuring women semi-garbed in great sweeping pieces of shiny cloth. But no, that wasn’t my mission. I almost succeeded at a big box store. Set the Dark on Fire by Jill Sorenson says on the front cover that it is “A Novel,” but the back cover sales copy calls it “erotic romantic suspense.” As you can see, it’s a clinch cover, but with lots of purple swirling around, indicating that this story is full of action as well as passion. It sounded just fine until I read the author’s foreword, in which she thanked experts for their expertise about rattlesnake bites. Oh, ick. I kept looking. Show No Fear by Marliss Melton was a serious candidate until I realized that the hero and heroine would be slogging through a depressing and deadly South American jungle, dodging vicious bands of quasi-military types. Nah. Not for me.

Doggedly, I continued to pursue my goal. I picked up Sliding Home, by Kate Angell, but even though I love baseball, I don’t usually enjoy romances about "bad boy" star athletes. (In fact, the best baseball scene I’ve ever read in a book was in Chaim Potock’s The Chosen. Really. Those Yeshiva boys kick butt on the baseball field.) I looked at Lucky in Love by Carolyn Brown several times, but it was a ranch book, and I wasn’t terribly interested.

By now you’ll have realized that I was being very, very choosy. I’ve played this game before, and so have you. Bored with the same old same old, I’ve looked restlessly for...Something Different. For years I might have been perfectly happy reading whatever was the most popular subgenre flooding the bookshelves. But then, I’d get a yen to read...Something Different. That’s how I found some extremely interesting books. Books that it took guts for the authors to write and faith for the publishers to attempt to sell. Maybe an unusual time-period historical when historicals were in one of their frequent troughs. (They seem to be doing fine right now. There are plenty to choose from.) Or maybe I would have picked up a paranormal when that was still a subgenre-to-be. When it was daring. Or I could have found a contemporary romance about an older woman with a subplot about a lesbian cowgirl (I did read that one; cool book).

I will be frank and admit that I have zero interest in paranormal romances featuring vampires, werewolves, fairies no matter how they’re spelled, elves, Keebler elves, ogres, demons, angels, guardians, shapeshifters...I’m getting exhausted here, and needlessly alienating those of you who love a rousing vampire tale. So let me explain that I am not interested in tales of the-undead-and-the-dread because mostly they operate at night. And I am a serious lover of sunlight. I don’t even like to go into my basement during the daytime because I’ll miss some daylight. All those dark nights in dark paranormal books just don’t do it for me. I keep thinking that if they’d just tuck into bed around midnight instead of cruising dangerous bars, they wouldn’t have to fight off the undead so often.

I almost gave in and bought an Amish romance, since I've heard so much about them. But most of them seemed to be historicals. And nothing called.

Then, finally, I hit paydirt. I found a book whose title tickled my fancy: What Would Jane Austen Do? by Laurie Brown. It’s a time-travel that involves the modern-day heroine with the real Jane Austen. Is it a contemporary romance? A mystery? A historical? I don’t know yet. But I want to read it. There wasn't anything else that was brand new and yet fulfilled that yen for a thoroughly modern point of view and the potential for romance. I'm hoping for kisses and a happy ending. I'll let you know how it turns out.

As my extended shopping trip proved, something is up with contemporary romances. Yes, they're out there, but they are currently being crowded off the shelves by other romance subgenres. And many of the offerings tend to feel like retreads; you know, "been there, done that." Which makes me wonder what happens next with contemporary romance as a genre. Because obviously, women want to read romances based on their real (contemporary) lives. But we must be at one of those moments when something key in the mix has to change. I wonder what it will be?

Amish Romances are Still Fiction

2009-09-15T00:56:00.002-04:00

Recently the Wall Street Journal had an article describing the boom in Amish romances. These are not romances written by the Amish for the Amish. They are written by the non-Amish and meant for a general romance audience that does not want sex in their romances and likes the idea of a simple life in an ordered society. But it turns out that these stories also are being read (under the covers) by the Amish, the article claims. Which is a humorous idea, but it also leads to a tough situation for the authors. They have the double burden of writing good stories and also being extremely accurate about the details of this strict agrarian sect. Being sloppy with research can be a big turn off to a reader and it is a fact of life that the very people drawn to a particular story tend to be the ones who already know something about its topic. But because the Amish themselves are reading them, these romances are getting scrutiny from experts. And some are already decrying the inaccuracies that populate these stories. Ouch. Okay, maybe there aren’t a lot of real-life buggy accidents to create meet cutes. But the Amish are still reading these books. And the general romance public is, too. Even though we’re getting a somewhat misleading picture of Amish life, and going along with it.

But then, we always do. Huge inaccuracies happen all the time with movies and television. I particularly dislike the gift whose box is not wrapped shut and whose top simply can be lifted off. Nobody in real life wraps a gift like this. Another glaring inaccuracy that happens a huge amount of the time is that in movies and television, the women who are major characters often are not seen carrying purses. Come on, the hallmark of the adult woman is the carrying of a purse. Young girls beg their mothers to buy them these objects long before they are expected to carry ID or money, and can be seen modeling them happily on family shopping trips. So for an adult woman in a movie to not carry a purse is not only inaccurate, it looks...odd. (I’m perfectly willing to concede that superspy women and shapeshifter women who go around in black leather and stilettos and carry guns, knives, or swords would not carry purses. But most women in Western society do.)

