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 and she didn’t miss a trick, I shouted hallelujah!
self-publishing
Book Review: Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
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?
The authorial beau monde
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.
Thank you, Stephen King.
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.
“Eventually you will succeed.”
Does anybody actually believe this without a boatload of qualifiers?
Over at Romancing the Blog, there was a very nice article about a mystery writer’s convention comparing and contrasting how that genre’s culture stacks up against the romance genre’s culture (including ebooks, my pet topic, but I’ll pimp that later elsewhere). I found this tidbit interesting:
The motivating keynote and luncheon speeches sounded just like the ones we hear at RWA, discussing how important it is to write your story, to finish the book, to be persistent, hone your craft, and if you keep at it, eventually you will succeed.
Er, no.