Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been the type of person who felt obligated to finish things I started. Including reading books. Truth be told, most especially reading books. If I started a book, I HAD to finish it. If I didn’t, I somehow felt my universe was out of wack, like the author of that book would somehow know that I’d laid her book down, never to be lifted again. I felt guilty. Horribly, terribly, unequivocally guilty.

I’m happy to say that, after years of therapy…kidding …well…

Those days are gone.

My life is busy with five kids, a household to run, my own writing to do, looking for a new teaching job, and every other responsibility that rests on my shoulders as madre extraordinaire. The bottom line? I don’t have time for books I don’t love.

Once I came to that realization–and set down my first blasé book, mid-read–I felt freed. Hey, my time is valuable! I don’t have time for one-dimensional characters, weak plots, or clichés. No, I have things to do, places to go, people to see. I need a GREAT book to keep me enthralled. Nothing sub-par allowed.

The downside of this newfound freedom is that it’s now hard to become engaged enough in a book to see it through. It’s like abuse of power. I love my own books, and my critique partner’s books, and occasionally I find books that are pleasant enough, with characters and/or plots developed enough to keep me engaged. I don’t LOVE these books, but I will finish them. But my expectations have skyrocketed and sometimes feel almost unattainable.

It seems like a rare experience when I come across a book that sticks with me like no other. They have been darn hard to come by recently. In fact, I went through a dry spell that lasted a good year or so. If I wasn’t invested in the characters of a book by page fifty, or maybe page 75, then down it went. And that’s frustrating.

So, imagine my surprise when, in the last two months, I found and read two, count them, two, books that I feel are exceptional. One came to me by recommendation by a close friend. It was given to her as a birthday gift, not one that she thought she’d ever pick up on her own. Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is a story so movingly and beautifully told, with a protagonist that is so deeply real, that I think about it–and her–still. Since it’s not really a romance (though it has vague romantic elements in it), I won’t discuss it more here, but READ IT! It’s real.

The other book, Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, has clear romantic elements and so I will discuss it. One the back cover flap, Stephenie is quoted as saying: “I’ve always admired the ability of some authors to create situations of impossible fantasy, and then add characters that are so deeply human that their perpectives make the situation believable. I hope Twilight offers readers that same experience.” Well, Stephenie Meyer, it does! From the opening, I was engaged in the story, and wrapped up in Bella’s (the protagonist’s) story. And by the time I realized what was truly going on (though I sort of knew from all the buzz surrounding the book), I was completely invested and couldn’t stop reading. I finished the 498 page book in record time, abandoning laundry and cooking and a thousand other tasks, including my own writing, just so I could keep reading.

It was that good.

Twilight is carefully crafted, thoughtful, subtle, wrought with conflict and danger, and is irresistible. When Edward… Oh, and when Alice… Oh my, and when Bella and Charlie and then James…

Well, I won’t spoil it for you. But a book that sticks with you, that makes you long to stay in the story, that makes you root for the hero and heroine, despite the danger and their ill-fated future, that makes you want to read it again the moment you put it down–that book is a rarity. And for me, Twilight is it. So again, I say with unabridged enthusiasm, GO READ IT! You won’t be disappointed.

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Just the other day I was bemoaning the fact that this is not a Harry Potter summer. I can remember each of the previous ones (after the whole phenomenon began, which was with Goblet of Fire, I think). That summer, my husband was planning to read the newest tome to our then-eight-year-old, just as he’d read the previous three to him.

And he did, but not before planting himself on the couch of the beach house we’d rented beginning the Saturday the book came out and reading the entire 700-plus pages in just under forty-eight hours, with appropriate breaks for food and sleep and other irritating necessities.

The summer of Order of the Phoenix I was pregnant, and we were also lounging at the beach shortly after the book’s release. That house featured an enormous, supremely comfortable Adirondack swing on one of the covered porches, and my belly and I spent long afternoons there, rocking and reading. I reacquainted myself with Harry, Hermione, and Ron in peace while my husband took the boys swimming, and got to meet a whole raft of new characters. I had time to linger over pages and stare off at the ocean while I tried to remember plot points and clues from the previous books, and shake my fist at He Who Shall Not Be Named at the appropriate times, spraying condensation from my perpetual glass of iced tea while I did, happily unaware of what I must have looked like, perched in that swing with that enormous book on my equally enormous belly.

