Lauren Wayne

This is hilarious:

Dear Author: Top Ten Things Authors Should Not Do at Amazon

It reports on a flame war between an author and her reviewers on Amazon.com.

Note: Do not be this author.

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I came across this review in The Curator for a fantasy book, Cyndere’s Midnight. The book is by Jeffrey Overstreet, and the article is by Annie Young Frisbie, titled “On Fantasy Fiction; Or, You Should Read Cyndere’s Midnight.”

Frisbie (or can I call her Annie? she sounds personable) talks about her history as a closet fantasy fan, her coming out, and now her advocacy for non-fans of the genre to lay aside their snarkiness and give a really good book a try. She declares: “I’m tired of seeing fantasy ghettoized. Genre was made to be transcended.”

I’m one of those people who don’t…quite…get fantasy. It’s just not my thing. I love C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter books, and I hear true fantasy fans disparage them as bad examples of the genre, so…I guess I’m just not a fan, although this glowing review might inspire me to give it another chance. Truly, no offense intended; I think I just get tripped up by names I don’t know how to pronounce.

Because in any case, I totally understand feeling marginalized for enjoying commercial fiction that’s not considered prestigious, in my case romance and mystery novels, and in fact enjoying them so much that I write my own.

When Frisbie (and/or Annie) mocks people who read “to pad your Goodreads feed with Booker nominees in order to impress your Facebook friends,” I remember when I signed up for Goodreads at a friend’s request and then feeling twinges of…oh, no, was that embarrassment?…when I listed recent books I’d truly enjoyed but were nothing like what my other friends were sharing with the world.

I didn’t and don’t want to fill this blog with apologetics and justifications and rants about how I feel ashamed or victimized by my preferences. I know other people just like me are out there, in large numbers, and I choose not to dwell on the naysayers’ snootiness.

But I don’t mind bringing it up once in awhile, just to discuss the phenomenon of creating a divide between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. (Isn’t that a funny distinction all in itself? Literary meaning it’s like literature, and commercial meaning it sells — shouldn’t both strive to be both? Kind of reminds me of “Republican” and “Democrat” — shouldn’t all Americans embrace the basics of both those words?)

I’ve been skulking agent blogs and writer forums whenever I need a break from revising my WIP (work in progress to those who don’t skulk — I’ve discovered all new terminology from all this procrastinating), and I found this uplifting A from a Q & A by the Evil Editor:

Authors don’t get to declare what kind of prose they write. … That’s a job for critics, agents, and the people who make up the lies that go on the backs of books. Apparently you’re unhappy with calling your book literary fiction. Don’t be. Literary doesn’t mean it’s literature; it just means it’s boring. My advice: add some sharks and a wolfman, and call it commercial fiction.

That made me laugh. I love that we have professional advocates out there to override any sneering voices.

I’ll end with a great quote from Annie (I’m going for it — I just read her bio and she loves LLL and cloth diapers [just like me, swoon]. Seriously, read her article; it’s great, and here’s a similar blog post she wrote):

Don’t let signs at Barnes and Noble or tags on Amazon.com tell you what kind of books you like to read. You’ll miss out on countless worlds of beauty.

Enjoy novels that tell a story! Enjoy characters you’d want to be friends with! Enjoy an adventure you’d like to go on! Embrace your chosen genre, and be happy.

Image courtesy of Julia Freeman-Woolpert from stock.xchng

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I hope no one thinks I’m being disloyal for writing a murder mystery for NaNoWriMo08. I’m working on a romance novel in non-NaNoWriMo life, and those are my two favorite genres.

As a palliative to those of you who prefer romance over murder, let me tell you that I’ve included a married couple as my protagonist detecting team. The main character is Christine, a church praise team leader in her late 20s. She narrates the story. Her husband is Rob, a graphic designer by day and newborn sleuthing partner at night.

I love love. I love marriage. That’s why I love romance novels so much. I adore the giddiness of finding true love, that first spark of interest, the rapturous wondering of “is s/he interested back?”, the relief of finding out “yes!”. and, of course, in novels, all the interesting barriers in between and/or after those steps.

But, having been married ten years now myself (sooo long, I know!), I will play the old wise woman and say that a committed marriage is just as fascinating, just as satisfying. It’s a different emotional kick, but it appeals to me just as much. Obviously, or I wouldn’t believe so strongly in marriage!

What I think is missing from most novels, movies, TV shows, and so on is portrayals of real, positive marriages. There’s plenty of cat-and-mouse flirtatious bickering of an odd pairing, plenty of tingly first-kiss experiences, and, sadly, more than enough of sour and negative relationships, whether continuing or ending. Many popular sitcoms have made their married couple characters barely tolerant of each other, constantly sniping and undermining, rather than true partners on the same team.

Have you ever read Kate Wilhelm’s Constance and Charlie series? There’s a wonderful example for me to live up to: a middle-aged married couple who like and respect each other. The tension is in catching the murderer, not in whether or not they’ll stay together. Their commitment to each other is a given.

