1. Quiz (ponder to the tune of Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi, or The Carpenters’ – or Sonic Youth’s – Superstar)
Some folks had fun last week guessing “the real rant”. So I have another challenge. In the early days (waaaay back in 2007), I did not have a blog, or even know about your blogs. So I did the old fashioned thing and directly emailed authors whose books I loved. But one of these is a fake! Which of the following did I not send a fangirl email to?
a. Megan Hart, for Dirty
b. Lara Adrian, for Kiss of Midnight
c. Barbara Dunlop, for The Billionaire’s Bidding (Silhouette Desire)
d. Diana Gabaldon, for Outlander
2. Links of interest
*I am going to be completely shameless and pimp the discussion of Anne Stuart’s Black Ice we started here last night, which is still ongoing. Thank you so much to everyone who participated, and I invite any of you who haven’t jumped in to do so — and no, you don’t have to read all 100+ comments first. If you are interested in romantic suspense as a subgenre, in feminism in romance heroines, in amoral heroes, or in what love is, you’ll enjoy the discussion.
*Do you ever have trouble keeping track of your comments on various blogs? I do, so I started using http://www.cocomment.com. All the discussions I have participated in are listed, with the latest comments, and links back to the blogs. So convenient! You can leave your account open for others to see where you’ve been commenting, or you can keep it private.
*Sarah Frantz, Captain in the Army National Guard (now medically retired), posted on the military and romance at Romancing the Blog.
*SuperWendy is asking readers to share where they get their books. She has even invited folks to write posts on their own blogs about it. I am going to try to post a photo essay later this week.
*Not romance, but Joanne Lipman wrote an op-ed on women’s status (and why we may be partially to blame for it) for the New York Times, which is very interesting. Or perhaps, as Gawker proclaims it “inaccurate, intellectually offensive, and gratingly pompous.”
*And again, not romance, but something I think about often: do you feel safe posting pictures of your children online? The New York Times looked at this issue yesterday. A bunch of women in my ‘hood locked their “family blogs” after a convicted child molester moved in to our neighborhood. But does it matter if the pedophile lives next door, or across the state?
3. Post Dramatic Stress Syndrome
I won’t have time to give it it’s own post, but I find lately that when I read romance, I sometimes think I know that the author is going to do something … bad. and I know this, because another author has led me down this exact same path, and I got burned.
Sometimes I am actually so worried about impending literary doom, that I don’t enjoy what’s in front of me. No, I don’t mean fear that the hero or heroine will be hurt, because that’s a good part of romance, a kind of dread lets you know the story is working, if it can make you fear those emotionally wrenching moments. I mean when you know the heroine or hero is going to do something stupid, or there’s going to be a big misunderstanding, or someone is going to tell an incredibly unhelpful lie, or deny something totally obvious, or get jealous for no reason, etc., just because the author needs it to happen, even if it makes no sense at all for the character or plot or setting.
Usually, I am thrilled with the knowledge I have gained of the tropes and techniques of the genre. It helps me to appreciate the genre so much more, because I recognize things I used to miss. Kind of like when you look at Michelangelo’s David after taking an art history course. But the price is that I have also tasted of the fruit of evil, and I remember it — the disappointment, the book hurling, the “no fucking way!” that had my spouse come running from another room. I have been burned and the ashy taste is sometimes still in my head when I read a new book. For better and for worse.
Happy week!
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#1 by Sarah Frantz on October 26, 2009 - 9:28 am
Thanks! But it’s the ARMY National Guard (and I’m now respectably medically retired).
#2 by Wendy on October 26, 2009 - 9:46 am
Re: The Fangirl E-mail – my guess is that you did not e-mail Megan Hart.
I used to write fangirl e-mails back in the day. Generally reserved for those books that I squeee’ed my little librarian heart out for. I have sadly gotten out of the habit though, and I blame my blog. I really should pick up the habit again…..
#3 by Magdalen on October 26, 2009 - 9:50 am
On Post-Dramatic Stress Disorder (or PDSD): Great phrase, btw.