That’s what I call finding the right book at the right time. Characters you know as well as your own kids (or your own childhood self, minus the way cool magic, unfortunately), a plot that keeps you turning pages long after you should have given in and gone to sleep, and the chance to luxuriate in both, uninterrupted. It doesn’t happen often. But when it does, it’s bliss.

And sometimes it’s a kind of lifesaver. When I was about eleven, I stumbled onto The Girl Who Owned a City, by O.T. Nelson. Rereading it now, it has its problems, but the premise is still fascinating – an apocalyptic plague wipes out everyone on earth over the age of twelve. Suddenly it’s a world of children, all alone, without power or running water or fresh food. Sounds grim, I know, but at the time my mother was seriously ill. I was living in my head far too much, playing out all the worst-case scenarios I could imagine, and none of them made me feel much better.

Even if I didn’t put it together so clearly back then, reading that book at that particular time was huge for me. Lisa, the protagonist, lost both of her parents, and had a younger brother to care for, but she figured out how to survive. If she could do it, surely I could, too, right? That book planted seeds of determination and confidence in me (as well as a big old yen for apocalyptic stories like Stephen King’s The Stand, but that’s a column for another day), right when I needed them most. (My mom, by the way, has lupus, but she’s fine now.)

A lot of childhood books stand out for me. A friend recently told me that she’d never read Little Women, and I can’t imagine what she’ll think if she reads it now. Is forty the right time to meet the Marches for the first time? I’m not sure. Much as I adore the book (and I do – I reread it probably once a year), if I stand back and observe the characters and parse the book’s themes as an adult, there are more than a few things that make me grit my teeth in frustration (even if they are mostly the same things Jo railed against, thanks to Alcott’s own rebellious streak).

But “grownup” books can be those perfect books, too. When I started commuting to New York City from Trenton daily, my train ride was more than an hour each way. I had just begun editing romance, and I picked up that genre-bending bestseller, Outlander. Lengthwise, it was more than perfect – there were plenty of pages to keep me occupied on those long rides. And it was perfect for that time in my life, too – a brand-new take on some classic romance tropes, with characters so real, so true, and so unforgettable, I can only hope to create people as memorable one day. That book was an inspiration in a period of my life when I was always looking for a fresh voice, and when I was thinking hard about what romance was, and what it could be.

How about you? Have you ever read the right book at the right time? Stumbled into a story that helped you through a problem or provided the answer to a question? Or have you ever simply picked up a novel you just couldn’t put down – and found, thank the stars above, that you didn’t have to until you were done?

The latest trend in publishing seems to be novels in the vein of the popular television series Desperate Housewives. This summer alone will see books with titles like Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA, The Secret Desires of a Soccer Mom, The WWW Club: A Novel of Sex and Bonbons and The Devil in the Junior League hitting bookstore and library shelves everywhere.

Hear that? It’s that pesky cash cow moo-ing again.

This latest example of Jumping On The Bandwagon Syndrome shouldn’t shock anyone. Desperate Housewives is a monster hit, and the show caters to a large female demographic. There is a precedent for this. Certainly Jackie Collins’ books got a king size 1980s-style boost from primetime soaps like Dynasty, Dallas and Falcon Crest?

Now all we need to do is convince the publishing industry that women actually have a wide variety of tastes. I mean we’re also watching The Sopranos, Deadwood, Nip/Tuck, 24, Lost – the list goes on and on. So where are the fiction novel counterparts? I’ll tell you where – either relegated to Slush Pile Hell or being marketed to men.

A July 2 article in the Los Angeles Times announced that crime noir and pulp novels are making a comeback (profiling Hard Case Crime). So where are my pulp fiction female protagonists? Seriously, I cannot believe I’m the only female on the planet who adores pulp – so where’s my wisecracking female heroine who isn’t a Gal Friday or femme fatale? Yeah, Kinsey Millhone was a good start – but give me the female equivalent to Amos Walker and I’d be all over that like fleas on a dog.

::knock knock:: Any paying attention out there?

I suspect not. One has to look no further than an article in the June 10-11 issue of The Wall Street Journal titled: “Odd Twist for Hero of Popular Thrillers – Women Like Him Too.” Reading in between the lines I can just picture the writer clutching his chest when he learned that women like to read Lee Child’s Jake Reacher novels. It must have come as a shock to the old boy to realize that women aren’t just reading cookbooks, Oprah picks and chick lit.

Ultimately though, do we as women want more noir and grit? Just because I keep dreaming of pulp crime novels featuring strong female leads doesn’t mean there are enough women out there like me to make it feasible from a marketing stand point.