Or look at the delightful Nick and Nora!

I like to think I’m doing my part to promote the naturalness — the unostentatious joy — of a good marriage, both in real life and now in fiction.

ETA: I forgot, and we’re even watching them on DVD right now! There’s also Hetty Wainthropp! I think my characters are a young, newlywed version of Hetty and her husband — very grounded and very committed.

Photograph of beautiful hands courtesy of Julia Freeman-Woolpert from stock.xchng

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I’m halfway through the timeframe of NaNoWriMo, though not halfway through my word count since I started late. I have daily writing goals of 2,000 words that if followed (or caught up on…) will get me to 50,000 words on exactly the last day.

Now it’s just down to two things: 1. that I have the story told by 50,000 words, and 2. that I remember to verify my word count by midnight! (I tend to fudge my “days” a little.)

As for #1, I’m trying to be bare bones about this writing assignment and make sure I get the plot told. I figure I can fill in all that fancifying description and character development later!

Here’s something I didn’t expect, though. As a huge fan of reading murder mystery novels and watching American and British versions of same, I thought of myself as hardened and jaded in terms of committing fictional murder. But in my first chapter, I had to kill off a character (otherwise it’s not, you know, a murder mystery), and I felt guilty! She seemed kind of nice, and I’d barely gotten to know her before she was dead. In a horribly agonizing way, although not overly gory. (This is a cozy, so I’m going with things like poison and booby traps.)

I accept with no qualms the deaths of characters in mystery fiction I read or view, but somehow being the perpetrator of the death made me feel bad. I could see it being even more wrenching if I’d really “known” the character and become attached.

How have you experienced the death of a character? Has it felt necessary and acceptable, or has it upset you as much as it did the other characters?

Photograph courtesy of Mateusz Stachowski from stock.xchng

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I really loved Mary Balogh’s latest in the Bedwyn Series spinoff the Simply quartet, which follows the stories of four teachers at Miss Martin’s School for Girls in Bath. Simply Perfect tells the story of Miss Claudia Martin herself, neatly finishing off the package. Though, of course, there were enough colorful incidental characters that I wonder if we’ll come back both to Bath and to the Bedwyn peripherals in the future!

You can read an excerpt of Simply Perfect here at Mary Balogh’s site as well as keep up with the series upon series she’s written.

I love when authors write in series and have old characters weave into new stories. I feel like I’m coming upon old friends, and it deepens my appreciation for those characters. I will fully admit that I don’t always remember everyone — I’m terrible with names and faces in real life, so some details are always lost to the fog — but I remember enough to feel fond and enjoy meeting everyone again.

Simply Perfect lends itself to this sort of reunion nostalgia, because as the headmistress of the girl’s school, Miss Martin has a perfect excuse to further her friendships with her former (is there another F word I can think of? No? Shame) teachers. And since her school’s story is inextricably linked to that of the Bedwyns — in particular her erstwhile charge, the incorrigible Miss Freyja Bedwyn as was, and her employer at that time, Wulfric the duke — she rubs shoulders with all the Bedwyn crew as well, despite her reservations about doing so.

This, of course, is where romance novels, particularly series, can fall into absurdity. Almost every one of her friends has made an advantageous match with a noble, and this plain schoolmistress finds herself neck deep in titles as she spends a summer out in the country with her charity girls, enjoying aristrocratic hospitality. Balogh acknowledges the humor in the situation by having Claudia herself continually refer to the unlikelihood.

But to the love bits: Claudia’s match is with Joseph, Marquess of Attingsborough and heir to a dukedom, a delicious tidbit in that she particularly despises dukes. Much of the novel he pursues his family’s socially acceptable choice for him in an unromantic but fully understandable manner. I don’t buy heroes and heroines from other cultures who flout their society’s expectations without a second thought, so it made sense to me that it would take so many gradual degrees to move each of them into admitting and accepting their love for each other — and then working to overcome the obstacles in their way. The same applies to how Joseph works out his situation with his blind, illegitimate daughter, figuring out how to truly care for a person society would have, for two reasons, put far away from public notice.

Whether everything works out in the end — well, I’ll leave you in suspense. You’ll have to read the book!

And, yes, I see that it’s been two months since I last read anything fun like this. Eep! Even writing this post was interrupted by a certain 15-month-old.

That reminds me that, when I was reading, I kept critiquing some of the parenting in the book with the daughter! I wanted them to stop saying “good job” to her, as if they could have read Alfie Kohn or somehow intuited his ideas! Oh, well.

It does make me think, as a writer, how much indirect influence you can have on readers. I do find myself in my own writing wanting to put in elements of my life and philosophies that are important to me. In writing historical fiction, of course, you always have to keep it plausible, though. I want my heroines to matter-of-factly breastfeed, for instance, but I know wet nursing was very common in the nineteenth century, so you almost have to make a point of saying how unconventional your heroine is for doing so.

