SEX

“Twice.”

Moriah Jovan
Lion’s Share

“I am in my prime. Professionally. Financially. Intellectually. Not sexually. All things considered, my sexual prime came in the back of a 1970 Nova and went out the door of a judge’s office three months later.”

I crack me up. I really do. Yesterday, I randomly tweeted the above out of one of my books that I thought was one of my better lines. That’s Finn Marston,1 from Lion’s Share narrating the circumstances of his shotgun wedding at 19.

That’s funny (yes, it is; fight me), but the real story is in Lion’s Share’s opening line.2 Read more →

La Bodega

Moriah Jovan
An image of the dining room at LaBodega tapas restaurant in Kansas City, Missouri.

I’ve been thinking about the way I eat (for various reasons) and how/why my eating habits are so bad, why I fall back on banal comfort food, why I’m not adventurous in the least.

As I was writing Paso Doble, I kept finding myself associating my characters’ meals at tapas bars with romance. Small bites in small dishes. Tasting. A meal of hors d’oeuvres, eaten slowly, from a lover’s hand. I wanted to be able to do that. Read more →

Virginity as a feminist statement

Moriah Jovan

1996: Victoria, an American professor in Sevilla, Spain, moonlighting as a nightclub singer meets Emilio, a smooth Spanish matador moonlighting as a chemist. She makes him laugh. He solves her problems. They’re just friends—right up until the first kiss.

In which a promiscuous matador is pissy about having been brutally friend-zoned by a feminist college professor he wants to have sex with in the worst way, and she pounds him into the ground.

••• TL;DR •••1

EMILIO: “Why is being a virgin when you get married so important to you?”

VICTORIA: “Because it’s not important to anybody else,” she snapped, then huffed. “No. What happened was, I saw girls in high school—and one at church—they’d have sex, almost always pressured. Sometimes it was date rape, but they didn’t have the guts to say so. Or they were confused or conflicted about it. And they’d either get pregnant or the guy would treat them like crap. Regardless of what people like to think, I’m not oblivious. I see and hear, and I remember. But I don’t care.” Read more →

We all know how it works

Moriah Jovan

I read that once in a comment on a Mormon women’s writer’s blog bemoaning explicit sex in books. If I recall correctly, it was one where a bunch of the Deseret Book-published writers gather, because it was a “name” who said it. I don’t remember if my book was the one under discussion or not. Didn’t matter.

“We all know how it works.”

What struck me then and still does is that, No, we don’t all know how it works, Read more →

Coming out of the closet

Moriah Jovan

I’ve taken a lot of heat the last couple of months because I dared to say that the bodice ripper romance was a product of its time and thus needed to be considered for the time in which it was written. Is the forced seduction PC? No, and never was. It was a fantasy, a fantasy that, if the contemporary nonfiction literature at the time is to be believed (both anecdotal and academic), was common. Considering the number of those written and sold, I’d say it was a pretty popular one, all dressed up in period clothing and the mores that clothing represented. Read more →

Update on the creepy book.

Moriah Jovan

Okay, I’m about halfway through The Actor and the Housewife and things have started to become a little clearer.

The actor is clearly in love with the housewife; I don’t believe he is in denial about this, although he puts up a good act. Because he’s an actor. Heh. He’s a nice man.

The housewife is in complete and total denial. On purpose. She’s smart; she knows what’s up. She doesn’t want to deal with it because it’s gonna be nasty messy and painful. That is to say, she’s bored and she’s lonely and she’s completely unappreciated and she’s not getting much in the way of sexual healing from her husband. So handsome clever dude comes along and appreciates her as a woman, and of course it’s gonna go to her head. All the while she’s saying, “I have the perfect husband and I love him so much!” What she needs to do is wake up and tell her husband they need marriage counseling. I don’t excuse her actions. She’s lying to herself. IMO, that’s her biggest sin and she needs slapped. Read more →

The zeitgeist of a story

Moriah Jovan

Romance novels are mocked all the time everywhere. That’s not news. What was surprising to me upon my reentry into reading and writing romance, which necessitated entering Romancelandia, the world of romance reader blogs, was that they’re also mocked by people who love romance novels.

Some books deserve it, but some that might seem to deserve it … don’t.

Those are books from the history of romance novels that are mocked for their fashions and specific song references and other tidbits of culture that date them and, quite often, the covers that were made for them at the time. In particular, very often the sweeping scope and larger-than-life characters and plots are mocked. The people doing the mocking, I find, are young and/or young to the romance genre. Read more →

Oh my heck!

Moriah Jovan

Yeah, I know I have more non-Mormon readers than Mormon readers. How do I know this, you ask? I have the Sight. (Plus the not illogical assumption that I offend most Mormons.) Anyway, that post title just gave every single one of my Mormon readers a giggle. Mostly because I used it.

This blog: Why Mormon Girls Stay Single is probably a lot funnier now that I’m married, but I had to tell you about it, which is actually the whole purpose of the post. I found it via the current, ah, kerfuffle (don’t hit me, Jessica) over what is and is not a real bloggernacle blog, but my blog is not any one of those.

Thank heavens.

Sex and money

Moriah Jovan

In this society, we treat sex like the Big Cheat. You know, when you go on a diet and you can’t have this food or that food or any other food you’d really like to have, so … you substitute. It doesn’t hit your spot, you’re still hungry, and you’re still craving what you didn’t allow yourself to have. So you binge. It’s at once the prurient attraction and the guilt-laden violation.

Meme of a drawn man with a raised index finger. Text: “Sexual education classes in school should just be listening to a baby cry for five hours straight while watching the same cartoon on repeat.”But money? Well, we treat that like it’s too sacred to be spoken of in detail and with clarity. Read more →

The 37-year-old virgin heroine

Moriah Jovan

The Virgin Heroine has always been (and remains, IMO) a staple of genre romance. It’s getting not so much that way anymore, but as time goes on and society gets freer with its sexcapades, it’s harder for a writer to justify the Virgin Heroine, especially beyond, say, college age. On the other hand, we still have historical writers who are perfectly capable of pulling off the “wicked virgin widow trope,” which I have to admit is cracktastic and I never ever get tired of it. (Kind of like “I had to do it to fulfill the will” plots, but that’s another post.) Read more →

An embarrassment of half-assed riches

Moriah Jovan

See, the thing is, I keep getting these great ideas to blog about, but then I get distracted and they don’t gel and I have about 6 half-written posts in my drafts folder that kinda sorta mean something to me now, but not really. Prepare for leftovers, kiddies, because mommy’s tired and she doesn’t want to cook dinner. Read more →