by Laura K. Curtis | May 29, 2014 | Books, Romance |
If you ask someone who’s been married a few years about their spouse, you’re apt to get an answer that begins with “I love him/her to death, but…” That’s because marriage is hard. The falling in love part, the part we see in romance novels, may be angsty and difficult and there may be hurdles to be overcome, but we know—because we are reading a romance novel—that the hero and heroine will conquer the issues keeping them apart. By the end of the story we’ll see a committed couple.
But what happens in the “ever after” part of the HEA? I admit to being turned off by most of the “marriage and a baby” epilogues I’ve read. That doesn’t mean I want HFN endings, because I don’t. For me to feel satisfied by a romance, I need to see some kind of commitment between the leads by the end of the book. No, it’s not the “ever after” that frequently sticks in my craw, it’s the “happily.”
I’ve been thinking about this issue a great deal lately because I’ve found myself unable to believe that many of the relationships in the books I’ve been reading the potential to last beyond the time frame of the story. Partially, this is because I read a lot of romantic suspense. The nature of the genre is that characters spend a lot of time running, hiding, fighting…anything but talking to each other. Problem-solving is immediate and critical. You cannot argue too long about which direction you’re going to run or you’ll end up dead. So, yeah, by the end of the novel, he respects her fighting abilities and she realizes he has some emotional depth. That’s good. But it doesn’t exactly tell me that they’ll be able to resolve the issues that inevitably arise during a marriage. What if they can’t pay the bills? What if one of them gets a job offer halfway across the country and the other doesn’t want to move? If they’re both badass, high-powered, high-energy thrill seekers, who will take care of the kid that shows up in the epilogue?
After Hours by Cara McKenna has a great and very realistic ending.
I am also a fan of contemporary romance, and I know I am not the only one frustrated by the number of stories in which the heroine is forced to move to a small town she hates at the beginning, is determined to return to the “big city,” only to find that by the end of the novel she is totally happy in that same town. There’s virtually never any question that the guy might move to the city or that, together, they might move somewhere entirely different. What about—*gasp*—the suburbs? Presumably the heroine enjoyed her life in the city for a reason and all too often the story never touches on how she will replace whatever she got from that life. Maybe she was a litigator or a high-fashion model or a gallery-owner. Will running a chocolate shop or starting a law practice that basically works on wills and real estate transactions give her the same satisfaction? I am not saying it won’t, I’m just saying that too often that question is ignored.
So, what does make for a good ending if it’s not a “happily ever after”? Well, to start with, it has to fit the story. I once read—and I wish I could remember the name, but I can’t—a book in which a woman’s tragic past included an emergency hysterectomy due to abuse. It was one of the great sorrows of her life that she would never have a child. But the guy she falls for has tons of cash and in the epilogue they’ve just returned from “overseas” where she’s had some “experimental procedure” and…she’s pregnant. Seriously. There was so much wrong there I just mentally blocked out the title and author. If you give a character a backstory like that, and invest me in it and in her desire to have a baby, the best kind of ending would be to show me how she and her lover work through the fact that she will never get what she wants. Don’t magically make it possible, show me how they deal with tough times. Then I will believe that when their house burns to the ground and they have to live in a hotel room for six months, they won’t drive each other nuts.
Bounce by K.M. Jackson seamlessly blends women’s fiction & romance
I am not saying that romance should change its focus to the reality of marriage. That’s been the mainstay of women’s fiction for a long time. Occasionally, the two cross—as they do in K.M. Jackson’s Bounce—but romance tends to be about the finding of love, not the keeping of it. And that’s fine. I love that. I don’t have any desire to change it. I just want a shot of realism injected into the ever afters. I am tired of the deus ex machina flying in at the last minute to solve problems that real life couples would have to adjust to, or one partner in the couple magically changing their mind.