I felt this way when I read, back-to-back, two Judy Cuevas/Judith Ivory books that had been highly recommended. I read Bliss first. I’d been rolling my eyes at various stupid choices by the protags all along, but I lost it when the ending (which I won’t give away) required a secondary character to be TSTL and a deus ex machina all at the same time. Head shakingly infuriating (for me, personally).
Then I read Beast. More TSTL behavior by all kinds of people, and the ending was virtually unreadable. But people whose opinions I respect LOVE J.Ivo., so I tried Black Silk next. Here’s where the PDSD kicked in. I simply couldn’t read it with an open mind or heart. I kept flipping pages, convinced that I was going to be infuriated with everything.
J.Ivo’s books could be the greatest romances ever written (although I personally wouldn’t take that bet), but I’m too scarred now to appreciate them. I still have Sleeping Beauty to read, and people are still touting her books, but I may never be healed sufficiently to give it a fair shake.
#4 by Jessica on October 26, 2009 - 10:04 am
Sarah, I will fix it. I was going to put (Ret.) after, but I thought maybe that was wrong. is it right?
I think authors must love these kinds of emails.
I agree that blogging has made me less likely to do it.
I wonder if Twitter is an issue too? so much easier to tweet “loving your book [@author]” and get instant reply.
@Magdalen: I agree about the silliness of Beast, esp the end. but I love Ivory’s wrting so much I overlooked it.
#5 by Renee on October 26, 2009 - 10:31 am
Re: The PDSS
This is exactly why I’m such a Loretta Chase fan. She always sets up these situations where, as they are unfolding, I’m thinking things like, “Here is where there’s going to be a Big Miss.” Or, “Insert the TSTL character now.”
And, then, the heroine actually talks to the hero, thus avoiding the Big Miss, or the heroine does something unexpectedly smart, proving she isn’t TSTL.
I actually think she’s one of the most subversive historical romance authors currently out there.
OK, off to read the Black Ice post!
#6 by Sarah Frantz on October 26, 2009 - 11:13 am
Thanks! Yeah, I think (Ret.) is wrong, b/c (to me) it implies that you put your 20 years in and retired (with a nice fat pension). That didn’t happen for me. I was medically separated. Anyway, it was the Air/Army thing that really needed to be fixed.
Go Army!
And I think you didn’t write to Diana Gabaldon.
#7 by katiebabs on October 26, 2009 - 11:53 am
You didn’t email Diana Gabaldon.
I wished I could have joined in on the Black Ice discussion, but I still haven’t read the book.
You should do more book discussions
#8 by Maili on October 26, 2009 - 1:19 pm
Agreed with SarahF and Katiebabs that you didn’t email Diana Gabaldon.
Until recently I refused mentioning the existence of my mites for a long time. I still refuse to upload photos of them and my relatives. It’s not about paedophiles, but about respecting the family’s right to privacy.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the mites grew up to be a cam whore, though. Probably the youngest mite. I plan to educate him not to use our bathroom to take photos of himself via a mirror reflection. In fact I plan to educate him not to use MySpace or Facebook. Ever.
If he had to use either, I’ll teach him to use proper English because if he typed something like “skool iz so fekin boreing ah bin snoggin tracy hoe binhind the skool byke shed!! such a hoe! lololol”, I’ll kill myself.
Did I just out one of my secret fears? Yeah, I did. Sorry about that.
#9 by Aoife on October 26, 2009 - 2:24 pm
I’m going to take a wild guess that you didn’t email Lara Adrian, but that may be a case of me projecting.
I was going to join the discussion of Black Ice, and then realized that it had been so long since I had read it that I was no longer positive which things happened in Black Ice, and which events happened in one of the other books in the series. Which made me also think about the umm, similarities in the themes in Stuart’s books. I’ll see if I can think of anything to say that isn’t hopelessly repetitive.
