Archive for: December, 2010

Merry Christmas! What We Did and Which Books We Exchanged

Dec 25 2010 Published by under Children's Books, Navel gazing

I hope everyone has a wonderful day today!

We celebrated last night at my mom’s house, who lives down the street. Until 2005, Mom had lived her whole life in southern New England. After we had the kids, she would leave work on Fridays, get on a 5 hour bus, and arrive here at 11:00pm. Then she would help us all weekend with the kids and the household chores, and get back on the bus at 6:00pm on Sunday night to be back for work Monday morning. She did this for about two years, before realizing that she didn’t want to miss everything that happened Monday to Friday. So, about 5 years ago, she  retired early and moved to Maine. The kids go to her house every day after school, she makes us dinner on nights we are too tired to do it, and we haven’t had to hire a sitter in five years.

It’s been an incredible blessing to have her here. Not to mention the fact that she’s my best friend, and I can stop at her house and know I will have a nice cup of coffee, or, amazingly, a 5 course meal (somehow, despite having a tiny kitchen, she is always ready for any possible food and beverage need), and a great conversation.

It’s Italian American tradition where I am from to have a big meal and open presents on Christmas eve, so last night, Mom made lasagna and meatballs, and we had a long discussion about the proper proportion of pork to beef (25 to 75%), and about how to prevent the lasagna noodles from splitting (dunk them in cold water, pat dry). She is an amazing cook, having learned from her mother-in-law, who hailed from Pisa.

My mom started a food club back when that wasn’t fashionable, and it became so popular the state newspaper covered it. Growing up, my parents actually had a second house on our property just for parties. It was a converted barn, with a bar, a dance floor, wall to wall red shag carpet, two kitchens, his and hers bathrooms, and poker tables. This was the 1970s. I tell anyone who wants to know about my childhood to watch Ang Lee’s movie The Ice Storm.* Swap out the Connecticut WASPs for Providence Italians, and that’s pretty much it. Nostalgic for those heady days of real parties, Mom and I spend probably way too much time complaining about the way Mainers entertain (it usually involves store bought mayonnaise, overcooked chicken, and lamentably bad white wine, sometimes in terrifying combinations).

[*Alas, no one has ever actually asked me to tell them about my childhood, but I feel it is important to have a handy movie reference just in case.]

Anyway, from her, I received two cookbooks as gifts:

My husband got a subscription to Wine Spectator, which he is thrilled with, although we discovered this morning that even subscribers have to pay to use their website, which is ridiculous, if you ask me.

The kids also got books. Mom’s a big reader, and I grew up with books everywhere. We had books in the dining room, the kitchen, the bathroom, in little stacks (but nothing hoardish, don’t worry). Looking back, I think I got the message that there wasn’t just one room or one place or one time to read. And it stuck.

We have a great little children’s book shop in downtown Bangor called The Briar Patch, where my mom got these:

David and Max is about the Holocaust. Our boys haven’t “gone there” yet in fiction, so it will be an education for all of us to read and discuss, it.

My older son’s “big present” was a 3rd generation Kindle. Very exciting! Of course, I had to get out my own second gen Kindle and compare. The new Kindles feel so much smaller and lighter. I love the “home” button on the new Kindle, and find it easier to navigate, with faster page refresh and crisper contrast. I don’t like the tiny page turn buttons, or the lack of a number row of buttons.

Anyway, we immediately loaded the gift card he had gotten for Hanukkah from his other grandparents, and he bought two books:

Of course, we also bought a couple of books for my mom:

I swear, she asked for Old Maine Woman!

This isn’t always the easiest time of year for everyone, myself included. Without bringing the whole tone of the post down, I felt like I wanted to mention the people who experience loss, estrangement, or just interpersonal tension most keenly during the winter holidays. If this is a difficult time for you, know you are not alone, and consider yourself virtually hugged.

I converted to Judaism many years ago, so we’ll be celebrating Christmas the traditional Jewish way today, with a movie and Chinese food. I am working my way through Jennifer Crusie’s backlist as I write a paper on “emotional justice” and the romance novel. So look for a lot of Crusie reviews next week.

Whatever you are up to, I hope you get at least a few minutes to read and relax.

Merry Christmas!

19 responses so far

Can an African Dictator Make A Good Romance Hero? You bet!