So I am asking for recommendations: what books, old or new, in any subgenre, do you think do a particularly good job showing couples working through difficulties and making compromises?
by Laura K. Curtis | May 20, 2014 | Books, Romance, Writing |
Can you tell I am just a tiny bit excited? Maybe even more so than I was for my debut. There’s something about the story of Lost that resonates for me in odd ways.
You can see an excerpt from the book on my site, and I am trying to come up with something cool to give away. I was hoping to see something while I was in New Orleans that would just speak to me, but I didn’t. If you were going to enter to win something, what would it be?
In the meantime, I have some pictures from my trip to the Romantic Times conference over on my Facebook page. It was madness. I’ve never been to RT before, so I don’t know if it’s always like that, or whether the combination of a bunch of crazed romance writers and the general decadence of New Orleans created the mania. Either way…wow. Just, wow. Even without drinking a Hurricane, the official drink of NOLA, I felt blown away!
More later, but for now, a few links to where you can find Lost:
All Romance eBooks
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
iTunes
Kobo
Enjoy!
by Laura K. Curtis | May 11, 2014 | Books, Romance |
Or, at least, I am GOING to New Orleans. It’s not really moving to NY. It’s the Romantic Times booklovers’ convention and I must admit to being a wee bit intimidated since it’s my first time at the con.
But be that as it may, I am ready. Or at least as ready as I am going to be. Or at least, as ready as I am going to be after I pack on Tuesday evening.
If you’re going to the con, hit me up for some swag. My swag this year is little first aid kits with bandaids and first aid cream, for those new convention shoes that are leaving blisters on your feet. Or the paper cuts from bookmarks. Or the scrapes and scratches you aren’t sure where you picked up while out partying!
And if a brand new conference I’ve never attended before isn’t enough to stress out about, on Tuesday the 20th, my new book, LOST comes out. I am hoping to find some fun things at RT that I can give away to celebrate, so be sure to check back next Tuesday to see what’s going on!
by Laura K. Curtis | Apr 25, 2014 | Books, Romance, Writing |
I spend a fair amount of time thinking and talking about marketing. (In fact, if you’re going to be at the RWA conference in NJ in October, you can come hear me talk about author branding.) But I like to think everything I do amounts to “truth in advertising.” Your brand shouldn’t be something you “put on,” it’s an expression of who you are. My brand is not just what I write in my fiction, it’s also the types of things I discuss here on the blog, the dog photos I post on Twitter, all the parts of the “social me.”
Your marketing should always be honest. Your cover shouldn’t make promises your book doesn’t keep. If the cover looks like romantic suspense, there should be thrills and chills inside. It if looks like a light, happy beach read, there shouldn’t be dead bodies piling up. If the cover copy (and please note, cover copy is the descriptive text about the plot; “blurbs” are those things where people say “this book is the best thing I’ve read in five years!”) says that the book is a romance, there damned well better be a happy ending.
Back in the days when authors didn’t have a whole lot of personal contact with readers, marketing was a different game. You (which, in those days, meant your publisher) gave clues, tempted and teased, and hoped that when readers picked up a book in the store and paged through it that they’d buy it.
But things have changed. In today’s world, authors meet their readers on Twitter and Facebook and blogs. They actively ask their readers to review their work on various sites. The lines between readers and authors are getting blurred more every day, which is both good and bad. It’s good because I feel—as a reader—that I can more easily tell my favorite authors how much I appreciate their work. And, as an author—certainly as a new author who is hoping to constantly improve her writing—it’s great to be able to hear directly from readers.
But there’s a down side, too, in that, well, not everyone likes my work. And I do have the desire to explain things to them (“but did you miss that she…?”). So that’s hard. And negotiating the author-reviewer relationship is difficult since I was brought up to say “thank you” to everyone and I’ve been told that a number of reviewers/bloggers don’t want to hear that from authors. So it’s problematic. My own solution is to say “thank you” to those I know from social media, and leave others alone.
This new author-reader-reviewer relationship, however, has also created an opening for a far darker and more manipulative form of marketing than used to be possible. Now, a select few authors—and I am by no means tarring everyone with this brush, but there are enough of them out there to make it a “thing”—are posting to blogs, forums, social media about how they are being “bullied,” and therefore they will be forced to stop writing. This leads to a jump in their sales, and a huge outpouring of sympathy, and of course they don’t stop writing.
There are other manifestations of this same kind of marketing, which I think of as “guilt marketing.” Authors post that someone has ripped them off. They post that they need money because of some personal problem or illness and that the best way to help them is to buy their books. (Instead of just giving them money, which doesn’t create a sales jump and thus a ranking jump on Amazon.) They post that haters are writing negative reviews for some specious reason and beg their followers to go post positive reviews to Amazon to drown out the negative voices.
Mind you, I am not saying that these things don’t happen—people do have family emergencies. They do get ripped off. They do have unfair reviews written on occasion. But up until now, that’s never been a problem they expected readers to solve for them.
The real issue is that this is now happening so frequently that it’s pretty clear not all of it is true. Which leaves readers feeling cynical and abused.
Recently, an author claimed that because of poor reviews, etc, she was suicidal and she was going to quit writing, take down her book, take down her page, yada yada yada. She did none of those things. In fact, she recently sent a review site a request to do a “cover reveal” for her new book. Yes, another book after she supposedly had to quit because of the psychological trauma caused to her by the readers of the first book.
Now, if you’ve followed this blog for a while, you probably know that I am a depressive. In fact, a high percentage of creative people deal with depression. I suffer from both epilepsy and depression and I deal with them, just like other epileptics and depressives. They’re part of my life the way, I don’t know, migraines, are a part of someone else’s life. I don’t expect other people to solve my problems for me and I don’t go “I’m going to kill myself because you are all being mean to me” when stuff goes wrong.
In fact, I’ve known a lot of people who have those feelings, and I’ve known those who actually committed suicide, and none of them have thrown that kind of tantrum. People who have depression take the words “I am going to kill myself” very, very seriously. Often, they won’t say them even when they mean them. If they do say them, it’s frequently to only a few very close friends, people they trust to help them stay alive.
Mood disorders affect different people in different ways. Yes, some people may prefer to announce to the world their current state of mind. But most don’t. Not when their current state is as dire as this woman said hers was. And she is not alone in faking this kind of melodrama. I’ve seen this same behavior several times in the past year. And none of these people have actually stopped writing, have actually taken down their sites and disappeared from the Net.
This kind of manipulation infuriates me, not the least because it drowns out the real cries for help that occur on the web. And it’s becoming more and more common. I don’t think there’s anything to be done about it, unfortunately, except for readers to become aware that they may be being manipulated and to proceed with caution.
But still, it pisses me off.
by Laura K. Curtis | Apr 24, 2014 | Books, Romance |
Recently I had a discussion with some friends on Twitter about “alpha heroes.” Now, you may remember that I have an intense dislike of the “Alphahole,” but there are heroes who are alpha without being jerks.
But let me back up a minute. This conversation began because in a post on Heroes and Heartbreakers, which is a blog that is often a great deal of fun, author Jackie Ashenden wrote a post about what she says are the six types of alpha heroes. I encourage you to go read her definitions to see what you think, but my thought when I read them was “are those guys really all alphas??” Because I’m not so sure they are.
For example, she talks about playboys as alphas. Well, let me tell you, I’ve known some of these guys in real life, and they weren’t the least bit alpha. In fact, lack of alphaness is almost definitional for the true playboy, who’s not going to waste his time on a woman who doesn’t want him when he can move along to an easier target. From television’s current crop, let’s take Rick Castle (in his pre-Caskett days). Playboy? Absolutely. Alpha? Absolutely not.
