by Laura K. Curtis | Aug 17, 2013 | Writing |
How often do you need a new one?
At the Romance Writers of Australia conference the other day, Julia Quinn made a statement that quickly spread all over the writing communities on Twitter: You’ll never hurt your career by helping another author. It brings me back to something I have been meaning to examine more closely pretty much ever since I wrote my post on the things authors are charged too much for. In that post, I said that I wasn’t competing with other authors, and I want to expand on that idea.
Here’s the thing: a book is not a refrigerator. You cannot translate your experience selling refrigerators into book marketing.
A person who buys a refrigerator and finds it does a good job doesn’t immediately go out and go out and buy another refrigerator, and then another, and another. A book is more like a vacation. It’s an experience, and when people have enjoyable experiences they want to repeat them.
For example, I have a friend who likes cruises. Now, a cruise is my idea of hell, but she really enjoys them. She begins planning her next cruise the minute she gets home from the one she’s one. That’s exactly how I am about books. Let’s say I read a book by Karen Rose. I like it, so the first thing I do is immediately look for another book by the same author. But maybe I’ve read all her books (I have, as a point of fact). So then I look for something that will provide a similar experience. Maybe Lisa Jackson or Laura Griffin. Or maybe I pick up a Dee Davis book, which has a more paramilitary slant to it, and decide I want more of that. Next up might be one of Tara Janzen’s or Roxanne St. Claire’s.
And, if I like Roxanne St. Claire’s romantic suspense novels (I do), I might try her contemporary romances. And if I like those (I do), I might look for more in a similar vein to them, only by different authors.
This is because I am your favorite customer, the serious reader. I read two or three books a week. I always have a huge number of books on my TBR list, but they don’t all suit a particular mood. If I am reading, say, zombies, and I want another zombie story, I don’t go on to the cozy mystery sitting on my TBR, I buy another zombie book.
So you see where I am going with this, right? People for whom reading is truly pleasurable tend to read more and more until their consumption of books reaches max speed. You couldn’t possibly be the only author they read, so you’re not competing with other authors for that spot. In fact, boosting other authors you think your readers might enjoy helps you. If you have to justify helping other authors, remind yourself of that.
by Laura K. Curtis | Aug 6, 2013 | Books, Romance, Writing |
I blame Twilight. Closely followed by its fan fic, 50 Shades. But lately, it seems that everywhere I look I see romance novels populated by stalkers and abusers, general alpha-holes, who wouldn’t make it past my front door. These are guys who won’t take “no” for an answer, even—or especially—when they profess to love the speaker. Many of them are billionaires, for some reason. Or bikers. In fact, so many of them that I am willing to add both Billionaires and Bikers to my list of TICAs, at least for the moment.
It was easier with Twilight. At least there you weren’t dealing with a human. I mean, I think we can all agree that a human male who sneaks into a girl’s bedroom and watches her sleep needs intense therapy at the very least, right? If not jail time? Maybe social mores among vampires are different.
But what about Mr. Grey? Ana tells him “I don’t want to see you” and he repeatedly shows up. That’s called stalking. It’s against the law. And the other crap he does to her (and no, I am not talking about the sex, I am talking about separating her from family and friends, controlling her life, etc.) are textbook abuser behaviors. And yet, supposedly, all of this is ok because of his traumatic past.
Or take Kristen Ashley’s Motorcycle Man, which begins post-coitus with the hero telling the heroine, his new office manager and one night stand, to leave her number when she leaves. Then their first actual interaction basically begins with him speaking these words to her:
“I do not work with bitches who have had my dick in their mouths.”
And then he goes on to dissect their sexual encounter.
Right. Because that’s the kind of “hero” we’re all looking for nowadays. I mentioned to a friend of mine that right there Ashley lost me and she said “oh, but he’s the hero, you know there’s a reason he’s acting that way and that we’ll find out what it is.”
Well, but here’s the thing. I don’t care why he’s acting that way. I don’t care how horrible his childhood was. I don’t care if only the love of a good woman can save him. I’ve known men like that and if they reach his age and still act that way, they’re done. That’s who they are. My suspension of disbelief will stretch only so far, and that’s about a mile past the marker.
Now, that’s not to say I don’t love a good Alpha hero. Even a bossy, slightly overbearing hero. Probably my very favorite of this type at the moment is Cara McKenna’s Kelly Robak from After Hours. The guy has plenty of baggage and he likes to have his way. But he’s not an asshole. And he’s up front about everything. He’s a grown up. He’s learned to deal with his own issues and to explain. He pushes some of the heroine’s boundaries, and she gets in his face, and that’s okay. Although I did at one or two points find myself going “well, that’s the wrong way to handle something, Bud,” I never thought “wow, you’re a complete shit.” And there’s a big difference.
There are lots of ridiculous tropes I love. The Marriage of Convenience, for example, which, since I don’t really read historicals, is hard to find. (Now that same sex marriage is legal in many states, I know an editor looking for same-sex marriage of convenience stories…if you have one, holler!) A good contemporary MoC story will grab me every time. Just like a good Best Friend’s Little Sister story. And I know there are plenty of people who hate both.