Dec 23 2010 Published by under Reviews

I was going to bypass the supermarket used book bin, I swear, but I glanced at it, saw this cover, and was intrigued:

What was this? A non-Kimani category with a black hero? With dreadlocks? I read the blurb:

To the world, Jean-Charles Laroque was a tyrannical ruler—a powerful mercenary driven by greed. But was he threatening enough to assassinate? Making that assessment was profiler Emily Carlin, a woman whose professionalism masked her phobia of being dominated by an alpha male. A male like Laroque. Working undercover to infiltrate his psyche, Emily discovered a noble man—and an undeniable attraction. Amid the hot nights, Emily found herself falling for the magnetic Laroque. And if he discovered her true identity, she might lose not only her chance at love, but also her life. (Excerpt here.)

An African setting? I fished out fifty cents, threw it in my shopping cart, and am happy to report that Seducing the Mercenary is one of the most unusual and entertaining categories I’ve yet read. Published in 2007, it’s the fourth of five Shadow Soldiers books.

If you are feeling tl/dr today, here’s the skinny:

Strengths of this book:

  • Unusual, terrifically rendered setting. Author avoids both “See! Africans are JUST LIKE US!”, and “See! Africans are different, exotic, and primal, but THEY ARE REALLY GREAT!”
  • Alpha hero with a beta heart, totally believable as an African (black African “Ubasi” mother, Afrikaaner [white, of Dutch decent] father), raised in France
  • Interesting, semi-complex, and logical international political plot
  • Real suspense
  • Totally hot. Instant, all consuming attraction between the leads. Also, tent sex.

Weaknesses:

  • Typical over-reliance on family of origin issues to feed internal conflict
  • Occasional problematic language for hero: “primal”, “predatory”, that kind of thing.
  • Occasional breathy phrasing: one sentence paragraphs, one word sentences. Sentences broken up. Like this. So that there is more emphasis. But it is. Truly. Annoying.
  • Length of book necessitates tidy resolution to complex problems

Cover note: I actually think this is a great cover, perfect for the characters and the setting. Interestingly, the model portraying the heroine appears Asian to me (this is clear when viewing the back cover, below. Click to enlarge.), yet the ethnicity of the heroine is never mentioned, nor are there cues in her physical description.

Emily and Jean-Charles take one look at each other and they are gone. Theirs is an unusual first meeting. He is in a Jeep and military vehicle convoy, the kind you see on the news with young men holding rifles in the air. And she is in the middle of an adoring crowd on a dusty hot street, having been separated from her research group (which was a cover anyway) at customs. He’s wearing the camos, the beret, and the dark sunglasses.

Emily ends up at his palace, and in order to stay there, she tells him she wants to write a book about him. Jean agrees to grant her an interview, in order to find out what she’s hiding and who she is working for. The physical danger is so high — the ruthless leader whom Jean ousted is plotting a violent return, possibly with the help of the US — that he has to take Emily with him wherever he goes. By spending all this time together, Emily comes discover that Jean is neither a greedy mercenary nor a tyrant. Unfortunately, her team will assassinate him in 7 days if she doesn’t report to them. Alas, Jean has confiscated her laptop and cell phone.

I enjoyed reading a category romance in which the alpha male’s suspicion of the heroine was justified. I loved the descriptions of Ubasi, from the Ubasi airport, to Jean-Charles’s palace, to a small village, to an outpost in the Purple Mountains. Maybe I was just in the right mood, but I loved the over the top romance against a backdrop of intrigue and war. I’m glad I read this unusual and compelling romance.

Word on the Web:

Enduring Romance, Robyn, very positive

20 responses so far

Review: Bad Case of Loving You, by Laney Cairo

Dec 22 2010 Published by under 8 Nights of Ham/mukah, Ethics, Reviews

Bad Case of Loving You is an erotic m/m romance by Laney Cairo. You can purchase it from Torquere Press or read a sample here. I read it on the recommendation of several romance readers whose opinions I trust, and I’m glad I did, but I have some reservations about the actions of one of the heroes. Here’s the blurb:

Matthew is a medical student, trying to ignore his various roommates’ wild parties and get through his classes. Andrew is his instructor, a doctor at a prestigious British hospital. They’re not supposed to be attracted to each other, but they can’t deny their undeniable chemistry.

