Here we are again, in a familiar place for readers and writers of romance—with someone denigrating both romance fiction and its readership. This time, it’s Kelly Bohan, an intern at the Missouri Review, who decided for some unknown reason to critique a genre she admits to knowing nothing about.
In fact, she is very proud of the fact that she disdains romance. She found Roberts’s language horrific but Nabokov’s beautiful. I won’t pick apart the passages she chooses—you can do that yourself—but I will say that it’s immensely clear to me that she’s not just not a reader of romance, she’s not a reader of popular fiction of any kind, and that’s hardly something of which to be proud. Especially when she’s interning at a magazine, so one assumes she has hopes of writing herself someday.
How do I know she doesn’t read popular fiction? Well, she doesn’t read thrillers—they’re absolutely chock-full of over-the-top description. Is it about sex? Not always, but certainly there’s plenty of sex in James Rollins or Barry Eisler, none of which is particularly elegantly written (sorry, guys) but instead is written to suit the stories. And then there’s Lee Child, who was nominated for a Bad Sex award for this passage from The Affair.
There’s a particular class of Sci-Fi is called “Space Opera.” Obviously, she doesn’t read that. Nor does she read High Fantasy—the descriptions of the settings alone would be far too florid. I love sword and sorcery stories, but that’s probably because they are romances in the traditional sense—stories of adventure that end happily. Or modern lit fic, since that, too, is frequently ridiculous in its descriptions of sex (heck, test out any of the Bad Sex award shortlist excerpts.)
But I digress. It happens when I get upset. What I really wanted to talk about was the conversation spawned by this article, along with something I thought about while I was at RWA.
I don’t have any particular love for awards ceremonies—I don’t watch the Oscars or Emmys or any of those things—and I’ve never thought about winning an award myself. But watching the Ritas, I thought I would like to win for one reason and one reason only: so I could tell the world how fabulous my husband is. Really, that’s the only acceptable venue for such a declaration.
And the thing is, our marriage isn’t perfect. I’m not giving away any secrets by saying that. But despite being a long-time romance reader, I never expected either my husband or our relationship to be without flaws. I don’t want a billionaire with a perfect body and a dark past that he can get over only with me. I do want, as Tessa says, fidelity, respect, and orgasms. And, to be brutally honest, I expect the first two from anyone I let into my life, if you define fidelity as “strict observance of promises,” as the dictionary does. The promise my husband made was that there would be no one else. Others may make different promises in their relationships.
Even in romances, relationships take many forms and the promises made vary from couple to couple—or trio to trio or quartet to…well, you get the idea. What’s important to a romance is that those promises are kept.
I will also not be giving away any secrets if I say that in the ten years of our marriage, my husband has had to deal with a lot more “in sickness” than “in health.” Unlike a woman I know whose husband left her after she was diagnosed with cancer, mine has never flinched from the doctors or hospitals. He doesn’t talk much, just does what needs doing.
That’s what I wanted when I got married—not a chisel-jawed billionaire or the leader of a motorcycle club or an ageless vampire. I frequently hear men say that romance novels give women unrealistic—and unreasonable—expectations. But that’s only because men are looking at the surface, the toys owned by the heroes, while women are looking beneath the perfect six-pack abs.
I feel intensely sorry for all those people who think that fidelity, respect, and orgasms are too much to expect all together in one relationship. (And to those women sacrificing the first two for the third, get the heck OUT. The third you can provide for yourself.)
The only requirement for a modern romance is that it features a protagonist who ends up in a committed relationship and that the story focuses in detail on the development of that relationship. Everything else is up for grabs. There can be murders, world destruction, werewolves, demons, tragedies, triumphs, explicit sex, implicit sex, no sex at all, divorce, massive family dysfunction…there are romances to suit every taste. And there are covers from the most abstract to the most explicit.
Decide what you want in a book and find it. Decide what you want in a relationship and go get it. Fidelity and respect (and orgasms) are not out of anyone’s reach.