We’re used to the inaccuracies in movies and television. But we still expect fiction to be based on facts. Yet Philippa Gregory’s bestselling, fictionalized novels of the lives of real historical figures of the Tudor period have all depended on stuff she totally made up. In The Other Boleyn Girl, Gregory uses lots of solid historical fact, but freely departs from confirmed history whenever it pleases her. I don’t think it’s a secret by now that she strongly implies that Anne Boleyn and her brother George committed incest to produce her last, miscarried pregnancy. Nothing in history confirms this idea, other than the outrageous accusations against Anne Boleyn when King Henry VIII wanted her gone from his life. It’s a crazy idea to begin with, considering how public the lives of public figures really were. (Right down to the intimacies of personal hygiene.) But Gregory tells her tale in such a riveting manner that much is forgiven. When she pulled a similar trick with Katherine of Aragon, however, readers did not go for it. But she gets props for daring to even suggest that this pillar of rectitude was not one after all. (Hmm...back then, women wore headgear. Just like Amish women today.)

So what are we to make of yet another subgenre of romance (we’re all for those, of course) that depends on questionably accurate facts about a relatively secretive sect? Are we creating a fake Amish culture that romance readers will now know the boundaries of, but that is not true to reality? To go along with other beloved clichés such as the rock star romance, in which the amazingly non-promiscuous male rock star falls for the amazingly ignorant and innocent teenage fan? Or the sheikh books, in which the amazingly Western-thinking Arab guy does not act like a total domineering jerk with the spunky American girl used to her personal freedom? Apparently, we will now have the new cliché of the amazingly broad-thinking, hunky Amish guy with his buggy who doesn’t mind marrying a modern woman who has had a varied sexual past? And just how likely is this? But then, how likely is it that the Billionaire will want his Secretary to Have His Secret Baby? Not likely at all, which is why these romances are fiction.

The truth is, fiction may be fact based, but it always is a riff on a reality, not the reality itself. Fiction is the embodiment of possibilities taken to extremes. Romances in particular take one simple thought, such as, “Gee, that Amish guy walking by me in this tourist town is muscular,” and turn it into an entire string of implausible yet interesting events involving a woman yearning for love and ending in a happily ever after for two appealing people. Nice going. That’s why most of us, even when we recognize inaccuracies, shrug and let them go by. We’re reading fiction, after all.

Timeless Romance: It’s Not Old, It’s Art

2009-08-31T20:39:00.003-04:00

Often I post book covers to illustrate this blog, but today, we’re dipping way back into the past, and I’ve got gorgeous, vintage sheet music. Before there were records, let alone CDs, mp3s, and so on, even before there was radio, there was sheet music. Americans entertained themselves by playing the piano—the must-have home possession of a century ago—and they bought sheet music by the millions. That’s why, despite World War paper drives and epidemic scares requiring that used (and possibly virus-carrying) paper be destroyed, these vintage works of art are now easily available. But most people are unaware of just how attractive these covers are. Take “One Alone,” for instance, from “The Desert Song,” a very popular 1926 operetta by Sigmund Romberg. It’s comic book style art, a line drawing contrasting with a brightly colored background. We’ve got a serene, boyish sheik, and a cute, flapper girl who looks surprised at being carried off in his arms. Charming, and it deliberately sends a message that this story is played strictly for romance and fun. In fact, the plot is all about a Clark Kent type whose secret identity is the dashing robe-clad hero.

The cover for “Diane” is a close-up of two people desperately holding onto each other (actress Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, very big stars in their day). Their embrace points clearly to the melodrama of this movie’s pre-Hays censorship plot, which involves prostitution and lots of misery. “Diane” is a song I don’t know, from a movie I’ve never heard of, “7th Heaven.” But once I got to the chorus, “Smile for me, my Diane” the song was familiar. It’s only an 82-year-old song. Why shouldn’t it be familiar? Yeah, irony intended. My tweener godchild has never heard of it, of course. The television variety shows that kept those songs alive are long gone, although probably some cabaret singers still sing them.

I’ve never been a Bing Crosby fan, but just look at the beauty of “Moonstruck,” in which he stands holding long-forgotten actress Mary Carlisle, who leans back trustingly in his arms. It’s from an infinitely forgettable 1933 movie called “College Humor,” which has a typical college football hijinks kind of story. But what a romantic photograph, in a page so delicately designed and colored that it looks like a painting.

Some songs were published without any photos or drawings of people. Look at this cover for “How Deep is the Ocean” for elegance of composition. Perhaps because it was written by Irving Berlin, the greatest American songwriter of the 20th century, there was no need to use people, whether drawn or photographed. All these covers share one vital element: they are romantic. In different ways, it’s true. “One Alone” is lightly and pretty. “Diane” has a passionate clinch. “Moonstruck” is more subtly suggestive about romance and passion. “How Deep is the Ocean” asks one to enter a romantic world of simplicity, represented by the stark, affecting design.