They come together with a heat that surprises them both, and through doctor’s strikes, dealing with Andrew’s teenaged son, and hospital red tape, Andrew and Matthew learn to live, and love together. Is their relationship just what the doctor ordered?

Mature readers continue after the jump…
Continue Reading »

13 responses so far

Monday Morning Stepback: Rigged contests, Guided reading, Harlequin’s Enhanced Online Reputation

Dec 20 2010 Published by under Blogs and blogging, Monday Morning Stepback

The Weekly Links, Opinion and Personal Updates Post

Annoyed with bloggers who do constant giveaways to increase readership? Feel sure these contests are rigged? Their time may be at hand, if this angry person or this one has anything to say about it. A third post, Are Bloggers Conducting Illegal Lotteries? also raises interesting questions about how blog contests should be regulated. (via @myfriendamy):

Go right on ahead then honey because when the feds intervene, when state law governing sweepstakes intervene, I will be sure to grab some popcorn. Because I spoke about this issue once, about whether the sweep was a sham, and I was right then, I am right now. Bloggers are rigging their giveaways for winners based on whom THEY want to win, not by chance. Which technically if you as a blogger are conducting yourself in such a manner you are violating federal and state sweepstakes laws by crossing into lottery territory.

[Edited to add: Author and attorney Courtney Milan blogged about this a year ago. The post is called, "How to run a blog contest without going to jail."]

*****

Have you ever read in a genre, noticed a trend, and thought, “I find this really weird, but since no one else is mentioning it, I’ll just keep my mouth shut.”? Well, that’s what I’ve always thought about the “bra suck” in romance. Luckily, SuperWendy has proven once again that the truth shall set us free, with her post on The Soggy Bra Epidemic, followed up by a somber and thoughtful discussion of this very important issue with her man. This is a matter of public health and sexual education, people. Go forth and read.

*****

Library Journals’ 10 Must Read m/m romances (via @katiebabs). Was happy to see Sean Kennedy and Alex Beecroft there. Many of the others are unknown to me.

*****

What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, by Jaclyn Friedman, in The American Prospect on the Assange charges and the media’s coverage of them (via @moirarogers(bree))

Here’s how it works: As soon as a rape accusation makes it into the news cycle (most often because the accused is famous), it’s instantly held up against our collective subconscious idea about what Real Rape (or, as Whoopi Goldberg odiously called it, “rape-rape”) looks like. Here’s a quick primer on that ideal: The rapist is a scary stranger, with a weapon, even better if he’s a poor man of color. The victim is a young, white, conventionally pretty, sober, innocent virgin. Also, there are witnesses and/or incontrovertible physical evidence, and the victim goes running to the authorities as soon as the assault is over.

But let’s face it, actual rapes almost never match up to this ideal. Most rape victims know their attacker (estimates range from 75 percent to 89 percent), most rapists use alcohol or drugs to facilitate the assault (More than 80 percent, according to researcher David Lisak), not weapons, and most of the famous men whose accusers receive media attention aren’t poor men of color. But once the accusation hits the news cycle, whatever pundit gets there first uses the non-ideal details of the alleged assault to argue that surely, we shouldn’t take this seriously, and other pundits nod their head in agreement.

*****

At Novel Readings, Rohan Maitzen weighs in on the debate over Oprah’s choice of Dickens for her book club. The literati are worried that the common folk won’t understand the book, apparently.

Maitzen rejects the idea that Oprah readers are too unsophisticated to “get” Dickens, noting that Dickens was once a “popular” author. Yet, as an English professor, she believes that guidance can enhance the reading experience. I especially appreciated her point that:

novels that don’t immediately gratify your taste may be revealing some of your own limits, not just theirs. Sometimes, you’re asking the wrong questions, for instance. Here’s where ‘real guidance’ might come in handy, at least in training you as a reader to stop and think about why the book is as it is, what purposes its aesthetic and formal choices serve, what ideas shape it. You might not like it any better, but you would understand a lot more about it.

Opinion

Mrs. Giggles is bored with the internets:

I decided to look for new titles to buy using online hype when I got home. I hit up the Web and… sigh. Is it just me or have all the major romance blogs are now collaborating to hype up the same 5 authors over and over again? I mean, come on. I’ve read those 5 authors already. I want to see the spotlight on someone new. Someone who isn’t published with Harlequin, please. Seriously, have Harlequin bought over the blogs when I wasn’t watching? It used to be that we laugh at the titles of their Presents books. Now, it seems like everyone is reading Harlequin category romances like they are serious business.