I originally wrote this as a comment on a post over at Heroes and Heartbreakers, but I felt as if it deserved a post of its own because so many people in my personal community are talking about NA. This post is slightly modified from that, for both clarification and elaboration.
I can’t deal with NA fiction as a genre because it seems so much a part of the infantalization of America. I didn’t read much YA fiction as a child with the exception of The Outsiders. I went from kids’ books to adult books with no transition…and no problem. But I also got my first job at 15, a job I maintained through high school, and I worked continuously all through college, so when I got out of college, I wasn’t a “new adult,” I’d been an adult for several years.
Lots of people focus on the sexual aspect of NA. I’ve heard it called “YA with sex,” and Laurie Gold, who wrote the post on H&H that prompted this one, mentions that
In all the initial articles I read about New Adult Fiction, eroticism and Fifty Shades of Grey were always mentioned, which struck me as incredibly sad.
Well, yeah, that would strike me as sad, too, but mostly because it sounds as if NA is all about the sex. Sex and women who are doormats, waiting for a stalker/abuser to walk into their lives. Women with no personality of their own.
But plenty of people I respect say NA isn’t just YA with sex. They say it’s a different genre, and, frankly, I couldn’t care less about the sexual aspect. The adult stuff I read in my early teens, or even as what they would now call a “tween,” had sex in it. If kids want to read about sex, that’s between them and their parents. My parents didn’t care and it didn’t scar me forever…and even after reading all the non-consensual sex in the 1980s bodice rippers, I knew rape was wrong. (And reading all that sex didn’t mean I was *having* it…I was, among my crowd, late to the sexual party.)
In the 90s, almost all the romance I read would now be classified “new adult.” The heroines were rarely older than 27, the heroes never over 30. In fact, it got very irritating to me to be reading about them because they fell into one of two categories:
no real life experience, so they were just starting out all wide-eyed and innocent
far more life experience than any 25-year-old could possibly have–you know, the MD, PhD and three years with Doctors Without Borders type.
But now, we seem to have entered an era where people aren’t considered “adults” even in their twenties. They still live at home. They are still trying to figure out what they want to be. And that’s okay. It’s so okay, they even have a literature all their own. It’s true that romance in general seems to have aged up a tiny bit (and thank goodness for that) so that heroines who are doctors are realistically aged for their field, but there are still plenty of books out there for those interested in reading about 20-somethings.
I just feel as if encouraging people not to explore literature beyond their age group by saying “look, here are books specifically for you” does a massive disservice to both readers and the society at large.
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of Total BooX since the first time I read about them, so the other day I when got an email saying their site had gone live, I immediately hurried over to see what I could see.
Total BooX is a pay-as-you-read service. Instead of buying a book outright, you download it for free and don’t pay anything until you begin reading. The more you read, the more you pay, up to the full list price of the book. But if you only read 10% of the book and say “Good lord, that heroine is an idiot,” you only pay 10% of the price. Figure out the killer and lose interest 50% of the way through the mystery and lose interest? You only pay for 50% of the book. Want to keep a TBR pile? No problem, because you don’t pay anything to download the book to your device, only when you read it.
Total BooX on my phone
There’s no devoted e-reader for Total BooX–you read your books on your tablet or phone. More devices, they say, are coming later. You need to use their software because that’s how they track the amount you’ve read of each book.
There are some issues: the bookstore has a limited selection as yet, as it doesn’t appear that any of the “Big 6” (Big 5?) publishers have yet decided to try it. But there’s some great old crime pulp, and Sourcebooks, a big romance publisher, has jumped into the pool. Horror publisher Prologue Books is in the mix, too, along with Constable & Robinson’s horror and erotica anthologies. (And speaking of anthologies, I should mention that in the Total BooX model, the % of pages of the book you read doesn’t have to be consecutive. You might read 2 short stories–the first and the last–that add up to 20% of the text, thus only paying 20% of the cover price.) There are plenty of free books, too, so you can see what you think of the interface before investing. And right now, they’re giving you a $3 credit to sign up.
All in all, I think it’s a fabulous idea on many levels. But first let me tell you a couple of the cons.
