To clarify: C means neither good nor bad, but average.

To me, an average book = meh = forgettable. In my opinion, if a book is forgettable, it didn’t finish the job it started. What I haven’t figured out yet is if a book is so bad it’s not possible to forget, did it do its job?

I’m trying to distill this out for myself, but I’m reading a lot of books lately that are meh. In fact, they are so meh I forget I was reading them the minute I turn my ebook reader off to tend to other things. As I said on the Dear Author thread, I found a dozen books by bestselling authors that I didn’t remember buying and, worse, that I didn’t remember reading until I scanned the blurbs. Mind you, these are books that got high marks at Dear Author and Smart Bitches (I know, ’cause I went back and looked).

Now we have DocTurtle reading a Harlequin Blaze as a challenge by Smart Bitches to read a “real romance” and see how wonderful it is. Turns out he’s having fun, but not of the type everyone expected. He seems to read in fits and starts, so obviously it’s not keeping his eyeballs glued to the pages, unless that’s the type of reader he is, which I don’t know.

So what is this meh? Where’s it coming from? One of the last non-meh books I read was Ann’s because it was so damned different. What made it different?

I’ll tell you what made it different. She broke all the “rules.” Somewhere, somehow, with the evolution of RWA and its sister organizations and their writing workshops, easier access to agents and editors, more stringent-yet-vague criteria on how to write a query letter, and more propagation of some writing “rules” (the ones that would get you a D in any college creative writing course–ask me how I know), there’s been some weird homogenization. (And I started noticing this really begin to gather steam in the early ’90s.) Yeah, you can have unique plot devices or tried-and-true plot devices done differently, but essentially, the voice has become the same: same meter, same literalness (thanks, RfP) to supposedly make for clarity, and same explanation of things that I (Random Reader with a modicum of intelligence) don’t have to be told and would have rather inferred or been left wondering.

Tired, y’all. I’m tired of reading the same stuff over and over again. Even the stuff I’m getting mad at and simply not finishing–one reason is because the voice is tired on top of other problems. Everybody’s taking voice lessons from the same singing teacher out of the same songbook. The only reason I remember any of these books is to say, “Oh. That.” And off it goes to be archived on CD or in the box to take to the used bookstore–without finishing. One book I’ve been looking forward to reading and bought on its release date (because I had it on my calendar as a reminder) was a real let-down.

This “write from the heart and you’ll get sold if you try hard enough” cheerleading? Bullshit. Don’t write from the heart; write from the rules. Write what the gatekeepers tell you to write and, more importantly, how they tell you to write it. Obviously, lots of people love it, and I am the High Priestess of Capitalism, so I’m not arguing with an established market.

But…if everyone’s following the rules, how do you know the reading public wouldn’t like what you wrote from the heart? I know how you know. The gatekeepers won’t buy it because why mess with the homogeneity of voice? People like it; people buy it. [Insert philosophical plug for doing things independently, but that's not what this post is about.]

Nothing, but nothing, makes me realize how homogenized the romance voice has become until I read something different. Kristan Higgins’s books were different and I enjoyed them muchly (although I heard some whisperings they weren’t romance so much as women’s fiction/chick lit and honestly I don’t know what the hell difference it makes). Ann’s, of course. Laura Kinsale, always.  Eva Gale, who came here as a poster (never heard of her before that), whose voice (albeit short pieces) just pushes all my right buttons (not talking about the erotic aspect, either).

Remember, I’m not talking about archetypes, plots, and themes. I’m talking about rhythm, word choice (e.g., the obsessing over avoiding “be” verbs and adverbs that spawns ridiculously tedious prose), dialog tags, over-explanation, and, yes, punctuation, which is one of the biggest tools in keeping your rhythm and singing in your own voice.

RfP said it best over at Racy Romance Reviews:

My most frequent complaint lately is that genre romance has no voice: it’s overly literal and can over-explain mundane detail to the detriment of style. Some of my favorite novels include more impressionistic passages in which I’m not sure exactly what’s happening, but they’re wonderfully referential and evocative.

I mean, come on. If I’ve noticed it and other people have noticed it enough to remark upon it and complain about it (and we’re only a fraction of a percent of the reading public), maybe there are a lot more people tired of it than the gatekeepers think.

Re: Ann Herendeen and Phyllida

This is what’s apparently called “good” gossip. I shall take the liberty of bragging.

Eric Selinger, a professor at DePaul University, who also contributes to some romance blogs, including Teach Me Tonight, has invited her to be a panelist on a conference next spring at Princeton University, along with Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History, and Joey Hill. Selinger is also teaching Phyllida in two graduate seminars, this summer and in the fall.

Also, Ms. Regis will be referencing her in a chapter she’s writing on Women’s Genre Fiction for The Cambridge History of the American Novel.

The woman’s a groundbreaking juggernaut, I tell you. I’m like Smart Bitches with Ferrets.

Re: The Proviso‘s followups

I think I mentioned before that this is the first of a series. Well, it’s not. It’s more like a family-and-friends saga.

Right now I’m working on book #2, which is titled Stay. It’s the story of Knox’s wards, Vanessa and Eric. You won’t get too far into The Proviso without reading a little about Vanessa, and Eric is mentioned not long thereafter, though Eric has more face time in The Proviso.

I’m also deep into book #3, Magdalene, which is the story of Mitch, who has no face time in The Proviso, but is somewhat significant to one of the characters and is mentioned a lot. He’s a widowed Mormon bishop busy tending his ward and running a business and keeping his 17-year-old son on track, and then he meets Cassandra, whose prior profession is, well, the world’s oldest. Teh sparks. Let me show u dem.

Re: “Self-Publishing”

I am henceforth and forthwith going to refer to it as “independent publishing.” I set up my own publishing company. I bought my own ISBNs. I got my Library of Congress Cataloging Number. I got my cataloging info to put on my copyright page (oh, Librarians, I did this for you, my loves). I paid an editor! to edit my book. And hey, all you Mr. PageMaker Publishing Persons out there, I’m using Word to typeset. Bite me (but only in the nicest way!). And no, I will not be using Garamond or Palatino, thankyouverymuch.

April Hamilton does a very nice job as ambassador for independent publishers and she has a point when she says that independent artists and musicians and filmmakers don’t seem to feel the same industry shame at “self”ing anything. In fact, “indie” as applied to the aforementioned is a tag of distinction and diversity.

Re: eBooks

Y’all know this is my pet theme. I would feed it if it had fur. There’s just way too much information going on in eBookWorld right now to disseminate by myself or what I think is important about it. But a few things have caught my eye recently:

1. During Tor’s book giveaway, I noticed they have one book in the .epub. It’s a graphic novel and so bravo!

In case you don’t know, which you probably don’t and that’s okay because this is the only time in my life I’ve been an early adopter of anything, ebooks come in all sorts of formats. This is no VHS/beta situation. This is a VHS/beta/and 16 other ways of buying and viewing movies with attached machines that may be obsolete tomorrow situation.

The .epub format is hoped to be the .mp3 of electronic books; that is, it’s open source and elegant, so it has the greatest flexibility of all the other formats to explode eBookWorld. The hope is that there will come along a slew of ebook reading devices whose native format is .epub and/or that the device can decode the .epub format and turn it into its native language–across the board. I don’t have an iPod; I have a Rio Karma. But it still reads .mp3 files.

2. I’ve been sitting here wondering when the iBooks store is going to open. Huh. Guess Jobs really does think people don’t read anymore… Bastard.

3. The dude at PersonaNonData thinks each ebook format should have its own ISBN. Poor Elizabeth Burton over at Zumaya is swimming upstream there, but I’ll tell you what, Ms. Burton, if it becomes an issue, pack all your formats into a .zip file and slap an ISBN on that. Right now, the standards don’t require one per format, but if it does, you can see small publishers taking the hit. Unless, of course, they take my suggestion.

4. And as always, my personal gripe about DRM. Stop it already.

Re: LDS fiction. Again. Go away.

It won’t die. The term “LDS fiction” has been defined by the consumer. It is its own genre. Live with it. You’ve been pwn3d.