Think of it as The Secret Desires Of A Frustrated Librarian or The True Confessions Of A Bookworm. Grit and noir is what I want – but what are your secret desires? What types of books do you dream about at night? The confessional is open for business.

Jane, of dearauthor.com recently reviewed Be Mine Tonight by Kathryn Smith. I read the site regularly because as a rule I find Ja(y)nes’ reviews to be helpful to me as a writer. They give a pretty good idea of what did or didn’t work for them, and while reading is highly subjective, everything goes into the great melting pot for future consideration. One aspect of this particular review, however, caught my eye:

What furthered bothered me was the constant use of characters as setup for sequels. Brotherhood of the Blood? Puhleeze. JR Ward called and wants her series title back.

I’ll admit I had a pretty strong reaction to that line. Brotherhood of the Blood rips off the Black Dagger Brotherhood? So no other author can have a brotherhood now? What about authors who had a brotherhood before J.R. Ward wrote hers? Sabrina Jeffries’ Royal Brotherhood series began in 2004. Maybe she wants her series title back.

I shared this reaction with somebody who disagreed with me as strongly as I disagreed with Jane’s statement. She felt that, due to the phenomenal success of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, the term would naturally be associated with J.R. Ward’s books. We debated the issue for a few minutes before each retreating to our own corner.

On the flipside of that coin, somebody else asked, “What about the In Death series?” She hasn’t read the books, but even so knows those are J.D. Robb titles. She said, “What if somebody wrote Destiny In Death?” My gut response—that wouldn’t be right.

So why do I have opposing reactions to two seemingly similar instances of “branding”? Why do I resist Brotherhood being solely associated with J.R. Ward while I unequivocally associate In Death with J.D. Robb? The short answer—I don’t know. I’m a fan of both authors—a knocking on the door five minutes before Borders opens kind of fan—so that’s not a factor. If I was a fan of one author and not the other I could understand a bias, but I enjoy them both very much.

I think mostly it comes from my being a writer in a climate where a lot of “rip-off” accusations fly. You can’t have a vampire from the mythology-rich Carpathian region without being a Feehan rip-off. If you write a less-than-adept bounty hunter/amateur detective/etc, you’re obviously trying to capitalize on the success of Janet Evanovich. So if you have a “Brotherhood” you’re ripping off J.R. Ward. Not being able to use In Death doesn’t hurt the way not being able to use Brotherhood of the XX or The XX Brotherhood does.

So I’ll throw the question out to y’all: Do you think “branding” can be taken too far? What was your gut reaction to Jane’s comment, and why do you feel that way? And, if you write, do you feel the same with your reader hat on as with your author hat?

Across the world, Mother Nature is hellbent on doing her thing and showing us all who is in charge; from tornados in New York City (of all places), to flash floods, lightning strikes, earthquakes, unprecedented hurricanes, mudslides, the list goes on. For decades, we as a people have taken our environment for granted, spewing fumes, setting off bombs, chopping down trees–all in the name of technology and progress. Our vision has become distorted and the future will pay the price.

There is an old African proverb that says “It takes a whole village to raise a child.” Simply put, it takes the help and wisdom of the elders to shape and mold a child as they cannot successfully do it on their own.

I’m sure many of you that are reading this are scratching your heads wondering what any of this has to do with writing. Well, let me explain.

For writers of every ilk and genre the reading public is our mother nature. They have immeasurable power. The power to send us hurdling to the top of the charts or down into the abyss of obscurity. Power that they can evoke by simple word of mouth. They have the power to stroke our egos or make us wish we’d chosen another profession! And as writers we cannot take our readers for granted. We cannot assume that they will always be there ready, willing and able to support whatever we dish out. As writers we have a responsiblity to our readers–to give them our best with each and every book.

True craftsman/women should not be led astray from the craft by jumping on the bandwagon of the latest trend and thereby leaving behind the very ones who got us to where we are. Take them with you, embrace them and encourage them to take the ride with you, by remembering to incorporate all the elements that made them clamor around you when you were no more than a child needing the help and encouragement that they offered.

Of course as writers we grow and change. We seek to expand our horizons and spread our literary wings. It’s only natural. No one expects us to write the same story over and over. They do expect that we will respect them, answer their questions (even when we don’t want to), smile (even when your jaws are hurting), show up on time, be courteous and make each and every one that we meet or correspond with feel their importance to us.

Without our village of readers we would simply be writers piling up page after page of text for our own pleasure. Without our village of readers there would be no one to see us grow, bloosom and applaud our efforts, no one to nuture our thirsty, but fragile egos.