I have four things to say about her post (too annoying to try to comment over there. HATE LiveJournal):

1. It’s true that this is a small community and we like to read what our peers are reading, in order to have shared experiences to talk about on Twitter and our blogs, and so some books get overexposed. But this is not just an issue with genre fiction. Anybody notice a little book by Jonathan Frantzen this year? And how that was the only book anyone in the literature/general fiction universe talked about for a month straight? Plus, if a book is good, of course we are going to rave about it, and increased chatter will be the result. And if a book is good and does something NEW in the genre? You do the math.

2. Luckily it is very easy to fix that sense of sameness: start reading other blogs. It is really quite simple to cut out of your life a blog that bothers you. I wonder why more people who complain do not try this? Alternatively, ask your readers to help you find new and unique books. You can see this last strategy at work in Mrs. Giggles’ own thread. (But see point 4 below). Or just surf or shop randomly, picking out what interests you.

3. I have only been on line a few years and even I have noticed the increased respect given to Harlequin, much of it driven by things other than the quality of its books, such as its marketing savvy, its embrace of digital, and its responsiveness to the online community (Blogger Bundles, etc.). But, unlike Mrs. Giggles, I think this is mostly a natural and good thing. Some Harlequin books are great, some not so great. To lump an entire publisher or line together is to do the same thing on a smaller scale that non romance readers do to the entire genre. Harlequin is our major genre publisher. Does it make sense to turn our noses up at it?

4. It’s kind of interesting how many commenters on that thread say they don’t read romance, and do not recommend any romance in their responses. I don’t know why, but I always find it kind of surprising how many people in the romance community don’t seem to read or even much like romance.

Personal

Hanukkah and both birthday parties are over. At his birthday party on Saturday, my 11 year old received a copy of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games from a friend, and to my shock, it turned out half the boys had read it.

I have a bit of grading to finish today, and then it’s break until January 10. We aren’t traveling, but we might toss some beach sand on our new kitchen floor, don sunglasses, and play some Jimmy Buffet.* (*actually, I hate Jimmy Buffet. Sorry Parrotheads.)

No idea what I will be blogging. Hope everyone who celebrates has a wonderful Christmas holiday!

I leave you with this very amusing Andy Samberg video, lyrics NSFW:

YouTube Preview Image

49 responses so far

Sexual Desire

Dec 16 2010 Published by under Ethics, Genre musings

One of the most popular readings I assigned this semester was “Sexual Desire”, by Chistopher Hamilton (“Sexual Desire: Some Philosophical Reflections”, Richmond Journal of Philosophy,Vol 7, Summer 2004). He is a lecturer at King’s College London. Since romances have a little something to do with sexual desire, I thought I would share a bit about it here.

Hamilton, by the way, who has strong research interests in the intersection of philosophy and literature, is also a “philosophy misery memoirist” whose latest book is Middle Age (Guardian review here). Hamilton was profiled last year in the Independent UK.

In this essay, Hamilton starts with what he considers “the most profound philosophical account of sexual desire”,  Jean-Paul Sartre’s.  In L’Être et le néant [Being and Nothingness], Sartre rejects the idea that sexual desire is just about pleasure. Normally sexual desire attaches itself to an object. Otherwise, masturbation would be as fun. Remember the scene in Sex and the City (Hot Child in the City, Season 3, Episode 15) when Charlotte finds husband Trey  — who has had trouble getting aroused — masturbating in the bathroom?

Later during a visit to the therapist…

Charlotte: He said he wasn’t a sexual person!
Trey: It wasn’t sexual! It was tension release. It helps me sleep.
Therapist: I understand. This may be difficult, Trey, but I want you to tell me specifically which magazine you were using.
Trey and Charlotte in unison: Juggs.
Therapist: All right. We can try and see this as a positive thing.
Charlotte: How? How is this a positive thing?
Therapist: Trey was masturbating to Juggs. At least we know he isn’t gay.
Trey: Excuse me, what exactly is the problem here? It was tension release, it had nothing to do with my wife.
Therapist: Interesting choice of words, Trey. Maybe that’s the problem. We have to find a way to integrate your wife into your sexual routine.
Trey: How are we supposed to do that?