Either write/publish in it and slap the label on it or write/publish out of it and get it into the mainstream. As I said in my penultimate post on the LDS Publisher thread, mainstream genre/literary readers are going to be a lot more forgiving of characters being LDS and/or being informed by an LDS worldview (and oh, hey! you get the culture out there into the social consciousness!) than LDS readers are going to be of LDS characters who don’t conform to a rigid morality…

…which is its own little irony right there, forgiveness. Yes, it’s true. We LDS are very forgiving. When you act like we think you should.

Re: Sex

Heh.

I’ve thought a lot about this lately, what I pick up, what I put down. I’ll finish a book regardless; it’s just something I do. I can’t stand to leave a book unfinished, no matter how torturous. Also, I’m not one of those readers who has to be absolutely captivated by the first or third page. I’ll give an author a good 50 pages to live up to the blurb (which is what would have hooked me enough to buy it), sink that hook in my mouth, and reel me in. (Which is kind of a moot point anyway, since I’m going to finish it.)

Right now, I’m reading a series of Georgian romances (er, that would be when King George III ruled the world before he went nuts requiring the Prince Regent [aka Prinny] to step in his place, which then required every pannier-wearing woman in the Ton to adopt Empress Josephine’s habit of sheer slip dresses and oh, you gorgeous Regency empire-waisted dress, how do I love thee, let me count the ways!).

Oh. Ahem. Pardon my fashion drool.

Back to the series. I started reading book #2 inadvertently, got about 100/507 pages in (that’s on my eBookwise reader; I don’t know what that translates to for the dead-tree variety), then realized I’d mistaken it for book #1.

So let me address that one first.

It’s got problems that keep taking me out of the story. It’s not as well edited as it should be, I suppose, but that might be me being able to see the man behind the curtain and finding him neither handsome nor ugly but simply not to my taste. Too, books suffer when they’re edited with the goal of shaving word count, which is what I suspect to be the case here, but I understand that. Some days, it’s all about the budget.

On the other hand, even after I realized I was reading the wrong book, I still didn’t want to put it down to save for later so I could catch up.

Does that make it a good book? No.

It means the writer did her job to my satisfaction.

Now. On to book #1. It’s obvious the writer grew from book #1 to book #2, but I’ll tell you what. If I’d picked up this one first, I’d suffer through and not read the other ones I bought*. I’m only getting through this one to be able to pick up #2 where I left off. It’s got logical inconsistencies, continuity issues, language issues (as in, the language doesn’t fit the Georgian era), and a not-very-bright heroine. She’s not TSTL (too stupid to live), but one minute she realizes the hero’s issue and the next, she’s confuzzled. She shouldn’t be able to realize the hero’s issues one minute and then turn around and be bewildered when he acts consistently with those issues she’s already sussed out. Were it not for my slight OCD on the issue of finishing books, I’d just put it down.

Which means the writer didn’t do her job to my satisfaction.

*So I actually bought all 3 books in the series at once, plus her fourth book, which is the beginning of a new series (everybody writes series anymore; everybody reads and likes series–and I’m no different).

In the end, does it make a difference that I’m equivocal about this author if I already spent the money on every book she’s had published so far?

This book, whose tagline is “A man in love with his wife and his boyfriend,” wouldn’t normally catch my eye because m/m isn’t my kink. I bought it for an entirely different reason. So now that I bought it and read it and thoroughly enjoyed myself (oooh, have you noticed this trend about what I review?), I must speak my piece.

Here we are in Regency England (and those of us in Romancelandia are more or less completely and totally comfortable in Regency England, Heyer or no Heyer) and a sodomite wishes to marry to fulfill his duty to his family name while still continuing his unabashed lifestyle. He finds the right chick, marries her, figures out he so really doesn’t mind doing her, thinks she’s refreshing and falls in love with her blahblahblah (yeah, you know how it goes), then meets the male love of his life and we all end up happily ever after in the same bed with nary a menage a trois to be had. Of course, what would a Regency romance be without a little spying here and there?

After some reflection, I have to admit that the mixed third-person omniscient and third-person limited points of view was fun and refreshing.

Now, one more thing I found interesting: A review of the book on Amazon, wherein the reviewer—who gave it 3 stars—says:

The book is…okay. It is not stunning, nor is it horrible.