At the beginning of the post, Ashenden says
I love an alpha hero. Yeah, I know, loving an alpha isn’t so fashionable these days. We want a guy who’s more sensitive, who’s not so in your face or controlling, who’s laid back, who’s a bit more true-to-life even.
But, actually, I think the vast majority of heroes in today’s romances are alpha. In fact, since I don’t always like alpha heroes (they trigger some bad memories for me), it’s often difficult for me to understand the uber-popular books of the moment.
Ashenden also lists the “wounded alpha” as a type, but the way she describes it doesn’t seem particularly alpha to me. When a strong man has a tragic event happen—either physical or emotional—and he basically curls up into a ball and wants everyone to leave him alone, that’s not alpha. He may or may not have been alpha in his previous incarnation, but during the period of the book, he’s not an alpha. The entirety of the narrative may be focused on getting him to the point where he can once again be alpha, but I would argue that he’s not an alpha hero.
But I don’t want to spend all this space on what an alpha is not. I am more concerned with what an alpha hero is.
Let me start with my house. If you could speak with my dogs, they’d tell you that I am alpha. I give the orders. I decide what they can and cannot do. They do not disobey me…unlike my husband, who’s a total pushover. That’s not to say they don’t go behind my back and shred 18 rolls of toilet paper if I happen to leave the pack lying on the kitchen table without putting it away, because they do, but if I say “down,” they go down.
This works because I know what I want and I am in a position to get it.
To me, an alpha hero has two essential characteristics:
- He knows what he wants
- He has the self-confidence to believe he can get it.
Those are, as far as I can see, the two characteristics that are absolutely necessary for a hero to be alpha. Either of those characteristics, taken to extremes, can turn the guy from a hero into an asshole or an abuser, but without either one of them he becomes either beta or unheroic.
And then there is a third characteristic (and my thanks go to Olivia Waite for helping me work through this in my mind), which is more amorphous and harder to define: leadership ability. I think this is an important characteristic, but it’s usually merely assumed in the narrative of the romance. That is, in a military romantic suspense, we might see the hero being a leader. It might also occur in the motorcycle club romances—I don’t read those because they tend to be too alpha-hole for me, so I don’t know—but in a more general sense, we rarely actually get to see the hero being a leader.
Let’s take one of the most popular alpha heroes, the billionaire, as an example. (As an aside, damn, there are a crap-ton of young, attractive billionaires in Romanceland. But that’s another post.) Anyway, we see those guys spending money, attending social functions, riding horses, driving fast cars, engaging in one-on-one competitions in business…but rarely do we see them leading whatever business it is that has brought them their billions of dollars. We assume that they are leaders—after all, how else did they get their big bucks?—but we don’t actually see it. (And, frankly, again, this is fiction. In real life, the super-wealthy don’t have to be leaders. They frequently inherit their money and pay other people to manage it so that it continues to make more money for them. But that’s not a romantic notion.)
In Romantic Suspense, we assume that the law enforcement hero is alpha unless something in the narrative convinces us otherwise, but frequently they’re never shown as leaders because we don’t get to see them working with others. Of course, a moment of logical thought reminds us that this is fiction, not fact. In real life, most members of law enforcement work in teams. And law enforcement is like a corporation in which the vast majority of romance heroes would be considered “middle management.” In order to get around that, we usually see the “maverick” or the “loner” LEO, but that means we don’t get to see his leadership capabilities.
In turn, this results in one of the more problematic areas of romance in general and romantic suspense in particular: when the alpha has to be shown as a leader and the only person he’s in regular contact with is the heroine, he pretty much has to lead her. And that particular dynamic is uncomfortable for me as a reader.