Continue Reading »

17 responses so far

Behind the Lines: Shannon Stacey on Exclusively Yours

Dec 14 2010 Published by under Behind the Lines

Welcome to the second installment of a new feature, Behind the Lines, in which I ask an author to reflect on a scene of her choice in her work. Here’s Shannon Stacey, talking about a book I really enjoyed, Exclusively Yours:


My writing process is somewhat messy and difficult to nail down in a few words, but one thing it’s definitely not is analytical.

I’m analytical neither as an author nor as a reader. My reaction to a book I’ve read is often a simple emotional one: I didn’t like it, it was meh, I liked it, or I loved it. If you were to press me, I’d find it hard to articulate why I had that reaction, which is probably why I can’t write a decent review, but enjoy reading analytic reviews written by others of books I’ve read.

I write the same way. A scene either works or it doesn’t. How do I know if it’s not working? When I’m reading through it and I’m twitchy with the urge to check Twitter or make a phone call or fling some Angry Birds on my iPod Touch, I assume a reader’s going to feel the same way. I don’t worry about themes and symbolism and all those other things I didn’t pay attention to in high school English class. I write the way I read: emotional gut reaction.

So when Jessica first mentioned this idea for her blog to me, my immediate reaction was a brain cramp. Analysis and introspection aren’t really a part of my process. But then a scene popped into my head from Exclusively Yours that I think illustrates how my subconscious mind steers the crafting of my books.

In this scene, Mike and Lisa (brother and sister-in-law of Joe, the hero), are having an argument about the possibility of having a fifth baby after the subject was brought up in front of the family by Mike and Joe’s dad. Mike doesn’t want another child, but Lisa thinks she does. (Joey is their oldest of four sons.)

But everybody froze when Mike made a frustrated growling sound and plowed his fist into the side of his camper. Joey was on his feet in an instant, freeze pop dropped in the dirt as he stepped in front of Lisa.

Joe watched the boy—so tall, skinny and scared shitless—facing off against his dad, and felt an odd tightening in his chest. Lisa wasn’t in any danger. Mike had a bit of a temper, but he’d throw himself under a bus before he raised a hand to his family.

But his oldest nephew had just taken a giant, irreversible step toward the man he’d become, and it was an awesome and yet incredibly sad moment to watch.

On the surface, this scene could be considered nothing more than the catalyst for Joe’s emotional confession during a subsequent conversation with the heroine, Keri:

Joe smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes or make his dimples pop. “Do you want kids?”

The question flew at her from left field and she didn’t even have time to get her glove up. “I don’t know. I guess I stopped thinking about it at some point. By the time I meet the career goals I set for myself and then go daddy shopping, I’ll have to deliver in the geriatric ward. How about you?”

“I guess not.”

“Why not? Family’s always been everything to you, and you’d make a great
dad.”

He shrugged. “I was pretty self-involved for a while. Drinking and writing were my entire world. And then, after Lauren, I… I’ve got Steph and the boys, and being Uncle Joe’s been good enough for me.”

But there was an unhappiness in his eyes that she’d never seen before, and
it went deeper than concern for his brother’s woes.

“They’re growing up,” he said abruptly, pacing in front of the fireplace. “Joey tonight…I was so damn proud of him. And it hurt that he’s not mine to be proud of. I almost hated Mike right then, for getting to be Joey’s dad.”

But it was much more than a catalyst to me. Joey’s scene was one of the most emotional for me to write and to edit, and I think it was because a child’s transition from boy to man was much on my mind.

One day I was walking in the Wal-Mart parking lot with my sons. A car started to back out of a parking space in front of us and my teen stepped forward and put his arm in front of me to stop me. It was a simple gesture, something I’d done to him countless times, and it was over in seconds, but it shifted my entire world.

In those few seconds, I saw a glimpse of the man my son is becoming. I remembered my husband doing the same with his mother. Telling her to watch for a crooked step. Taking her elbow to steady her if the sidewalk was icy. My son, with that one gesture, had taken that first irrevocable step toward becoming a man and the emotion of that moment carried through into writing a scene in which Mike’s son took that same step.

That’s almost like a theme, isn’t it? And the freeze pop dropped in the dirt? Symbolism! I wish I could say I did it purposely, but that’s simply how the scene formed on the page. It wasn’t until I considered talking about my process that the emotional underpinnings of that scene really coalesced in my mind.