The popularity of sheet music (and pianos) declined as radio and the movies took over as central entertainment in American life. But regardless of the fate of sheet music, and the old songs, the romance implied by the beautiful artwork on these sheet music covers is timeless.

Is Romance Only for Old People?

2009-08-14T12:51:00.002-04:00

A new humor book, How Not to Act Old, strongly suggests that only Old People use terms like “making love” and “sleeping with.” Young People say “having sex,” and “f**king.” Yikes. And that’s how they think, too. It’s just sex to them. Not love or romance.

The book, by Pamela Redmond Satran, includes a guide to how different generations approach disclosures about their sexual behavior. For instance, teenagers and college students typically share online and on Twitter all the details of their sexual encounters (yes, all). The older the generation is, the less is shared.

This is a broad generalization, to be sure. I can remember a girl in college who insisted on having a discussion with me about nipple color. (I guess she was ahead of her time.) And over the years, I have known people whose sexual behavior was far wilder or far more restrained than the supposed norm of my generation. So it is reasonable to assume that whatever your sexual behavior and your habits of sharing or not sharing, you might not match exactly what Satran claims your generation does. Come to think of it, I had a chat with an older woman years ago about the difficulties involved in performing oral sex when you wear dentures.

Oh, ick. But we’re safe now. According to Satran, people under thirty never read past the third paragraph of anything, and they hate details. So let’s talk about romance, shall we? No matter how many times people claim that romance is dead and love does not exist, only sex, we know that is not true. Hollywood celebrities may not bother to marry, because there’s a lot of money at stake each time they do. But normal people do. And we don’t do it to have someone support us, thank you very much, or cook for us, or whatever. We do it because we are in love. While it’s probably true that every generation has its touchstone romantic gestures (passionate billets doux having given way to passionate e-mails), basic romantic behavior does not change. And a gift of flowers still seems charming and even unusual today.

But what about romance? How can there be romance when people might meet and have sex that very night? Obviously, the romance is all in the relationship growth, as it always has been. Relationships are made before, during, and after sexual behavior. Eye contact across a room, in a repressive society. Or a formal visit, chaperoned, and a few guarded words that express so much more. A date that ends with both people still liking each other and wanting to see more of each other. That could be the first night, or the first morning after. And then there is always the transcending power of lovemaking itself. Oh, call it sex, it’s a shorter word. My point is that anyone who has ever had sex will tell you (if you don’t already know this, and I hope you do) that there can be a moment during sex when something happens that goes way beyond one’s nerves getting a shot of excitement. It transcends the physical and crosses over to the emotional or spiritual. (I’m not picky about labels.) And the major purpose of romance is to find that person with whom the sex has the potential to be more than just sex, so that every day of your life, you are living happily with an added dimension of intimacy between you and that other who is also part of you. It’s called love.

Oh, sure, romance is customarily supposed to end in marriage and babies and perpetuating civilization. But people would not look for romance so desperately if they were not aware on some level that it is possible to achieve a bond with another human being that goes beyond exchanging rings and bodily fluids. So here’s to romance, which can never be merely the province of Old People or Young People, but is always the hope of All People.

Fascinating Covers, Tempting Books

2009-07-31T14:32:00.004-04:00

I’ve always been a sucker for a good cover. At the recent Romance Writers of America annual national conference in Washington, DC, I met or picked up the promotional pieces from several authors who have been lucky enough to get strikingly attractive covers for their latest books. Their book promotional material—most of it printed at their own personal expense, by the way—simply leapt out at me.

The combination of colors, for instance, in Your Magic or Mine, by Ann Macela, was both eerie and just right for a book styled a paranormal romance. Green historically has been the color of weird stuff—starting with Frankenstein, later the Incredible Hulk, and in between, all kinds of comic books with supernatural elements. Of course, sometimes, the comics didn’t even bother to color things green, as witness this startling cover of Strange Adventures from many decades ago, with a giant hand about to cause serious trouble. It doesn’t have to be green to be menacing, does it?

On the other hand (ha, ha), the cover of Highway to Hell, by Rosemary Clement-Moore, is very appropriately dominated by the oranges that suggest hellfire and big trouble for the two teenage girls on a road trip. This one’s a young adult novel, part of a series in which Maggie Quinn finds herself fighting evil. There may not be much—or any— romance in it. But the line art style signals that humor should abound, and the breezy feel of the cover says this one ought to be fun. I’m sold.

The cover of Anna DeStefano’s newest, Dark Legacy, signals perfectly that this is going to be paranormal romance with a strong romantic suspense element. And so it is. This cover also would be fine for promoting a straight Gothic romance, if such existed anymore. I have to mention that Anna also attached chocolate to her covers at the conference, a sure draw for hungry romance writers roaming the public rooms of a large metropolitan hotel in search of contracts, contacts, and inspiration. Thanks, Anna!