Sometimes they very well may shake our foundation, wash us away with a torrent of bad reviews, chop us down and go onto the next tree in the forest. But just as Mother Nature will always be here, so will our readers if we give them what they need and deserve–a damned good book and our thanks!

by Cara North

In the July 2006 edition of O, Oprah Winfrey’s magazine there were romance novels featured as summer reading for the first time! I was excited to see that. But as I read the magazine I found something more exciting. Moby Dick. That’s right, an article by Geoffrey Sandburn on “The Tale That Won’t Let Go”, reminded me of the writers most precious resource, readers. The article talked more about how difficult the novel is, but the message I took away was the tale of the woman who handed the captain a book to read. It was that word of mouth that turned Herman Melville into a household name. As a new author, it is good for me to get humbled before I even hit the printing press! Readers can make or break me. Simple as that. Word of mouth can be the best campaigned ever launched for an author.

No, not every reader will enjoy my books. I don’t enjoy every book that I read. However, I do take away a new perspective or idea or make a note to never do this or that, in my own work.

Some readers are rising authors, some are just the lifeblood of this industry. They are voracious readers that consume the books faster than we can put them out. And they deserve our gratitude. So…

Thank you, for spending your days, nights, and lunch breaks with our characters.

For escaping to the bath and to a new world with our books.

Thank you for saving pennies and counting days till the next payday to get that list of New-Releases.

For laughing, for crying, for keeping the nightlight on if we scared you.

Thank you for giving us endless hours of your time.

For being a part of our journey, for supporting us, and for making us feel like we are worthy.

More than our friends, family and loved ones, it is you that let us know that what we have put on a blank page, escaped into pure imagination.

It can be seen, heard and felt through your senses.

The characters and scenes come alive in your mind.

Thank you, for embarking on this journey with us.

Sincerely,
Cara North

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Any author out there who dreams of stardom, limo rides and fans falling at their feet, should spend a week with my kids. Heck, a day. Trust me–they’ll keep you from growing an ego too big to fit through the door.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my kids. Would lay down in front of a speeding train for them. They’re good kids, who see me as mom first, housekeeper/taxi driver/personal chef/laundry lady second. I’m not even sure author makes the list.

They’ve come along to booksignings from time to time, my littlest one making it his personal mission to find all my books in the store and turn them face-out (train ‘em young and they’ll be a one-person publicity campaign), while my pre-teen stands to the side, looking totally embarrassed that I am a.) writing about people kissing, and b.), talking about it anywhere near the space she is occupying.

For her, poor thing, it started in fourth grade. My first book, The Virgin’s Proposal, had just come out and the local paper did a story on me, slapping my cover on there in a huge picture with the title blaring out. Her teacher hung the article up on the door, covering the title with a Post-it that announced I was her mom.

You would have thought I had put on a Barney suit and done a concert in her classroom. “Now everyone is going to know you’re my mother,” she cried, probably contemplating her chances of a name change before she had to go to school the next morning.

She survived that humiliation (and I got through explaining what the title meant to my parochial school children) but went on to suffer many more. Me talking about her, telling a funny story on the radio or in a newspaper article. A fan who lived in our neighborhood, coming up to me during a garage sale to chat about my latest title–

In front of her own daughter. Who also went to school with my child. The two girls stood to the side, rolling their eyes and pretending they were with the guy looking at our old table saw.

My son, who is the younger one, is a bit cooler about the whole thing. Nevertheless, when I come to school to be room mom or lunch monitor for his classroom, I’m not Shirley Jump the author. I’m simply his mom.

And when he pulls out a tiny chair for me to sit beside him, beaming with pride because his mom is there–not his mom the author, not his mom the dinner maker, but his mom–I know that the thing that matters more than any accolades is sitting right beside me.

by Bob Mayer

I was listening to a panel at a recent RWA event where participants were asking questions of a couple of agents and an editor from Harlequin. And all the questions seemed to be a variation of the same thing: “What’s hot?” and “What’s selling?” which is the same as “What are publishers buying?”

I hear that a lot at RWA events. And I’m not slamming it. But I’m not too thrilled with it either. Because underneath it is the feeling that if someone said: “You know, Vampire-Lesbian-Nun-Slasher-Paranormal-Where the Heroine is Redeemed and becomes a Monk at the End-Novels are really hot and selling” I feel like there would be ten of those cranked out within two weeks of conference end. Whether or not those authors gave a damn about writing a V-L-N-S-P-W redemption Monk novels.