When we were having our Twitter conversation about alphas, someone said (and I am sorry I don’t remember who) that she thought many readers use “alpha” as code for “what I find hot.” That is, any hero, regardless of his characteristics, becomes an alpha hero in the mind of the reader who finds him attractive. I think that to a certain extent that’s true, but I also think it’s a shame. Because the classification of types is useful in that it gives us a common vocabulary, which is necessary to any kind of genre analysis.
by Laura K. Curtis | Feb 26, 2014 | Books, Romance, Writing |
A discussion over the last several days on Twitter, and a long and interesting post with a great discussion on Dear Author, on the topic of what kind of ending readers require in a romance–HEA (happily ever after) or HFN (happy for now), and indeed, what “happy for now” means to different readers–led me to examine my own feelings. But before I subject you to ruminations on fiction, I will give you this little piece of writing that sort of explains my feelings as fiction.
I almost miss him, eclipsed as he is by the stark white blouse and night-black pants of the hostess leading him across the room. He has turned gray, a mist that trails in her wake, a near void amidst the burgundy wine, white tablecloths, mahogany furnishings and bright, fresh food.
– That’s him? He’s not what I imagined.
I almost tell her I was wrong, that the slope-shouldered shell is not my former brown-haired, bright-eyed, laughing lover with the rough hands and soft kisses.
– He’s changed.
I have changed, too, and for a brief moment regret the twenty pounds I’ve put on, the fact that I’ve been gardening and my face is smudged with dirt.
– You’re glad, now, to have escaped, I bet. I can’t see you being happy with a man like him.
I look at her, the one he married, sitting across from him. As brown as he is gray, she wears tailored slacks, a cream shirt, a string of pearls. Not an extra ounce to soften her frame; all her unworn pounds weigh him down. They don’t speak to each other, menus held like shields between them.
– I wouldn’t have been with a man like him. He wouldn’t be that man if we’d stayed together.
I cried at our parting. Tear of loss, tears of self-pity. I resist the urge to cry again. Tears of sorrow, this time, tears of frustration at what might have been.
– He got what he deserved. He should have stuck with the one he loved, not left her for the one who made sense.
She is angry for me, and I appreciate it, but she does not understand. We are what we are and he made the only choice he could. I don’t hate him. I never have.
When we leave, I will kiss his stubbled cheek and clasp his softening body to my own and wonder if he ever mourns the long-gone pieces of his soul.
As you might guess, that’s loosely based on my own life. I was 39 years old when I got married. I’d been in love before. More than once. Those were HFNs, but they could have been HEAs. When we were together, I think we thought it was forever. If you’d read about us, you could have closed the book and imagined forever. But it didn’t work out that way, mostly because I was young and so were they. We weren’t ready. We weren’t able to make the kind of commitment to each other a true HEA requires.
For me, a romance novel needs, at the minimum, a HFN like that. A HFN where you can close the book and imagine a future for the couple. Not that they won’t have to work at it, but that they might, realistically, be able to have one. So it’s definitional…if the “FN” just means that the characters are gleefully enjoying a sexual affair, well, that’s not romance for me. I’m not saying it’s not a fine reading experience, it’s just not romance. For romance, I need the characters to feel love, even if they don’t say it.
My real life is hard. When I pick up a romance I want to know that at the end, regardless of the trials and tribulations the couple goes through, regardless of how many horrible things may happen to them, their friends, their families, even their pets, that in the end, they will have a future together. That their lives will be better because they have someone to share them with. In fact, the books that end up with low grades from me when I review them are very often those where, although the characters at the end profess their love for each other, I simply cannot believe that they will be happy, even if they do actually work at it.
I must admit, it’s the rare thriller I am happy with where the criminal gets away at the end, though, so I guess I am a traditionalist. I want books to be better than real life.
If you ask someone who’s been married a few years about their spouse, you’re apt to get an answer that begins with “I love him/her to death, but…” That’s because marriage is hard. The falling in love part, the part we see in romance novels, may be angsty and difficult and there may be hurdles to be overcome, but we know—because we are reading a romance novel—that the hero and heroine will conquer the issues keeping them apart. By the end of the story we’ll see a committed couple.