Dragonbound, by Jade Lee, is another cover that is a happy confluence of color and design that grabbed my attention. The strong reds and browns contrast well with the heroine’s green gown and the green sky. Then the multiple touches of white and yellow highlight the hero and draw the eye down to the heroine below—pulling the reader right into the book. Just the way a cover should. Cover designers know that once a potential reader has opened the book, the chances are good for a sale. I picked up the bookmark with this cover on it instead of many others that were available. Buyers at bookstores are likely to pick up this book for the same reason, the striking cover.

And then there is Love’s Pursuit, by Siri Mitchell. This is religious romance, featuring a heroine from a “rigid community where appearance is everything” who “begins to question the rules and regulations of her childhood faith.” And, oh, yes, there are two men interested in her. The cover suggests Amish or Mennonite, or even Puritan. Since the promotional copy does not give the time period, this could be a historical romance set nearly four hundred years ago, or a contemporary in Pennsylvania or Utah, I suppose. The cover is a tease. But it’s a very effective one. The cap loosely sitting on the heroine’s head, and her gloriously messy red hair signal that rebellion and the quest for individual happiness, not to mention passion, will likely be elements of this romance. And it’s a beautiful cover, of an idealized, not-quite-real young woman whose eyebrows have been plucked and shaped despite the rigidity of her circumstances. Interesting dualities, and just begging for me to find this book and look inside.

This is what good cover art does for me. It lures me in, makes me ask questions, and tempts me to look for answers inside a book. The lush colors and the polished artwork appeal on a sensual level. They promise that inside, the words themselves will deliver what the cover promises.

The Best of Times?

2009-07-15T08:45:00.006-04:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way...
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 - 1870)

This is a wonderful time for romance novels, and for books in general. Sales of romances are way, way up. In recessionary times, cheap entertainment always does well. The ebook world has exploded. I know people who do all their reading on Amazon Kindles, or Sony Readers. I know a man who is making a fortune doing Print on Demand of books in the public domain. I know someone whose zombie stories are taking off at last, fueled by the (to me) puzzling love of zombies in today’s young generation. Even though people keep worrying that kids don’t read, the Harry Potter and Twilight phenomena have proved that they do read what they like, that they are still interested in good stories, well told. Or even bad stories, poorly told, that strike a chord.

This is a terrible time for romance novels, and for books in general. Sales of printed books in general are way, way down. Publishers are laying off dedicated, experienced staff. Some are closing shop completely. The future of the conventional publisher is in doubt. The future of the conventional “dead tree” book is in doubt, also. Thousands of trained editors with deep experience in helping birth good writing are scrambling to get a toehold in whatever new media will fully replace the old, dying media.

Although movies are flourishing because they are cheap entertainment, this is a tough time for the arts. In an economic downturn that affects people of all economic levels, the typical patronage of the arts has dried up. The gifts that are the lifeblood of the arts are not available. As a result, opera and repertory companies all over America are being forced to tighten their belts, drop planned productions, furlough employees, and, sadly, in some cases declare bankruptcy. The Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, is auctioning the handsome Art Deco-inspired costumes and sets from their recent production of Noel Coward’s “Design for Living” on eBay. It’s like the world is coming to an end.

And where is the place of romance in this new world? Women are no longer sitting on cushions sewing a fine seam, waiting for a knight in shining armor on a white steed to come knocking at the castle door. Women are on the battlefield themselves, in all areas of our culture. They may still need to break down the boardroom door of the big corporations, but they are on their way, even as the classic corporation crumbles and begs the Federal government for support. A Latino woman, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, is a nominee for the Supreme Court. What kind of man can be a strong hero when women are already such heroines?

Yet kick-ass heroines who fight hordes of demons seem to always find a guy who has complementary demonic powers, or who is a vampire, or a werewolf, or whatever, who wants to spend time with her despite (or because of) her demonic tattoos, her succubus powers, her vampiric tendencies, or worse. It’s just becoming difficult to tell who the good guys are.

Except that it’s not. The good guys are always the men with hearts, the men who are willing to risk everything to help the heroine save the universe. Or multiple universes. The heroines are always women with hearts, too, who are willing to risk their lives to do the right thing, even when the path forward is confusing and filled with pain. And despite all the darkness and misery inherent in an age in which vampires and demonic possession tales sell romances, we have comedy, too, as witness Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Not only is Fitzwilliam Darcy the hero of many straight romantic fantasies written today, but he is proving himself to be a man for all seasons, dealing effectively with the zombies who dare to invade the proper evening party that Elizabeth Bennet was only mildly enjoying. In short, heroes are everywhere.

Now, I admit it, I would rather not have my romance served up with blood splashing everywhere. But apparently, many of today’s romance readers are made of sterner stuff. Which is pretty amazing considering that for the past few decades, girls have been brought up to be excessively girly, dressed in pink, white, and lavender, living in princess bedrooms, and being taught to show off their bodies in a sexy manner at a very early age. The result? The kick-ass, tramp stamp heroine whose wardrobe appears to be dark tank tops and black leather pants. The heroine of Destined for an Early Grave has added stilettos to the mix. And notice that she’s got a navel ring, too.

The best of times, the worst of times...romance is all around us, surviving even in confusing times.