I suppose my process is to be aware of the elements of craft, plot and motivation and character arcs and such, and think about them while driving and showering and whatnot, but when it comes to sit and write, I trust my subconscious to bring it all together, as it did with Joey.

Thank you, Jessica, for inviting me to share a peek behind the scenes of Exclusively Yours!

Shannon

Thank you Shannon!

10 responses so far

Review: Exclusively Yours, by Shannon Stacey

Dec 14 2010 Published by under Reviews

Exclusively Yours was published by Harlequin’s digital imprint, Carina Press, in June of this year. I listened to it on audio, and I was underwhelmed with the narrator’s performance. She tended to pause too frequently, and emphasize the wrong words. Honestly, I felt she was “phoning it in”.

Exclusively Yours has gotten a lot of buzz in the online romance community, being featured in a Smart Bitches Sizzling Online Book Club, and being reviewed lots of places. Click on Sarah of MonkeyBearReviews for Sarah’s review as well as a list of other reviews.

Reading EY was a lesson to me in how important it is to try the same author in different subgenres. I had read one other book by Stacey, a Devlin Group romantic suspense, which was fine, but didn’t inspire me to read more. In fairness, rom suspense is my least favorite romance subgenre. However, Stacey’s voice in EY is so much funnier and crackling that she almost sounds like a different author.

Exclusively Yours is exactly the kind of romance I love to read: contemporary, sexy, smart, funny and touching. It’s the story of Keri, a big shot celebrity weekly reporter, out to get an exclusive from Joe, a reclusive multimillion selling thriller author. The interview isn’t Keri’s idea: it’s her editor’s, an alpha shark among predators, who has discovered, with a little unsavory blog hopping, that Keri and Joe dated back in high school in New Hampshire.

Keri and Joe didn’t just date, they were deeply in love. But Keri needed to spread her wings and head to L.A. after graduation, while Joe was rooted in New Hampshire with his close knit family. They split up on bad terms, sending Joe into a drunken depression. But he’s never forgotten Keri, and, for reasons he doesn’t want to investigate too closely, he proposes that she join him and the entire Kowalski family on a two week camping trip in the wilds of New Hampshire.

Unsurprisingly, there are funny scenes of Hollywood sophisticate Keri getting mud soaked during an ATV ride and being terrified of making her way to the bathroom outside in the dark. But most of the humor isn’t situational, it’s dialogue and character based, which I much prefer. I laughed out loud too many times to count listening to this book. When it comes to Keri and Joe, this is a light romance, with fairly low conflict … so low, in fact, that it becomes a bit of a mind bender to reconcile the depth and intensity of their passion with their decade long separation. Luckily, the high sexual tension makes up for it.

Surprisingly for such a short book, Stacey manages to include a secondary romance, between Joe’s sister Terry and her estranged husband Evan, and even a third, between Joe’s brother Mike and his wife, who wants to add yet another child to their large brood. There is also Joe’s brother Kevin, whose mysterious past sets him up nicely for his own book, Undeniably Yours, released just this week.

I marveled at the way the complex family dynamics were handled in this book. They felt incredibly real to me, and, perhaps because I am middle aged and in my 15th year of marriage, with kids getting older, while I delighted in the sexy and funny relationship between Joe and Keri, I was emotionally drawn to the impasse faced by the two secondary couples, whose intense focus on child raising had changed their marriages in so many ways, not all of them positive. In short, although there is plenty of heat and fun, this is a romance which is not afraid to show us what happens after the HEA, and that there may be more than one HEA for committed relationships between flawed human beings who live recognizably human lives. In this aspect, I would compare Stacey to Jennifer Crusie, who uses humor to inject that element of realism that so many contemporary romance lack.

Many reviewers have noted that the author’s decision to tell the story of the entire Kowalski family took some of the focus off of the main romantic relationship, and this is true. If you are a reader who likes a “pure” contemporary with intense focus on the h/h, EY may not be your best bet. In trying to interpret the trajectory of Keri and Joe’s relationship, I was torn between thinking either (a) the conflict was too superficial, so why have they been apart so long, and (b) the conflict is deep and significant, but then why did it get solved so easily? In the end, if the conflict wasn’t rendered to suit my tastes, I did believe completely in their love, which, for me, is what matters.