So what are your TICAs?
by Laura K. Curtis | Aug 1, 2013 | Books, Romance |
Image by @smartbiches Sarah.
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.
by Laura K. Curtis | Aug 1, 2013 | Stuff! |
You may have noticed that a couple of things are missing from my blog…the “About” and “Bibliography” are gone. That’s because they’ve moved to my brand new site at LauraKCurtis.com. Check it out! I think it looks grand!
by Laura K. Curtis | Jul 21, 2013 | Romance, Writing |
I’ll no doubt have more to say about RWA in coming weeks when my brain has settled somewhat, but first, a brief glimpse at my experience.
I arrived on Wednesday, got checked in, and met up with friends for dinner. After that, we went out to the Smart Bitches reader party, where we all wore mustaches. This took place in the back half of a music hall/restaurant/bar, and let me tell you, we got some highly intrigued looks from the “regular” patrons. My friends and I wore the plain black mustaches, but Kari Young (who I don’t know, but obviously should) brought one that matched her hair!
On Thursday, my agent’s agency had a luncheon at Mary Mac’s Tea Room. Naturally, it included fried green tomatoes. (I must say, being gluten free is not easy when traveling in the south.)
I mean, just look at those delicious fried green tomatoes! I wanted to eat them sooooo badly.
Then, right after the luncheon, I ran off to the indie signing to grab a book from the fabulous @briaquinlan for my niece. Here she is signing them. (I asked her to write the dedication to my niece and she was positively wicked in what she said. You would never guess to look at her–doesn’t she look sweet and innocent?–what an evil imagination she really has.)
On Friday, I had my own signing! It was fun, even if we at the InterMix table didn’t have physical books. InterMix has a sampler available with sample chapters from their 2013 titles and we had download cards for that (if you’re interested in the sampler, it’s free at all digital outlets). I also signed chocolate bars.
Friday night Penguin had a cocktail party for its authors, editors, etc, which was great fun because I got to meet people whose work I’ve been reading for ages.
Saturday, I finally had time to go to some panels. They were fascinating and so useful! Usually I manage to get to a lot of panels at national, but this year I was just ridiculously busy! I took some pictures at the panels, too, but then I lost my phone, so…
Before the awards ceremony for the Ritas and Golden Hearts, I went to dinner with old friends @IsobelCarr (the other half of my Twitter brain) and @SarahFrantz, and new friend Kris Hohls, of LoveLetter Magazine in Germany. We went to a fantastic restaurant called Abattoir. If you like meat, I highly, highly recommend it next time you’re in Atlanta. We were definitely the problem table because Isobel is allergic to eggplant, Kris is vegetarian, I am gluten-sensitive, and Sarah is extremely allergic to milk products. But the restaurant managed to feed us all admirably.
We made it back to the hotel just in time for the awards ceremony. And, of course, the Samhain after party, where they had excellent dancing music and delicious desserts. But I had to go to bed. I was exhausted.
by Laura K. Curtis | Jul 16, 2013 | Stuff! |
Before I leave for RWA tomorrow, a couple of pictures of summer in my garden!
by Laura K. Curtis | Jul 11, 2013 | Books, Writing |
by Laura K. Curtis | Jul 10, 2013 | Stuff! |
Pain is a peculiar thing, at the same time universal and utterly individual. If I say I am hungry, most people have a general sense of what I mean. If I say I am tired, they can probably not only sympathize, but empathize. But if I tell you my back hurts, or I have a toothache…
Pain, though physical in nature, is more like an emotion. We have qualifiers–stabbing, throbbing, radiating, shooting–and doctors will often ask you to rank your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, but even that’s not particularly effective at explaining to someone else what it is you feel. After all, who says our scales are at all similar? When I told an ER intake nurse one time that my pain level was an eight, she said, “EIGHT? No one comes in as an eight…everyone who walks through those doors is a ten.”
And chances are, a couple of years before that incident, I’d have rated my pain a ten, too. But in 2001, I had a perforated appendix and ended up septic with peritonitis. On the day I called 911 it was literally the only thing I could do. The operator got my address from my phone–I am not sure I could have remembered it to give to her. She asked if the door was unlocked. I couldn’t move off the floor to see.
My pain scale changed that day. Ten now is physically blinding, as in the pain is so bad that black spots show up all over your field of vision. Or it is for me. I’m not at all certain you’d have the same reaction.
People I trust–both friends and medical professionals–tell me I have a very high pain tolerance. But I don’t think that’s true. Comparing my reactions to other people’s, I think I am sort of missing some levels on the pain scale. That is, I have 1-4, but then 5-7 just continue to register as 4 and the next thing you know I am screaming because I am at 8.
If I truly had a high tolerance, I wouldn’t be so anxious to get to the doctor and get rid of the pain, would I? Wouldn’t I just sort of grit my teeth and go on? Stoicism is SO not my thing. Once I get to the pain, I want drugs. Immediately.