The Big Deal about Epublishing and the RWA

2009-06-30T10:32:00.007-04:00

The RWA is the Romance Writers of America, a 10,000-member-strong writers organization that maternally tries to look out for the welfare of its members. When epublishing started out, only a few years ago, the ethics, business behavior, and capital backing of some epublishers were shaky—to say the least. Some epublishers were downright crooks, soaking writers enormous fees for supposed editorial or production costs. Others were merely incompetents, who couldn’t figure out how to publish a professional product or make a profit, and left writers with their rights tied up in bankruptcy courts. Still others were run by individuals who looked upon the writers as belonging to them, body and soul. They practiced the tactics of harassment, shaming, and Internet flaming to keep their writers hewing to the party line. And the only epublished authors making significant money seemed to be the ones writing erotica.

In this atmosphere, it was no wonder that the RWA took a dim view of epublishers. That dim view was warranted, and still is in the case of some epublishers. But a lot has happened in the past year or so to change the face of publishing.

It is a lot easier to sell erotica or any other kind of romance on the Internet than in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. I can remember the scorn with which I was treated years ago when I bought some mild Regency romances at Charles Scribner’s upper-crust bookstore on 5th Avenue in New York. (Not too upper crust to sell such things, you’ll note.) The clerk, a young man of my generation, wrote on the charge slip that I had bought three books and two romances. As if a romance was not legitimately a book. (I’ve told this story before, so please excuse me if the number of books and romances has changed. The effect of the experience remains the same.) You can bet that a woman who wants to buy erotica does not want to subject herself to the modern version of that same scornful attitude. We want to read the books, not be judged for our tastes. The Internet makes a perfect marketplace for whatever we want to read: we get no attitude from an etailer. Then there is the privacy issue. Printed books bought online still get delivered by the postman or the UPS lady, and neighbors or the family may see them. An ebook is downloaded directly to a reading device or a computer. The reader thus has complete privacy about her reading tastes and the frequency with which she indulges them. This is the number one reason that erotica sells so well to women on the Internet. But so do many other kinds of books.

Once the inevitable failures in epublishing made their glaring errors, other epublishers arose who took note of them and did not follow in their lame, corrupt, or unprofessional footsteps. We now have epublishers who have been in the conventional publishing game for years, and know the ethics of the business, and follow them. We also have epublishers who have weathered the storm of the first shakeouts in this new field. The successful epublishing programs of some companies have given newcomers a paradigm they can follow for success. And now there are more epublishers around whose focus is not limited to erotica, who in fact publish a broad range of romance-oriented novels.

Has epublishing finally become respectable? Almost. The plain fact is that in the past year or so, conventional media have been dying. Newspapers as we know them are on their last legs, dying from lack of circulation, not just lack of ads. Magazines (except Oprah and Brides) have been losing ad revenue, their lifeblood. Have you noticed how thin most magazines are today? Network television is on the ropes, competing with cable stations for a smaller and smaller audience. Who gets their news from ABC, NBC, or CBS at dinnertime anymore? And people in Japan are reading manga and novels on their cell phones.

But sales of romances are way, way up. Print romances. But ebooks, too. As a generation of romance readers who grew up with computers and the Internet starts to have buying power, more and more, they are turning almost exclusively to the Internet for their entertainment, just as they turn to it for everything else in their day. It won’t be long before the vast majority of us who like to stay near the cutting edge of technology carry the kind of phone that is directly linked to the Internet, whether an iPhone or a BlackBerry, or whatever. Police detective Dick Tracy’s wristwatch radio, that marvel of early 20th century fantasy, is almost a reality. I’m not the first one to note this.

Meanwhile, the RWA, being a very large organization that has always been heavily into bureaucracy, is finding it hard to change with the times. More and more of the members want the RWA to help them decide what constitutes legitimate, trustworthy epublishing. But that is hard to do since the RWA has taken a complicated stance on epublishers that essentially blocks startups from coming to RWA national conferences and pitching their programs. And blocks RWA members from educating themselves about new publishers by meeting them and seeing what they have to say at a writers conference. HarperCollins or Harlequin is free to come and announce a new epublishing program and be subjected to instant scrutiny by the members, but Jill Nobody from Peoria is not.

Here we get into the nitty gritty. A major brouhaha has developed because of this post by Diedre Knight, which drew many responses from writers, plus this post by RWA president Diane Pershing in reply. Now a survey is floating around various romance-writing-oriented sites and RWA local chapter e-mail loops. The RWA has issued a stern notice that this is not an official survey, since just anybody could answer multiple times. Meanwhile, within the RWA, since their annual meeting is in two weeks, a proxy fight is happening. Votes are being gathered by individuals who want to make the RWA change its position on who is and who is not an RWA-recognized epublisher. I won’t go into the mind-numbing details. Follow the links and you can find out for yourself.