My final comment is about the cover:

I love it. It’s perfect for the story, and it’s not the kind of cover anyone has to hide. ;)

3 responses so far

Monday Morning Stepback: The Location of the HEA

Dec 13 2010 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The Weekly Links, Opinion, and Personal Updates Post

Links of Interest:

I don’t have too much this week. Either I was very picky, or the content wasn’t there.

If you are interested in soap operas at all, check out the fascinating four part series (part 1 here) at Henry Jenkins’ blog, in which he interviews the editors of a new book on soaps (h/t @jafurtado):

The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations For a New Media Era, brings together key thinkers about this embattled genre from the worlds of industry, fandom, journalism, and academia to share their reflections on the current state of the American daytime serial and to offer their suggestions on what tactics and strategies might allow it to thrive in a new media era.

I don’t watch soaps, but in reading through the discussions, I saw a lot of overlaps between concerns of the romance community and the soap opera community. Unlike romance, though, soaps are in decline. What do you think of this possible two pronged explanation:

I truly believe two main elements work against soap operas and help their decline at the present moment: their cultural standing in the public opinion and the way they are sold to the audience. In the mainstream, the regard for the professionalism and skill of soap operas is quite low. In  a culture that relishes being media-savvy and hip, choosing soap operas is not desirable, quite the contrary. This is an obstacle insofar as, to go against the current, you must truly love the genre. Otherwise, it is simply not worth it, because you do not get “rewarded” for it; you get “punished.” Fans are bullied into thinking they are not cool and, for the most part, they are afraid to come out as defenders of a genre they love. Hence the decline.

*****

A Guardian article by a writer named Edward Docx, Are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown a match for Literary Fiction? generated a lot of heat over the weekend. You can tell how DocX answers the question by how he asks it. It’s not new, well written, well argued, or even interesting, except for the fact that, inexplicably, it got published. Scathing responses in the comments, as well as by Ed Champion, and The Left Room.

*****

Carolyn Crane’s guest blog over at The Book Smugglers for their month long Smugglivus celebration was hilarious.

*****

Angela at Save Black Romance has popped up with a post on The State of African American Romance. Short and to the point summation of her current thinking on the topic, including this bit:

I stopped blogging because I was preaching to the choir. Plus, the fire lit beneath the so-called movement of authors and readers has largely died due to apathy. Who wants to fight for inclusion when the majority of those segregated don’t care to rock the boat? Also, my reading tastes have veered in the paranormal and mystery arenas, of which AA authors make up a very tiny percentage. But mostly, because I didn’t feel honest waving my pom-poms for a “genre” which honestly, has yet to give me what I need.

*****
Jane at Dear Author changed gears on Sunday to do a non-tech post, All About the Excerpt. I don’t even read excerpts, but I was very interested in the post, and the many comments.

*****

If you have been sitting around wishing more people would write manifestos, you are in luck. Check out this very uplifting, short, free read on What Does It Mean That Your Life Is Perfect? by cancer survivor and author Michale Ellsberg. I especially appreciated his focus on the importance of love.

On the Importance of Place in the HEA

I have been thinking about writing a blog post on those HEAs in which the hero and heroine end up back at the physical spot where they first met, or fell in love, or consummated their relationship, or which has some significance to the relationship. The major example I came up with the Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ Match Me If You Can, when Heath finds a missing Annabelle at the lake house where they consummated their relationship.

Any other examples?

Personal

Grading, grading, grading.

But my friend Elizabeth and I are working on a joint presentation for campus in the spring on a comparison/contrast between public perceptions of what women read late in the late 18th (Minerva Press) and 21st centuries (romance). I am really looking forward to it!

In sad news, our tuxedo kitty Goalie (with double paws) followed my husband and I as we walked to a neighborhood party Saturday night and has not been seen since. He often follows us when we walk the dogs, or go anywhere in the ‘hood, waits, and then walks home with us. Weird, I know. But he’s never been away this long. Keep your fingers crossed!

Look for an insightful and moving Behind the Lines post tomorrow by Shannon Stacey. And those m/m reviews I owe you!

HAPPY WEEK!

26 responses so far

« Newer posts Older posts »

Follow

Get every new post on this blog delivered to your Inbox.

Join other followers: