Posts tagged romance novels

I took this romance reader survey and there were a couple of questions I had problems with. First, the genres! The problem with their list was that 1) some of those genres aren’t really distinct (“drama” vs. “contemporary”?), and 2) I generally prefer all my romance novels to be erotic romances, no matter what the genre. Doesn’t “erotic romance” just basically mean the book has sexy sexy sexytimes? Can’t an erotic romance be historical, fantasy, sci-fi, action/adventure, etc.?

Also, the choices for why I still generally prefer paperbacks were completely inadequate. None of them applied to me. In fact, I would prefer ebooks if their problems with permanence, accessibility, usability, and privacy were all solved. I don’t give a shit about lending books to friends (sorry, guys), how they look on my shelves, or the feel of paper (come ON).

(There was no write-in section in the survey, so I have to air my grievances here.)

oliviawaite:

resoundingmelody:

I went to the library today and just for fun, I picked up this romance novel. I can’t even remember the title. It was something like “Warrior in Love” or “In Love with a Warrior” and there was this buff half-naked man wearing plaid on it with long hair, cradling some chick with this crazy revealing dress in his arms. 

I now have hope (after reading a few chapters of this) that I could get published. Because honestly, this was some of the craziest shit I have ever read. There lines like  ”Her dress revealed the tops of her plentiful bosom” and “Her eyes were like the purest of lavender”. It was pretty flipping hilarious. 

Congratulations on your desire to publish a romance of your own! Congratulations as well on your innocence, for thinking that getting published is as easy as falling off a log! Pay no attention to the thousands — nay, millions of intelligent, educated women who love romance and devote many of their waking hours to reading it and writing it and honing their craft and technique. Surely your one lackluster experience with a book that was not to your taste — though you appear to have gotten several chapters in — gives you more authority about the genre than someone who has actually read an entire romance novel. The same way that my dislike for the novels of Thomas Hardy means that I could no doubt produce a stellar example of classic English literature.

Bonus points for talking about the cover rather than the text. Authors traditionally don’t have a great deal of control over romance covers, especially the clinch-tastic ones like you describe.

In fact, though, your desire to be published in romance is on the right track: romance is the most flourishing part of the book industry right now, whether we’re talking about print or digital or anything in between. It’s also a hugely supportive community, so it would be quite easy for you to find mentors and others who can help you hone your writing and strengthen your work.

I wish you the best of luck!

+1 for the commentary!

oliviawaite:

fshk:

the new smutty novel

So 50 Shades. I find the whole phenomenon of the book’s success to be fascinating. I don’t think there’s anything new about what I’m about to say, but here are my thoughts, FWIW. I haven’t read the book. The media coverage of it is nauseating. This Slate article is better than most—it at least acknowledges the book’s origins as Twilight fanfic—but it suffers from the same problem that many of the articles on the book suffer from. So, herein, every article written about 50 Shades:

Have you heard about this book all these women are reading? It’s really dirty! Housewives in [Boca Raton/the Upper West Side/etc.] are eating it up like the fancy bon bons that we imagine wealthy housewives spend their days eating! It’s a story about a young virginal woman who falls into a relationship with a kinky billionaire who is into—*gasp!*—BDSM! Clearly no one has ever thought to write a book like this before! And the fact that all these women are reading this book says something about female sexuality, but we aren’t really sure what that is. It’s either that women are so sheltered that their exposure to mild BDSM is downright scandalous, or that women reading a BDSM novel are going to get tricked into thinking violence against women is totally cool. Women are totally susceptible to what they read because they can’t differentiate between fantasy and reality! So this smutty book could cause a real crisis!

What gets me about the slate article is that a) the author has clearly never read a contemporary romance novel, because otherwise the themes in 50 Shades would not seem so novel; and b) there’s some discussion of how feminists have a problem with BDSM, particularly D/s relationships where the lady is the sub to a male Dom. Which I don’t really think is true. Most sex-positive feminists understand that submissiveness in the bedroom need not translate to submissiveness to men generally. (But all this makes the conclusion to the Slate article kind of problematic, in my mind.)

Also, there are plenty of contemporary romances that involve BDSM that are actually well-written and have literary merit. (Critics have called the book’s whole premise offensive because, in the end, Bella Anastasia cures Edward Christian of his need to use BDSM to work out his issues (because, obviously, an inclination toward BDSM is some kind of pathology).)

The only BDSM romances I’ve read are m/m (which I suppose gets rid of that pesky gender politics issue regarding men dominating women). The books I liked the most have mostly been recommended on romance sites, which were quick to be like, “Yo, people only think this book is new and different because the types who keep getting interviewed only read a book every 8 years or something, so they don’t know what romance readers know, which is that 50 Shades is pretty middle of the road in terms kink and quality.”

But I think this also proves that no one can predict what will be popular, which is something the Bestseller Lists prove any time there’s some big phenom of a book out there, but that doesn’t stop people from speculating.

Reblogging for excellent analysis. 

Dear internets:

I have been mistaken. I apologize to all the historical romance novelists that I maligned because they had their heroes waltzing with a hand on the lady’s waist. In fact, it is historically accurate that during the Victorian era men/leaders held their partners with the right hand on the waist for the waltz. Modern waltz has the hand on the upper back because the waist is flexible and holding the lady/follower there can cause her to bend backward, losing the connection with the torso that you need to lead. However, they didn’t have this problem in the Victorian era since the ladies were wearing long overbust corsets that kept the torso rigid anyway.

(On the other hand, I stand by my disdain for Victorian books where the hero can just tug down the front of the heroine’s corset and her boobs pop free. Also, the ones where he sucks her breasts through the corset. Good luck finding a nipple through 4+ layers of stiff fabric, dude.)

morecoffee:

Maria Bustillos:

Romance novels are feminist documents. They’re written almost exclusively by women, for women, and are concerned with women: their relations in family, love and marriage, their place in society and the world, and their dreams for the future. Romances of the Golden Age are rife with the sociopolitical limitations of their period, it must be said. They’re exclusively hetero, and exclusively white, for example. Even so, they can be strangely sublime.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, “[Woman] is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other.” In romance fiction this formula is reversed, as scholar and former Mills & Boon editor jay Dixon (who spells her name with a lower-case “j”) observes in her book The Romantic Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1995. Woman is the Subject, man the Other.

(Source: The Awl, via oliviawaite)

angelaquarles:

Non-Alphas Need Not Apply: Can only Alpha males get published in Romancelandia?

Recently I received an email from a writer friend who’s agented, but has not had any luck selling her first novel. She told me that her agent says that the problem is that her hero and heroine are too much like real life and that she needs to make them into the romance cliché, and for the male, that means he needs to be Alpha, baby.

Sigh.

I’ve read this friend’s novel and I loved the hero, he had a quiet strength, he was intelligent and he respected the heroine. Her agent loves the characters too, but apparently the editors she’s pitched it to don’t. The agent said she needed to revise the hero so that he is more arrogant, more aggressive, and more domineering.

As new writers, in order to get published with traditional publishers, are we doomed to stick to this stereotype? Is this why many have chosen to go with smaller, independent presses? Apparently the Big 6 demand this type of hero and so if you’re tired of it, you know whom to blame. It’s this all-pervasive monolithic stereotype that allows us to chuckle at this 2-minute regency romance because it’s so dang true.

I know there are many readers and reviewers who lament the pervasiveness of this type of male in Romancelandia. In a Google search on the subject, I’ve come across these various opinions… Read more…

(via oliviawaite)