Happy New Year, Everyone!
I'm not so keen on my new hair color, but I love the look of my new webpage.
Jane was brave enough to ask folks what they thought of Dear Author's new look. She made the change so Dear Author would load faster. I just wanted my site to look prettier.
Though I know it's going to be a bit of slow load for folks on dial-up, I'm still going to follow Jane's shining example, and do likewise.
What do you think?
Everybody loves presents. Here's a list of presents from authors to readers--free reads!
Wow, Part 1: Demon Night
I just finished the ARC of MelJean Brook's Demon Night that I won from Dear Author. I'm still gathering my thoughts on it--there's a lot of plot, and backstory, and detail. I don't know quite what I think of Demon Night but I am certain of two things:
I should be all aglow with happiness--the final version of Like a Thief in the Night is turned in, and the excerpt is up on the Samhain site. Instead, all I see are things I want to change.
I can't help it, I'm a fiddler. I nitpick. I tweak.
Editor Laurie and the ever-patient Bam can attest, every time I send in a draft, something is different. I just can't help it. Just yesterday, I noticed in Ember chapter 8 that I described fabric as jacquard when I really meant brocade. O, the horror! I can't believe I did that! (Sorry, Anonymous Auction Winner!). It will be fixed in the full PDF.
I can't leave well enough alone. I change a word here, a sentence there. When a question about my main character that wakes me in the middle of the night like, "What does she do when she's not killing people?" I have to answer it.
It's like some kind of curse: Lo, and she shall edit nigh until the very end.
One of these days, I'm going to have to learn to let go. Maybe I can do that by obsessing on my next WIP?
Alone of all my sisters, I was not named to honor queens or saints. Instead, my stepmother named me for the climbing rose on the south wall of her garden, with its sweet scent and wicked thorns.
Another great post over at Dear Author wherein Jane wonders if a makeover would get the Romance genre a little respect from the mainstream.
Now, I hate mantitty, secret babies and clinch covers as much as the next gal-who-also-likes-to-occasionally-read- in-public-or-on-the-bus, but not even a tag team of Oprah, Tyra and Ty Pennington could spruce up the genre enough to get it an invite to the Mystery/Sci-Fi/We're almost literature Prom.
It's not that I'm down on Romance. You know I'm not. Thing is, Harlequin's many secret babies, Fabio dressed up like a metrosexual Indian, and those clinches that defy the the limits of human flexibility--they sell. And since they sell, they aren't going anywhere--not unless those of us who hate them rip off those cute calico "bookcovers" we bought at the last garage sale our romance-reading 80-year-old neighbor had (the one where she tried to sell you a whole box of Cassie Edwards novels for $0.50) and stop buying books with covers we hate.
And since I am not about to forgo one of my favorite genres for 3-5 years just to make publishers change their ways, I will suggest that those of us who would like to class up the look of our reading material give up on lifting all boats with a rising tide of respectability and focus our attention on the well-crafted vessels that aren't weighed down by the claptrap and cliche for which our beloved genre is (somewhat justifiably) mocked.
In the comments at Dear Author, I suggested that the Romance genre follow in the footsteps of comic books--er-hem, graphic novels--and think up a new name for books that aspire to a more artistic level. Comic books were long reviled as thinly-plotted, tawdry niche-market geek-boy fantasies. There were plenty of good--great--comics out there, like Love and Rockets or The Watchmen, but they never got any respect because they shared shelf space in dingy, geek-filled little stores with the afore-mentioned tawdry niche-market geek-boy fantasies. And then some clever person decided to christen the good stuff "graphc novels" and the rest, you know, is history.
So here's my question: What do we call our classier, more literary-leaning subgenre of Romance novel? And how do we make it stick?
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11,273 / 95,000 (11.9%) |
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20,891 / 50,000 (41.8%) |
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29,002 / 45,000 (64.4%) |
Split
Urban Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Romance
The classic tale of girl meets boy; girl meets boy's psychotic split personality. It's true love, with a body count.
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37,860 / 50,000 (75.7%) |
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