I enjoyed Lipman’s piece, but then I read it with the emphasis on the “op” part of op-ed. I’m not sure I’m persuaded by the connection she makes between women’s current status and 9/11, since I don’t think she really made her case on that, but I certainly didn’t find her pompous. And I’m not sure what relevance the failure of Portfolio had to the validity of her thoughts, although that seemed to be a Very Big Deal to the writer of the Gawker response.
My children are adults, but I still don’t post photos of them online without their permission. When they were younger I was paranoid about that, as well as any details about their location, activities, or appearance. I know I went overboard, but we actually had a young girl who went to my daughters’ grade school who was stalked online and then IRL. That was years ago when parents and kids were a great deal more naive than they are now, but I’m still taken aback sometimes by the kind of things about themselves that my daughters and their friends put up on Facebook. Or used to when they were still in college.
Doesn’t it look like the kitty Pilgrim’s hat is bigger than he is? Love the picture.
#10 by Keziah Hill on October 26, 2009 - 3:17 pm
I’m in the Diana Gabaldon camp too. Re Lippman on the whole I agree with her, but the 9/11 link was a little USA centric for my taste.
#11 by Marianne McA on October 26, 2009 - 7:36 pm
I don’t blog, but I don’t think I’d feel occasional family pictures of children inappropriate (using normal common sense – don’t list the children’s names etc.) You don’t think anything when their picture is in the newspaper – though I suppose a blog is a more permanent thing.
Maili: social networking has it’s plus points too – they can keep in touch with their friends who are away, and you don’t have the hour long phone calls my dad had to pay for when I was a teenager. And they are really sensible about the way they use it – they’ve no qualms about blocking anyone who is the least peculiar. Family included. And for every ungrammatical comment you see, you read something compensatingly fabulous – my daughter had a poem to write for school last week, and was grousing on facebook(?) about not being able to do it, and a friend of hers rattled off this fabulous, fake-pretentious poem about the angst of being a barcode, the last three lines of which were written entirely in binary.
#12 by heidenkind on October 26, 2009 - 9:41 pm
I’m also voting that you didn’t e-mail Diana Gabaldon.
That cocomment site is cool! Thanks for the link.
#13 by Jessica on October 27, 2009 - 12:05 pm
How did (almost) everyone guess it was Gabaldon? I LOVED Outlander. It – and only one of the other 3 — is on my top 16 Winsor list!
About pics of the kids: Like most academics I have a picture of my spouse and kids on my faculty webpage, As does my husband on his.
So why am I so reticent to do it here? It’s odd.
#14 by Janet W on October 27, 2009 - 12:59 pm
You know, that NYTimes article is somewhat like closing the doors of the barn after the horses have fled. The window of privacy seems to shrink daily as younger and younger children hop on the social media bandwagon. Your children are, I think, younger than mine: our biggest problem is keeping photos of us off their FB sites. My dh in particular is very adverse to being captured and displayed. It seems nowadays that an event is not fully enjoyed until the FB gallery goes up.
I’ll give you some stats from my neck of the woods, using my dd as an example:
Photos 1,493 (which explains her saying from ELF, about liking to smile, smiling’s my favorite)
Videos 7
Friends 944
I do think caution makes sense but I wonder, with all those sophisticated search engines, whether all is not known about us, not matter what we do (see Tumperkin’s blog for another perspective on that).
My two cents.
#15 by Kaetrin on October 27, 2009 - 11:45 pm
So were they right? Was it Gabaldon?
(I wouldn’t have guessed that myself because I know you and I share the squeeing fangirl thing about this one!) I would maybe have guessed the Lara Adrian but not for any particular reason….
Just curious…
(sorry, maybe your comment means that it WAS Gabaldon, but I wasn’t 100% clear on it…)
#16 by Jessica on October 28, 2009 - 7:44 am
oh, sorry for not being clear.
I did NOT send an email to Dg, but I DID send one to the others.
#17 by Kaetrin on October 29, 2009 - 1:46 am
No Jessica – it’s not you not being clear – it’s just me having a “brain-fried” day!
