{"id":5167,"date":"2012-09-06T20:42:36","date_gmt":"2012-09-07T01:42:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=4649"},"modified":"2025-08-24T11:37:26","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T16:37:26","slug":"magdalene-pw-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/magdalene-pw-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Magdalene and Publisher’s Weekly"},"content":{"rendered":"

For an author, a Publisher\u2019s Weekly<\/em> starred review is one of the holy grails of reviews. It\u2019s one of those things that, for a writer, is right up there with The Call (\u201cHi, Mojo. I want to offer you a contract for your book.\u201d). I\u2019ve had pretty close brushes with getting The Call, which (three times, to be precise) ended up to be \u201cI love this book and I want to buy it, but I can\u2019t because of Freak Things 1, 2, and\/or 3.\u201d What I have never dared<\/em> aspire to (especially once I started down the self-pub path) is a review in Publisher\u2019s Weekly<\/em> at all, much less a starred one. But then Tuesday, this happened:<\/p>\n

\"Review<\/a><\/div>\n

And you know what? I\u2019m kinda proud because I had some goals with this book and, at least for this reviewer, I hit some of them. Later I received an email from the senior editor of reviews at PW passing along some more remarks the reviewer made, which made me believe that I accomplished almost all of my goals with the book.<\/p>\n

But there is one I want to talk about because it\u2019s not one that\u2019s obvious. And it\u2019s not obvious because I set this challenge for my own benefit, not for the reader\u2019s.<\/p>\n

In 2008, my editor for Monsters & Mormons<\/em>, Wm Morris, wrote this piece at A Motley Vision (a Mormon lit blog): \u201cStephenie Meyer\u2019s Mormonism and the \u2018erotics of abstinence.\u2019\u201d<\/a> The erotics of abstinence.<\/em> Well, that\u2019s an intriguing little idea. He was springboarding from this Time<\/em> piece: \u201cStephenie Meyer: A New J.K. Rowling?\u201d<\/a>, wherein the author says this:<\/p>\n

But it is the rare vampire novel that isn\u2019t about sex on some level, and the Twilight<\/em> books are no exception. What makes Meyer\u2019s books so distinctive is that they\u2019re about the erotics of abstinence<\/strong>. Their tension comes from prolonged, superhuman acts of self-restraint. There\u2019s a scene midway through Twilight in which, for the first time, Edward leans in close and sniffs the aroma of Bella\u2019s exposed neck. \u201cJust because I\u2019m resisting the wine doesn\u2019t mean I can\u2019t appreciate the bouquet,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have a very floral smell, like lavender \u2026 or freesia.\u201d He barely touches her, but there\u2019s more sex in that one paragraph than in all the snogging in Harry Potter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I, like Wm (and pretty much everybody else who read the book), was intrigued by that idea.<\/p>\n

In 2008, Mitch and Cassie were a bare glimmer in my mind. I had mentioned Mitch\u2019s name a couple of times in The Proviso<\/em> with absolutely no intention of following up on that. Cassie didn\u2019t even exist when I wrote the sketch with a nameless unreliable and unlikeable narrator<\/a> in the style of \u201cSnuff.\u201d<\/a> I like to do those sometimes, usually because something catches my attention and I\u2019m restless and haven\u2019t written for a while and though I only have a few words in me, they must come out. That 250-word monologue was in my head when I started thinking about Mitch\u2019s role in Sebastian\u2019s life. The two disparate ideas simply wound in and around each other like different streams of smoke drifting on the same breeze, tickling my mind with vague possibilities.<\/p>\n

I was still in the planning stages of Magdalene<\/em>, trying to figure out if I would or would not have my bishop succumb to temptation. I will tell you: I didn\u2019t want him to, because that wasn\u2019t who he was and besides that, I\u2019d already gone down that road with Giselle. But how was I going to do this? I didn\u2019t think I could write sexual tension, didn\u2019t think I could carry abstinence too far and still make it seem legitimate. (We Mormons have all sorts of ways to justify our celibacy, but nobody outside our culture buys a word of it.)<\/p>\n

Then I stumbled upon the \u201cerotics of abstinence.\u201d Stephenie Meyer had to go to paranormal lengths to justify abstinence until marriage. I don\u2019t write paranormal, so I didn\u2019t want to do that. She also had teenagers, which is its own justification. I don\u2019t write teenagers, so that was out of the question.<\/p>\n

I wanted to do that. With adults. Who weren\u2019t vegetarian vampires. Plausibly.<\/p>\n

I wanted to do it better<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So I did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For an author, a Publisher\u2019s Weekly starred review is one of the holy grails of reviews. It\u2019s one of those things that, for a writer, is right up there with The Call (\u201cHi, Mojo. I want to offer you a contract for your book.\u201d). I\u2019ve had pretty close brushes with getting The Call, which (three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[549,526,547],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mormon","category-reviews-mojo","category-theology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5167"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5167"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18521,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5167\/revisions\/18521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}