CONS: The biggest problem with TotalBooX is the bookstore.
Perhaps it’s merely a function of the fact that there aren’t all that many books in there yet, but it’s only going to get more befuddling and confusing as time goes on. Paranormal Romance seems to be shelved as often in fantasy as it is in romance, and romance itself is just one big category–no subgenres that might help you narrow down to what you want to read.
Likewise, there’s no “if you liked this, you might like…” so if you go through the mystery shelves and buy a book featuring Sherlock Holmes, it won’t tell you how many other Holmes volumes are available on the site.
There’s no rating system, so I can’t even mark reminders for myself. I suppose I could create a shelf of “good” books and a shelf of “bad” books so I could see whether I wanted to read other books by those authors, but that doesn’t seem terribly efficient.
The Reader itself is quite basic. You can bookmark things, but you can’t highlight or annotate. People have become used to those abilities, even just normal readers. There’s no built-in dictionary as you’d get with a Nook or Kindle formatted document. This limits the type of books people are apt to want to read using TotalBooX. Nothing too challenging, nothing you’re going to want to take notes on, etc. Of course, like the bookstore, the reader could be upgraded at any time to fix some of these issues.
PROS:
As a reader, these are numerous. I can “taste test” pretty much anything. I can download a gajillion books to my iPad before a vacation and if I don’t read them, I don’t have to pay for them. I read a LOT, so the ability to give up on a book and not feel I have to finish it because I bought it is nice.
As a writer/publisher, the possibility of seeing real, true metrics of who’s reading the books, versus who’s buying them, is a super tempting. I am not sure whether TotalBooX is available to those who self-pub, but let’s assume for a minute that it is. Let’s say you create a really nice “package” for your first book that you’re self-pubbing–good blurbs, good cover copy, attractive cover–and you sell a bunch on Amazon and B&N and TotalBooX. All you know from A or B is that you sold the book. You don’t know whether buyers liked it. Whether they actually even finished it. So you don’t know whether they’re likely to buy your next book. But with TotalBooX, you can actually see where you lost reader interest. When your payments come in, you can tell that most people only read half the book. So there was a problem in the middle. Or maybe everyone read all the way through, which might indicate they want more in that same vein.
I’ve downloaded a few books to check out and we’ll see what happens. I think it’s a fascinating idea, and I’m all for anyone who will provide a new way get my “fix.”
As I get older, it gets harder to embarrass me. I do things today I couldn’t imagine doing in my twenties. It’s one of the few things I appreciate about the passage of time.
But the other day was something of a record.
I have a friend, Jenn LeBlanc, who is a fabulous photographer who specializes in romance novel covers. (If you ever want a cover, take a look at her portfolio.) Jenn was in town for a conference, and the guy she was supposed to shoot had to cancel on her. So she asked if I knew anyone. Well, I know this may come as a surprise, but I don’t know many people who are romance novel cover material. Well, actually, that’s not strictly true—I just don’t see my friends that way.
I do, however, know a lot of trainers and other gym rats. So I texted one and asked her. After a couple of days, she hadn’t come up with anyone and the one person she had asked had declined. I met her at the gym to work out, and we started…well…looking around. Then she asked one of her trainer friends if she knew anyone.
Well, the other woman, Rita, pointed out a guy in the gym and said “what about him? He was in the FDNY calendar.” (Which, I should point out as the wife of a firefighter—albeit a volunteer—you should probably buy. You can do so right here.) At which point, my embarrassing moment happened. Yes, I walked up to a complete stranger and asked him if he might be interested in posing for romance novel covers.
And he said yes! Unfortunately, then he got sick and couldn’t make it to the shoot. But he did agree to pose for Jenn at a later date. So at least some good came out of my acting like a complete weirdo!
Oh, yeah. And after all that? Turns out my husband actually knows the guy. Turns out he could have asked for me and saved me the embarrassment. But when I asked him whether he knew anyone, he magically forgot. *sigh* Real life men are not like romance heroes. Even (especially?) the ones we marry.