As much as this might seem like a tempest in a teapot, it’s not. It’s the kettle boiling over because the face of publishing is changing, dramatically and very quickly. Many new writers are not even considering submitting their work to any kind of publisher. They are going straight to self-publishing, through the many Internet printers such as iUniverse and Lulu. And then they self-promote their novels via their web sites, blogs, Facebook, or Twitter. Meanwhile, others are starting up their own mini-publishing companies, using the Print on Demand (POD) paradigm so they don’t need significant capital. MyRomanceStory.com has turned its graphic romance novellas into ebooks downloadable to the iPhone, and is also publishing paperbacks. And there are many other versions of publishing being developed even as I speak. We are fast reaching the stage of publishing becoming a free-for-all. Meanwhile, the RWA, a slowly moving ocean liner that can’t adjust its course easily, has to somehow navigate its way through all the flotsam and jetsam of this crazy ocean of new publishing possibilities. The problem seems to be that the RWA leadership is so conservative that it may not even notice the big icebergs ahead.

It Isn't Fair

2009-06-15T22:27:00.005-04:00

It isn’t fair. The most interesting and romantic book covers these days are not on romances at all. They’re on science fiction and fantasy novels.

Take The Dark Reaches, for instance, by Kristin Landon. There’s a hunky guy on the cover, wearing a long leather coat, a subdued ponytail, and a stalwart expression. He’s got muscles, but he’s not showing them off. He’s even allowing the heroine to put a cautionary hand on his arm. Or is it a touch to reassure herself that she has backup? Or is she holding him back from striking out at an enemy they both need to scope out first? And is she’s going to do the analyzing? I don’t know, but I do know he’s hot. Alas, this is not a romance. The spine says science fiction, and the inside front and back cover descriptions leave no doubt that this is a space thriller. Sure, there’s some love involved, but the main story is about intersteller something-or-other. Not romance. Sigh.

Or what about this one, Red Gold Bridge by Patrice Sarath? It’s billed as fantasy, but it has a cover worthy of an old Gothic novel. There’s a menacing-looking castle in the background, some mist rising, and a heroine with a horse, another totem often found in historical Gothics. There’s love in this story, too, but again, it takes a back seat to the adventure on another world in another society. Wah.

Maybe I’m lazy, but my idea of escapist fiction does not include learning a bunch of newly made up words that describe some other world where Things Aren’t Going Well. That’s adventure, not romance. I’d rather have the romance. But it seems as if these days half of the romance covers feature women whose clothing is in imminent danger of falling off, and the other half are some bland woman with a bland guy. Examples of same: After the Kiss, by Suzanne Enoch, and Dancing in the Moonlight, by Raeanne Thayne. You might think these last two are very different, but try switching the titles with the art, and you’ll see that they’re simply two sides of the same coin.

What frustrates me is that the best romance covers are on science fiction and fantasy books. The most meticulous attention to illustrative detail, the most romantic settings, the most achingly beautiful colors in the skies, the most intriguing—they’re all being painted in the service of stories that are not romances. These stories may have some romantic relationships, but the romance is not front and center. Meanwhile, romance covers are simply generic. Historical: half-dressed. Contemporary: Wholesome everywoman. On the one hand, it’s good to know what you’re buying. But on the other, isn’t it better to wonder a little? To be intrigued?

In Defense of Women

2009-05-31T21:49:00.003-04:00

In Defense of Women is a sly polemic written by H. L. Mencken almost 100 years ago, basically accusing women of trapping men into marriage because, according to him, we are much smarter than men but they are our economic main chance. Okay, simmer down. Times have changed since 1918. Women did get the vote. We did permeate the public world and are still pressing on to make further gains in government, the sciences, and other previously male-only or male-centric realms. We routinely work outside the home, and we no longer have to marry to assure ourselves of a secure economic future.

But such was not the case nearly 100 years ago, although Mencken points out that by then the situation had improved from 100 years prior to his time. He claimed that previously, a woman “could imagine nothing more favorable to her than marriage; even marriage with a fifth-rate man was better than no marriage at all.” And isn’t that exactly what Charlotte Lucas says to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, written about 100 years before Mencken’s book? Charlotte marries the idiotic toady, Mr. Collins, rather than remain a spinster. Perhaps our modern love affair with Jane Austen persists in part because Elizabeth, speaking for Austen, is so disapproving of this marriage of economic convenience. As was Mencken 100 years later, when such marriages were already going out of fashion. And as are we today, when women who marry for money are despised as gold-diggers.

Still, it stings to read his claim that women were intent on trapping men into matrimony for the sole purpose of attaining economic security. Was the accusation true? Yes and no. It was probably as true as the counter-accusation that men married women just to have someone to cook and clean for them and produce offspring. Even 100 years ago, most men and women in our society married in the belief that they loved or admired the other person. Romantic novels had already existed for over 100 years by then. (The first English novel was a romance, remember.) Further, 100 years ago there were artistic archetypes in magazines of handsome young men and women to dream about. There were romantic songs. Movies existed and matinee idols were just around the corner. Even more significantly, marriage no longer involved a dowry from the bride’s family. Most men married for the woman herself, not for the money or land she would bring him. Did women marry for the man himself, or for the economic security? Sadly, because men had more economic options than women did, there’s a good chance that some women settled, as Charlotte Lucas did a century before. But even Charlotte Lucas acknowledged that a marriage based on true affinity would have been preferable. The problem with settling was that in an era in which divorce was uncommon and created a heavy social stigma, marriage was for life, and there doubtless were some unhappy surprises after the vows had been said.