I’ve been thinking about this a great deal recently because last Sunday, I woke up in excruciating pain. Like whoa, mama, I’m just going to lie here and cry for a few minutes pain. I didn’t go to the ER because I didn’t feel…sick. Broken. I can’t explain it except to say that nothing I felt inside my body made me think I couldn’t make it until the next day when I could get in to see my doctor. I had a couple of pain pills left over from oral surgery earlier this years, so between those and enough Aleve to completely destroy my liver, Sunday passed.
After several docs and some really good painkillers and X-rays and an MRI, it turns out I have a herniated cervical disc. (And another problem with a thoracic disc, but I’ve had that on and off for 20 years, I can’t worry about it now.) There’s a piece of the disc that’s broken off and wedged itself oh-so-inconveniently against the nerve that runs down my right arm and into my hand causing weakness, numbness, and holy cow pain.
It is, as the neurosurgeon told me yesterday, a mechanical problem that will, in all likelihood, require a mechanical solution, aka spinal surgery. But he encouraged me to try other things first–acupuncture, epidurals, PT, traction–because in some cases, if you can manage the pain long enough, in six months to a year, the fragments will take care of themselves.
Since I don’t like the idea of anyone cutting into my back, I will certainly try. But the idea of managing pain for a year on the off chance it could resolve itself isn’t terribly appealing.
In the meantime, I have newfound respect for all those romantic suspense heroes and heroines who get up to sexytimes while near death from bullet wounds and field surgery.
And if I see you at RWA, please don’t slap me on the back to congratulate me.
by Laura K. Curtis | Jun 29, 2013 | Stuff! |
In a few weeks, with a little luck, I will be rolling out a new website. This blog will still be right where it is, but at the moment when you go to laurakcurtis.com it just redirects you to the blog–that won’t happen anymore. Instead, there will be a whole actual site. Freaky, right? But I worked with a designer (have I mentioned I have no design sense) and we have picked the key image we’ll be using, which means I can make coordinated business cards. So here’s what my new cards will look like!
That’s the full bleed. The actual trim will be a bit smaller.
What do you guys think? Fun, right?
by Laura K. Curtis | Jun 26, 2013 | Writing |
The only Senate I usually talk about.
Once upon a time, in the early days of blogging, back when you had to install software on a server to have a blog, I had one. It was required for my job as an admin for an academic computing lab. I hated it. I felt as if I had nothing to say and no one was listening. Which was mostly true in the beginning. But when I left the job, I kept the blog. It became a place for me to vent, and my venting in those days was highly political. I was living in Texas and then in Boston and I had a lot to say about both local and national politics.
But then life took a turn, as it does, and I started having trouble keeping track of even basic things. My epilepsy meds were failing, though I didn’t know it at the time, and I didn’t have the brainpower to keep track of bills or candidates, let alone write coherently about them.
So the blog went away.
When I got back to blogging, lots of things had changed. I had a new career, a new focus. And the Internet had changed, too. The trolls had invaded, and I had no intention of inviting them into my private space. So I kept my blogging to relatively innocuous—or so I thought*—topics, along with the occasional book review. (*It was during this period, when I think my work was probably as inoffensive as it’s ever been, that I garnered my one and only Cease and Desist letter. You never can tell what people will try to shut you up over, apparently. Which was when I learned that the only appropriate response to an out of line C&D is to post said letter. It was a valuable lesson.)
Nowadays, part of my consulting work is to talk to writers about marketing, branding, and social media. I always, always tell them to stay away from hot-button topics unless those topics are integral to their writing and they’re building a certain platform.
Over the past 24 hours on Twitter I have repeatedly ignored my own advice, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.
First and most obviously, because the topics under discussion—women’s access to healthcare and control of their own reproductive systems, and equal rights for LGBT folks—are near and dear to my heart. But there is more to it than that.
Twitter, I think, is a venue that seems fleeting. It appears as if you can drop your words into the Tweetstream and they will be carried away in a way they will not on a blog or even on Facebook. There’s a tendency to feel as if they will disappear.
Of course, they don’t. Indeed, if you say something particularly on point, that tweet may be retweeted by people with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers. It may show up on someone else’s blog as a quote. It may show up on television as an example of the type of conversation people are having.
But when you’re on Twitter, you don’t think about that.
So last night I got called, among other things, a baby killer. (I’ve never killed a baby. Or even a fetus. Unless you count baby roaches. I have NO sympathy for roaches of any age.) And this morning I was told that I had ruined traditional marriage. (My husband says that’s probably true because I refuse to wear an apron and I hate ironing.)
But it’s all good. It’s nice to find that old voice and exercise it every once in a while, even if now it has to be put away again.
For example, I have a friend who likes cruises. Now, a cruise is my idea of hell, but she really enjoys them. She begins planning her next cruise the minute she gets home from the one she’s one. That’s exactly how I am about books. Let’s say I read a book by Karen Rose. I like it, so the first thing I do is immediately look for another book by the same author. But maybe I’ve read all her books (I have, as a point of fact). So then I look for something that will provide a similar experience. Maybe Lisa Jackson or Laura Griffin. Or maybe I pick up a Dee Davis book, which has a more paramilitary slant to it, and decide I want more of that. Next up might be one of Tara Janzen’s or Roxanne St. Claire’s.