Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.
My subtitle says, “Religion. Money. Politics. Sex.” Okay, I think I’ve covered them all, but my tag cloud says I’m getting heavy on the religion side, so let’s hit the money for a while.
Over on Teleread, while looking for a post on ePub format (I know I read it the other day and I’ll address that in a future post), I found this gem: Top Ten Self-Publishing Myths. It’s all relevant to me, but I’m not going to post it all here. Copyright, you know. Go read, then come back!
We’ve got Mrs. Giggles, whom I have referenced before. Obviously, one reason I like her is she reviews self-published books. The other is she’s a hoot.
I don’t read a fraction as much as she does, I’m not nearly as adventurous as she is, and I certainly don’t have the gift for reviewing that she does, but I trust her reviews.
In my review of Phyllida, I made a reference to an average review it earned at Amazon with the caveat that the reviewer “stayed up all night to read the last two hundred pages, because I was engrossed with the characters’ stories.” To which my response was, that’s the mother lode.
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.)
I am bored with the below discussion (but don’t let me rain on your parade, so carry on). However, I do need to use it as the springboard for what’s on my ADHD mind today: What, precisely, defines a genre?
We’re very specific in romance. Got an email yesterday from my newest BFF (kidding! but the offer’s open!) who said, “I know you don’t write romance…” Well, yeah, I do. It’s just got so much other STUFF in it that it can’t be classified, which is why I’m publishing it myself. In fact, it’s got THREE (count ’em, 1, 2, 3) full-length romances going on at the same time all woven together (which is why it’s going to top 700 pages and who-knows-how-many megabytes). And they have sex and there is no fade-to-black and they say the f-word and the c-word. They live a certain political philosophy (some more than others) that will probably be uncomfortable for other types of readers. The story takes place over the course of 5 years and oh, by the way, they’re all in their late 30s and early 40s and wow is that so not part of genre romance.
If you haven’t read a book, don’t trash it. Your credibility is shot.
This post is for the non-Mormon readers of this blog who come from (most likely) the genre romance corner of the net.
Backstory: LDS fiction (aka Mormon fiction) is analogous to, say, what Steeple Hill puts out or any other run-of-the-mill Christian/evangelical inspirational romance. No swearing, no sex, very clean. No taking the Lord’s name in vain, no smoking, no drinking, no allusions to any of these things. For all intents and purposes, the term “LDS fiction” has come to be defined informally in the same milieu as inspirational romance category fiction.
I was a reader long before I was a writer, and I’m still a reader more than a writer (’cause, you know, reading is a faster process than writing). So when I read Dear Author this morning, wherein Jane proceeds to give publishers advice as to how to help readers buy books [dead link] and she didn’t miss a trick, I shouted hallelujah!
So the people over in Kansas City, Kansas, got a little huffy over a Jeopardy! question somewhere in the early ’90s. “Kansas City, Kansas, is a suburb of what city?” That would be Kansas City, Missouri, dingdingding.
This post is not for those who live here because we know there’s a Kansas City in Kansas and one in Missouri, too. We’re just tired of having to conduct extemporaneous geography lessons to people who think they know what they’re talking about.
Last night’s fare: I Am Legend.
I don’t watch many movies because I’m usually obsessed with the ones playing in my head, begging to be laid on paper.
But I’ll roll over for post-apocalyptic tales (oh, 12 Monkeys and Waterworld come to mind and that reminds me, why [other than Kevin Costner’s acting] is Waterworld so reviled?). I Am Legend is the best I’ve seen yet.
Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
by Ann Herendeen
published by Harper Paperbacks
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?
Third person narrative: Limited, Omniscient, Objective
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.
After viewing my KC photo gallery [dead link for now], a friend of mine said, “Oh, what a romantic city!”
Now, I love this town and yes, I have always thought there was a certain romance to it, but I never thought I’d hear someone not a native say it. I mean, that’s like saying Toledo is romantic. Maybe it is, but “romantic” isn’t the first thing I think of when I hear “Toledo, Ohio.”
Congratulations and good luck, Moxie.
Always Listen to the Ravings of a Mad Woman [dead link]
(A Story of Sex, Porn, and Postum in the Land of Zion)
by JulieAnn Henneman
published by Draumr Publishing [dead link]
This book was mentioned to me as something different (especially as regards Mormon characters), so I went a-seeking. And boy, did I get.
Corinne Young is having an affair with her dentist. Kinda. Sorta. She’s not sure why, but there’s gotta be a reason, right? Her husband, Brent, holes himself up in his office with his computer all night long, working on the software training company he built. And then, well, all hell breaks loose. It doesn’t take long to understand why Corinne’s diddling the dentist, even if it takes her longer than the reader to figure it out. (Because, well, what does “husband holed up in his office with his computer all night long” say to you? Okay, after much thought, it occurred to me he could have been gaming.)
In my wanderings around the ’net, one thing has become perfectly clear to me: However harried and hassled, looked down upon, sneered at, spit toward, and generally disrespected as a valid art form, genre romance (just after science fiction and Cory Doctorow) seems to be at the leading edge of the ebook revolution.
<donning pimp hat>
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The owner of Sexy Little Outfits [dead link] has asked me to contribute snippets (some clothing-related, some not) from The Proviso for the “Sexy Stories” [dead link] part of her site. She’ll be putting up one a week for the next several weeks, so don’t miss out!
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Hide-a-Book [dead link]. For keeping your deliciously wicked covers under wrap wherever decidedly un-wicked people will be staring at you funny.
Just because they’re so dang purty.
This morning I’m listening to Simply Red (flashbacks from freshman year at BYU) and the song “Money’s Too Tight to Mention” is a good song. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have it in my library.
It also trashes things I believe in. Does it bother me? On some visceral level, yes, but that doesn’t make it difficult for me to listen to it and it certainly doesn’t keep me from listening. I’d miss a whole lot of good music (and that voice!) if I took umbrage at other people’s opinions and the way they state them (usually the way they state them is more off-putting than what they say).
So it started me thinking about how I read fiction,
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In my opinion, this is not so much a twisted fairy tale as an example of how to write. I won’t get into all the gush-deconstruction with various adjectives and superlatives because it’s been done ad nauseam (by an agent, even!)
Bettie, if you see, this, please email me your Paypal account and I’ll PAY you for the privilege of having read it.
I stopped reading you when I was 17. There was a reason for this: I’d run through everything you’d ever written by that time and I was burnt out on you, so I went on to glomming my next author, whom I have also never read again. Lather, rinse, repeat throughout my life. Glom, abandon, glom, abandon. Yes, I am an evil reader.