Nearly 100 years after Mencken wrote In Defense of Women, many changes have occurred. Women don’t need to marry for economic security; they can create it themselves. Men don’t need to marry to have children; they can just live with a girlfriend who is willing to have babies without marrying. The microwave and commercially prepared meals mean that no one has to know how to cook. In between then and now, women and men spent nearly 100 years lightly chaperoned and going on dates that were essentially chaste in intent. A party or a dance. Dinner and a movie. Not so today, if the reports in the media are to be believed. If people like each other at all, they may end up in bed almost immediately. Only afterwards do they begin to decide if their relationship has any future. Or even if it’s a romantic relationship at all. Ironically, there is nothing new about this. It mimics the common situation of the past (whether 100 or 1,000 years ago) in which men and women courted formally or perhaps did not even meet before the wedding. Only after the marriage ceremony did they begin to learn about the real character of the new spouse. The relationship began once the wedding feast was over.

How, then, are we to judge Mencken’s dispatch from the past? Is the marriage of entrapment, made for economic purposes, dead and gone? Yes. Mencken’s outrage appears pointless in these days of men and women who live together without ever marrying, and households supported by the woman’s income, not the man’s. In fact, the conditions that Mencken observed appear to have been merely a stop along the way towards what we have today. Social mores quickly evolved even during his lifetime, and the carefully chaperoned young woman who tricked a man into marriage by putting on a demure act simply disappeared. Men and women dated freely throughout the twentieth century. More and more, they married entirely to please themselves, even crossing ethnic, social, and religious boundaries, to say nothing of not judging a potential spouse by economic standards. Of course there still are people willing to marry for money, both men and women, and even those willing to trap someone into marriage. But these instances are rare in our society today.

Is there anything to be learned from Mencken’s opinion of women? Yes, but probably not what he intended. What Mencken reveals by condemning women while seeming to admire them is that men also chafed under the old system. Modern courtship may be confusing, infuriating, and messy. But there is more freedom and honesty on both sides. Marriage has not been discarded as an ideal, but its main purpose today is seen as romantic, not material. People today look to marry their true love or soul mate, not a good provider or a good cook or baby maker. That nobody has to write supposed defenses of women anymore is proof that we’ve come a long way. But “He’s Just Not That Into You” and the current Jane Austen mania suggest that we’d like the courtship dance to be even more clear cut than it presently is. If that’s possible.

Confused About Paranormal Romances? Me, Too

2009-05-14T09:47:00.003-04:00

Paranormal romances are big sellers these days. But it’s hard to know what is and what is not a paranormal romance, especially because there seems to be a fine line between that definition and urban fantasy, another very hot subgenre. For instance, Lara Adrian’s Ashes of Midnight is published by Dell as a paranormal romance (it says so on the spine). It’s got a bad marriage and a lot of vampires and other beasts doing vast amounts of killing. But it does end with a male and a female happy together. Humans? Not exactly.

Moon Burn, by Alisa Sheckley (who has also written comic books and some chick lit novels as Alisa Kwitney) does not indicate that it is a paranormal romance. It is from the Del Ray imprint from Ballantine Books, which is generally considered a fantasy and science fiction line. It seems to be a straightforward, character-driven werewolf story, and again, it ends with a male and a female happy together. So why isn’t it labeled a paranormal romance?

Eve of Darkness by S. J. Day has been categorized as urban fantasy by Tor on its spine. The heroine starts off surrounded by Satan’s minions, and things go downhill from there. But by the end, she and her lover are going on a date. Hmm...does this qualify as paranormal romance?

And then there is Norse Code by Greg van Eekhout, which is another Ballantine book, but this time from its Spectra line, which used to be a Bantam imprint. (I love that title, by the way; it’s genius.) Norse Code takes Norse mythology and runs a straight fantasy with it, starring a heroine who looks just like the other heroines from these books. But, as is common in a story written by a man, it starts with a man’s point of view in a prologue, and only then begins the heroine’s journey. So, always, there is the sense that no matter what she does, she is clueless about the true significance of her actions. There’s a very good chance she is a mere puppet in the hands of experienced schemers.

As you can see, the covers of three out of the four books are remarkably similar. They’ve each got the same dark-haired girl showing a lot of flesh—but not cleavage. Ashes of Midnight has a clinch cover, a little bit of scrollwork, and a completely boring, empty street. It’s the only one that visually advertises a romance element.

Here’s something different, just to conuse me even more. Night’s Rose, by Annaliese Evans, is billed on its spine as a historical paranormal romance, but on the author’s web site, she calls it a historical urban fantasy. And the first page deals with ogres who eat people, bones and all. Lovely introduction to a romance. Lots of supernatural creatures and violence despite the soft-looking blonde (with a sword) in the red velvet gown on the cover. Is this a paranormal romance?