And you know what else? All of them would pretty much be bad. Because there would be no passion in them. Because they would be written for the wrong reason. But out there somewhere, is some person sitting in a dark room who is writing a V-L-N-S-P-W redemption Monk novel simply because they love the idea and it’s a damn good book and they have no clue whether it will sell or not and it wasn’t factored into their decision to write the book in the first place.

I think the questions of what’s hot and what’s selling comes out of a degree of frustration with publishing (which is bad) and also a degree of business savvy in RWA (which is good). But that business savvy can be taken too far and I think it is taken too far.

I wrote military technothrillers in the later 1980s. That was stupid business savvy wise. Hell, my first novel has a Special Forces team infiltrating in Russia. Wrote it in 1988. My agent in 1989 flat out told me he couldn’t sell it. I asked “Why?” He asked me if I’d checked out the news lately. Heard about the Berlin Wall coming down? Russia was a dead topic.

In the early and mid 90s when those books came out, the military technothriller market collapsed. Only two or three writers survived (think Tom Clancy) and even a lot of the ones who had been bestsellers even went under or had to find new genres to write in. But-I got published. And I learned about writing. Even though my career kind of sucked because I was in a very much not hot field. But I was writing what I wanted to and I think that’s why I got published. Lawyer books were very hot then. I imagine I could have written one of those. But you know what? My lawyer book, if I’d written one simply because that was the hot market, would have sucked and never gotten published. So it’s a vicious Catch-22. So I go back to writing what you really want to write.

I wrote my first couple of manuscripts living in the Orient studying martial arts because you can only do that so long each day and I need to fill my time up doing something else. It didn’t even occur to me there was a market. I didn’t even think of getting published until one day someone read one of the manuscripts and said “Hey, this is like a real book.” And I went “Huh?” Then I proceeded to do every single thing wrong you could possibly do business wise. I didn’t even know there were agents until a non-fiction editor I had submitted my fiction book to called me up and recommended an agent.

Some say write what you know. That’s good. Also, write what you want to know. Write what you’re passionate about regardless of market.

Plus the market changes. And even writing passionately in a supposedly ‘dead’ market works. It happens all the time.

Because writing for the hot market is a dead end in a way: you’re probably not going to get published in the hot market unless you really are passionate about it.

by Bella Andre

Whenever one of my critique partners introduces me to other writers, she immediately tells them about my “unique” gift for coming up with catchy titles and hooky two sentence pitches. My other critique partner has told me on numerous occasions that I could “make a fortune” rewriting people’s synopsis. (Am I the only one who thinks that sounds like a one way ticket to boringsville?) And the events of the past few months seem to back up their claims. I came up with an integral part of a YA tagline/hook for one friend and bam! 3 book deal with Berkeley. I helped another friend refocus/rewrite her pitch and synopsis to make them both much sexier and bam! 2 book deal with Kensington. Another friend needed a new title for book 3 of her series and bam! NAL is using one of the titles I emailed her. (I know my part in each of these events was extremely small, but go with me anyway, okay?)

That said, I can’t help but wonder, if I’m so good at helping everyone else brainstorm, pitch, synopsize, and title their masterpieces, where is my own 6 figure breakout idea? And why is it that when my editor wanted me to come up with a new title for a manuscript I was calling Constant Cravings (a 10 year college reunion story), preferably with the word “reunion” in it (quite possibly one of the least sexy words in the English language), all I could come up with was Red Hot Reunion? My CP just laughed when I told her. Somehow I doubt they’re going to use that stellar title, but really, where do my “unique talents” disappear to when my own career is on the line?

In talking with other writers, I know I’m not the only one out there who can rattle off a hundred brilliant ideas for friends, but gets stuck sitting and drooling when thinking about her own projects. Here’s my question: Does anyone have any thoughts on why this happens? And how we can access the idea factory as quickly for ourselves as we can for everyone else?

Is it fear of success? Self-sabatoge? Or just, simply, the fact that having distance on a project that isn’t our own makes it so much easier to access the creative well? But how can we ever separate ourselves from our own books? Our own career path? And is that what we have to do if we’re going to come up with the truly killer ideas?

Fingers crossed that genuis will strike this afternoon while I’m steam cleaning the carpets. (Can’t get any more distance from a book that carpet cleaning, can you?) Doesn’t everyone say that their best ideas come while taking a shower? Hopefully giving my carpet a shower will suffice.