I’m curious though – what made you NOT WRITE to Gabaldon (given how much you liked the book) and ACTUALLY WRITE to the other authors?
PS – thx for the Black Ice discussion – I’ve read most of the comments but I haven’t read the book – made me curious about it though!.
Oh, one other thing, what happened to the links that used to be on the right side of you page? They’re not showing up (for me at least) anymore. I used to go visiting from your site quite a bit…
#18 by AQ on October 30, 2009 - 7:13 am
Very much enjoyed reading the discussion on Black Ice even though I didn’t participate because I hadn’t read the book. Since you had such a great turnout, will you be having another book discussion? If so, what’s the book and any idea of a date?
#19 by Jessica on October 30, 2009 - 1:41 pm
@Kaetrin: I don’t know why I didn’t write to Gabaldon. I think by the time I read Outlander, a little later than the others, I was less over the moon about every single good romance!
I did get rid of the sidebar links, and went back to using Google reader. I was finding the feeds were not updating quickly enough. I also wanted my blog to be less “busy” than it was. I miss them, too, actually. But Thrillionth Page has a great sidebar link set!
@AQ: Yeah, I think I will do another one! Haven’t thought about which book. I will give plenty of notice. I hope you will be able to join us!
#20 by Wanderer on November 1, 2009 - 4:28 pm
Funny, my guess would have been Diana Gabaldon.
I recently joined cocomment and agree it’s fantastic! So much help.
Glad to hear the Anne Stuart discussion went well and sorry I wasn’t able to join in. I haven’t read any AS books and knew I wouldn’t be able to read that one in time for the discussion.
PDSD – I had this recently but it wasn’t with a romance book. It was the latest Jack Daniels book by JA Konrath. Stress at finding out which character died, stress at the actions the lead character was taking (which seemed very out of character), stress at the gruesomeness of the villain, stress that there was less humor in this book and that it took a more dark and dreary turn. Stress, stress, stress. Yet I kept on with the audiobook, go figure.
As for pics of kids (I don’t have any but several nieces/nephews) I’m not comfortable with it. Several family members have facebook pages with family pics but those are all set to private so only family and friends see them. I think children have a right to privacy themselves. Think about them growing up in a few years. They may be upset or embarrassed over the ‘cute’ photo you posted of them when they were 10. And now that you brought up the sex offender thing, that’s yet another worry. So while I may post/tweet on something a little nugget in my family says, I will never post their names or pics.
P.S. Thanks for the edit option, this is my 3rd one. Typos-R-Us
#21 by April on November 9, 2009 - 6:06 am
Re: PDSS—LOL! Oh my, do I EVER suffer from such things. I could barely get through McNaught’s Perfect (which I read only this past year) because I just knew what was coming.
While reading Victoria Dahl’s latest historical (can’t remember the name right now and too lazy to look it up) I was so so worried about what was coming up (found treasure solves all problems!). Yea for Dahl for not pulling that on me.
I’ve found that my PDSS has become so acute that I just refuse to finish reading a book if an author pulls one of those obvious devices on me. I do not have the patience.
Re: children using social networking sites
Oh, how to break one’s children of such gratuitous use of bad grammar? When did misspelled words become the cool thing? I argue with my tweenage daughters daily about this, but don’t feel it would be fair to take away their use of Facebook altogether because of it.
I know my parents were visually assaulted every time I decided to walk around with holes in my jeans, in mismatched socks, and shoes, and with 20 bracelets on….but I would’ve felt it was SOCIAL SUICIDE had I been forced to alter my style based on some old person’s ideal of propriety.
Therefore, I try to remember that when my daughters deliberately misspell words on their Facebook status, they are just asserting their independence to a degree.
But it hurts. Oh, how it hurts.
Re: Galbaldon
So, loving Gabaldon as you do, what did you think of The Echo in the Bone? I didn’t find your review.
I’ve dying to discuss this book with someONE.