And the final entries are from Sherrilyn Kenyon, who has achieved bestseller status. Her two recent releases from St. Martin’s Paperbacks are labeled novels. Not paranormal romance, not urban fantasy, and not fantasy. Once genre novelists hit the bigtime, their books never carry a genre label on their spine, nor are they typically shelved in bookstores with other genre novels. But as you can see, the cover of Dream Warrior has the typical dark-haired young woman with a skimpy black dress. And a cemetery for good measure. But even though there is a strong heroine, the back cover blurb reads as if this is fantasy starring the usual somewhat accursed hero type. (There is a manga version of Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter series beginning that might be a shortcut to comprehending the story arc.) Kenyon’s second recent title, Acheron, is a hefty 806 pages of backstory and current adventures of a character from her previous continuity. This one has a nonrepresentational cover, to align it with other hefty novels that a man might not be ashamed to be seen reading. Acheron starts like any historical novel, except that it’s a fantasy novel that is in her Dream-Hunter series. It ends with happily ever after. Is it a romance or not? Has anybody ever counted the kisses (I’m cleaning things up here) versus the number of demons burned, vampires impaled, and so on? I thought not.

In addition to my confusion about which, if any, of these paranormal romance/urban fantasy/fantasy/novels would offer me the story closest to a pure romance, I’ve got another issue. The world building. Each author has carefully created a new reality, and within it, new hierarchies of power, new creatures, and new methods of attaining power and of attacking others, and more. And the authors usually create some related political or power struggle between opposing supernatural forces, the more labyrinthine the better. It’s a lot of work to buy into each new world, because although the rules of vampire bites might seem common in all, for instance, that is not guaranteed. When I read for pleasure, I don’t want to learn a lot of new details about an imaginary system of demonic forces. To me, that’s not relaxing. But given how popular these books are right now, lots of people do like all the world building. Or just put up with it, because they like all the creature-slaying, demon-burning, etc.

I still haven’t solved the basic question, which is, how do I figure out which of these novels might have the strongest romance elements? There is no way to tell from the covers, other than the Lara Adrian one. The back cover blurbs and first page excerpts don’t help. In fact, none of these titles has a first page excerpt. Most of them feature praise from reviewers. I remember when I was a kid and I was trying to figure out what a book might be like, and I would read these kinds of reviews. (If they said “bold and lusty” I knew to stay away. I was just a kid, after all.) The trouble is, when a reviewer of fantasy says a story is erotic, the reviewer might mean that there is a hot romance, but there might be some sexual behavior that does not constitute romance at all. I read something recently in which the devil (yes, Himself) wants to have sex with the heroine. Erotic? Maybe. Romantic? I don’t think so.

I’m still confused about where the romance is, and to be honest, I’m not sure I want to wade through all the demon-slaying and ogre-crunching to find it. Next stop, Amish romance. I can’t go wrong with an oil crust homemade pie and a hunky Amish carpenter.

My Hero, My Yard Man

2009-04-30T20:06:00.003-04:00

There are a million reasons women read romances. Here’s another: In romances, heroes do all the rotten, complicated, difficult, and annoying chores that heroines put off for lack of funds, lack of strength, or lack of will. And heroes do them Without Being Asked.

Oh, boy, that’s a big one. Sitting as I am currently with a broken ankle and very limited mobility, I have to ask my own home hero for lots of help all day long. And just as with parenting issues, I have learned to make a stand--bad phrase--to persevere only about the important ones. After all, nobody else can do everything you need to do yourself. Even if, for the moment, you can’t do anything at all.

Real life is filled with mundane chores and vexatious decisions, and, for most of us, lack of ability to resolve them all. We don’t live perfect lives. Everybody has a long list of repairs and improvements needed around the house, or to the car, or whatever. Reasonable women know that their loved ones can’t do them all. But they keep hoping. Hence, the infamous HoneyDo list. Real men chafe at this list, because it is a challenge to their free time and to their free will. But romance heroes fix stuff and solve problems Without Being Asked.

The romance hero saves the heroine from all the mundane work of life. If her car breaks down, not only does he rescue her, but he has someone else drive it to the service station. And then bring it to her home. If he moves in, she suddenly finds that, Without Being Asked, he fixes all her broken latches and poked-out screens, tunes up and oils all her rusting power tools, and, again, Without Being Asked, trims the bushes that no one has touched in months or years. If she lives in a tumbledown shack, he either shores it up or takes her to live on his ranch or in his mansion or up in his 24th story city penthouse. He handles all the picayune details of life’s little troubles. And big ones, too, like fighting off murderers and terrorists and soul-sucking relatives. The romance hero does it all, and again, Without Being Asked.

A lot of women don’t do yard work, so in romances, the hero typically does some manly outdoor chore. Sure, sometimes he cooks a great dinner, too. Multitasking. But we can always call for takeout; a nice meal is thoughtful, but only impressive to the woman who doesn’t cook or who is too busy to cook. But we can’t always find someone to fix that wobbly step down from the porch. And the application of strong manly muscles to some impressively difficult outdoor task—well, that’s a thrill to see. Photos of some handsome hunks are sprinkled throughout this page. I wonder if any of them ever performs heroic mundane chores? Probably. Hopefully, bare-chested.

Yep, that’s my current romance fantasy. Right about now, I could use a man with movie-star muscles and romance hero initiative, a manly man who would like to mow my lawn, Without Being Asked.