Well, okay. That’s 3-star worthy right there. A 3 is a C. A C is perfectly average. No harm, no foul. But then the reviewer goes on to say:

I stayed up all night to read the last two hundred pages, because I was engrossed with the characters’ stories. However, I don’t think I’ll be borrowing this from the library again, nor will I be purchasing it any time soon.

Color me highly amused. I stayed up all night to read the last two hundred pages because I was engrossed with the characters’ stories.

Yeah. Okay. That’s called “the mother lode.”

Good show, Ms. Herendeen.

Third person limited, with a little modification.

According to Wikipedia (that most unassailable source), third-person limited is:

Third person limited is when the narrator is an outsider who sees into the mind of one character…In third person limited the narrator is outside of the story and tells the story from only one character’s view.

However, some authors use an even narrower and more subjective perspective, as though the viewpoint character were narrating the story; this is dramatically very similar to the first person, allowing in-depth revelation of the protagonist’s personality, but uses third-person grammar.

In my time writing novels, being in critique groups, chomped on by the creative writing professors at UMKC, this has been pounded into me as being The Correct Way To Do Things. Well, either that or first person, which has a literary cachet that is only beginning to gain ground in genre fiction.

Then there’s third person objective, which I will admit I have been confusing with third person omniscient as recently two minutes ago:

…which tells a story without detailing any characters’ thoughts and instead gives an objective point of view. This point of view can be described as “a fly on the wall” and is preferred in newspaper articles.

Then there’s third person omniscient.

Historically, the “third person omniscient” perspective was more common. This is the tale told from the point of view of the storyteller who knows all the facts. An example of this would be “little did he know” when told by that third person, such as a narrator. The primary advantage is that it injected the narrator’s own perspective and reputation into the story, creating a greater sense of objectivity for the story. The disadvantage of this mode is that it creates more distance between the reader and the story.

And the salient point to the above paragraph is this: “Currently this style is out of favor.”

Oh, ya think?

We who have been pummeled call it “head hopping.” I hate it. I really do. But my problem is that I don’t know if I hate this style of storytelling natively or if I’ve been conditioned to spot it and, thus, hate it. Why am I agonizing over this now?

Because of Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander.

The short backstory is this: The book was self-published and picked up by a NY house when it started catching buzz around Blogland. I did not buy the self-published version; I bought the Harper version. I don’t know how heavily edited the second one was, but it appears it underwent some serious whipping-into-shape. Obviously I can’t make comparisons between the two (sorry, not getting the other one), but this is significant to today’s agonization.

This book is told in so many points of view I can’t count them all. The servants have a POV, for cryin’ out loud! And while I don’t mind that in some authors, it makes me mad in others (no, I’m not naming names). So beware, head-hopper haters, this book might drive you up a wucking fall.

I didn’t mind it at all in this book, which is what surprised me, but that was also because there was no “meanwhile back at the ranch” transitioning (and if there was, I didn’t notice it), which is what annoys my inner storyteller. Why and when did this style of storytelling fall out of favor? If I weren’t a writer who’d had the propensity beat out of her with the sharp end of a red pen, I would A) not notice and B) not care.

Obviously, whoever read this book (then blogged it and started the buzz) enjoyed it enough for a bunch of other people to pick it up. That snowballed into Harper picking it up. They edited it, but they apparently didn’t follow the current trend of limiting the number of one’s POV characters and, furthermore, not head hopping.

My question is this: Does it even matter to the reader, all this technical flim-flammery, if the story’s engaging? Apparently not.

On the other hand, are you going to be able to send your deliciously wonderful head-hopping novel to an agent and expect something other than a rejection letter? Erm, no. Remember the story I just told you about this novel’s path to publication.

Are we writers just so conditioned by now to spot and eliminate (or the gods of writing will come take our pen nibs away from us) all head hopping and unauthorized POV switches that we automatically think “bad writing” when we come across it? I mean, yes, it can get in the way of the story (and I ran across that even when I was a child glomming every book in the small library by my house), but is it necessarily to be eliminated at all costs?

I’m now intrigued by this and will probably end up reading everything through this filter for a while. I know myself well enough to know I won’t ever be comfortable writing this way and even if I were, a lot of someones would come along and say, “You can’t do that.”