Food for thought: How have you as a reader enjoyed or deplored “lessons” you felt novels were giving you? How have you as a writer tried to insert your own social agenda into your fiction writing?

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I have checked out The Erotic Secrets of a French Maid, by Lisa Cach, approximately a gazillion times. Well, let’s say twelve. I kept putting off reading it — I would renew it twice, turn it in late, get back in line for it, get it again, and put it right back on my to-read shelf. I had liked a couple previous books by Lisa Cach, but I think I was slightly unnerved by the sultry cover of this one, and my library’s categorization of this in “erotic fiction” vs. “romance novels.” I was sort of excited by the idea of reading it, and sort of turned off.

This last time that I was turning it in, I finally read the back synopsis, something I often avoid in case it gives away too much of the plot (or mischaracterizes the plot, another pet peeve — sometimes I wonder if the cover designers, editors, illustrators, and writers have read the book. Have you seen women on the front with flowing blond hair, only to read that she has short dark curls? But I digress…).

To summarize the summary, Emma is a wannabe architect and current housecleaner who meets and falls in lust with Russ, a decade-older software engineer who overworks himself in his grief over his brother’s recent death. She half-jokingly suggests that she would be open to becoming a kept woman, and he later takes her up on the offer.

BUT…

The way he takes her up on it is HI-larious. I’m only a third of the way through the book, so I can’t comment on it as a whole, but I just want to share part of the scene where he hires her to do more than housecleaning. I forgot how funny Lisa Cach is — I remembered sexy, but I forgot the humor aspect of her books. This scene had me snorting and trying not to wake up my sleeping boys.

What Russ is trying to take her up on is her offer to shop and cook dinner for him along with the cleaning, but he fumbles the invitation in an effort not to make her feel like he’s accepting out of charity. He knows she’s looking for a place to live, so he starts off with offering his empty Belltown apartment to rent and then ambiguously states that he’ll take her up on her offer.

“You’re not offended, are you?” he asked warily.

She blinked. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, I offered, right? [...] If I said yes, how often would you want…” She trailed off, finishing the question with her eyebrows.

“I don’t think I need it every night. Maybe, oh, Monday, Wednesday, Friday? With something big on Friday to last me through the weekend?”

[...] “Er, what type of ‘big’ did you mean, for Fridays?”

He shrugged “Big. You know, lots of it. I’ll leave the details up to you.”

You gotta love that.

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I always envy romance heroes and heroines, because they always manage to be fluent in whatever language is most convenient at the moment. It reminds me nothing of slogging through German and Spanish classes in school just to be able to make a fool of myself in both languages!

In that spirit, I bring you a realistic look at a modern-day bilingual hero. From the makers of “Ooh Girl!,” here is “One Semester of Spanish Love Song”:

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I’m on a Jo Beverley kick and have just read A Lady’s Secret. In her notes at the end, Beverley points out a good resource for writers, particularly of historicals: Google Book Search.

I’d been using it unwittingly for my other blog — I found old-timey books on wet nursing such as A Treatise on Hygiene and Public Health.

You can also often search selections of current books to see if there are passages to interest you, such as The History of the European Family, which also gave me invaluable information on breastfeeding rates from days gone by.

Google Book Search is trying to scan in many copies of old and rare books to preserve and share them for free, and publishers and authors of newer books can offer a glimpse into their pages as a service to potential readers.

As a writer doing research or a publisher promoting a book, it’s worth looking into. As a reader scouting out good new reads, it’s also a treat!

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I’m loving this YouTube R&B song I first saw on Jo Beverley’s blog:

My favorite line has got to be: “Chafing….” Or maybe: “I could give you 7 minutes if you don’t move around too much.”

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I’ve finally had some time recently to pick up some fiction. I’ve been enoying Lady Beware. I always love Jo Beverley’s writing. She’s a very skillful writer, with obvious competence in plotting, characterization, and dialogue. She’s one of my biggest inspirations for what I want my romance writing to be like. I don’t feel like I’m up to her level yet, but when I’m editing my work, I always compare it to writers like her.

I also love her Company of Rogues series. I think if you came in on the series in the middle that it would be confusing, which is why I always check bibliography lists to make sure I read series in the right order. Usually the library will have any earlier works as well as the current ones, and often they’re automatically arranged by publication date. But to be sure, I check the author’s website, such as Jo Beverley’s book list here (it’s not the easiest site to navigate, but it has a lot of info, including links to her blog and for joining her Yahoo! Group).

Anyway, I’m not done yet with Lady Beware, so I won’t comment too much yet except to say — man, I missed romance novels! It’s so fun to be reading one again. Hooray! I love how drawn up I can get in the story, and at this point the Rogues characters seem like old friends to me. I’m always rooting for them, and for the romance, and Jo (I call her Jo) has never let me down!

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