Kerry Allen

I have solved the problem of labeling books for potentially offensive content. Let us emulate the music industry, which has been laboring under the heavy mantle of censorship for years. Publish a “clean” version and the “parental advisory” version of every book!

Parental Advisory Version
“If the horny bastard likes to fuck as if his life depends on it, make it so.”

Clean Version
“If the horny bastard likes to fuck as if his life depends on it, make it so.”

Leave gaping holes like they do in the songs. Sell the clean copies with a pencil so the reader can fill in the blanks. It’ll be like Mad Libs! (”If the horny UPS driver likes to macarena as if his life depends on it, make it so!”)

Of course, this method also has its pitfalls. Not only the expense of two printings, but buyer dissatisfaction will be a consideration. I can’t tell you how pissed I get when I download a song and there are blank spots in it because I neglected to scroll over and make sure I was getting the explicit version. If I mistakenly purchased the version of a book with almost a tenth of 1 percent of its words missing, I wouldn’t be any happier about it.

Notice the I neglected and the I mistakenly. My responsibility entirely to make sure I’m getting what I want, but apparently not everyone feels that way. For some people, it takes a village to make a decision.

There’s a great deal of hullabaloo (one example here) recently about slapping warning labels on romance novels because they may contain graphic sex or profanity or violence or any number of other things that might offend a reader’s delicate sensibilities.

(How about a warning label that says “The back cover copy is the best bit of writing in the whole book—don’t waste your money”? That’s one I could get behind, and it’s no more subjective a judgment than any source of potential offense.)

I think warning labels are a stupid idea (that’s the most tactful I can be about it), but as a public service, when my book is published, I will post its offensive statistics clearly on my web site. Here’s a sample:

Instances of the word “fuck”: 15

Instances of the word “cock”: 2 (not including occurrences such as “cocker spaniel,” “cocky,” and “cocktail”—I was a bit alarmed when it came up 17 times total! I know I don’t talk about that region that much)

Instances of the word “shit”: 15 (including “bullshit”)

Instances of the word “damn”: 34 (in all its conjugations)

Instances of the word “dammit”: 9

Instances of the word “bitch”: 19 total; only 1 referring to the heroine, as stated by the villain (and you can’t really expect better of him)

(That’s 94 curse words out of 100,000 total, or 0.094% of the word count, in case that’s the criteria we’re using to deem offensiveness.)

Slang terms for “vagina”: 0

Fellatio: 1

Vaginal penetration by penis: 2 (onscreen)

Heterosexual anal penetration: 0

Homosexual activity: 0

Rape: 0

Unwanted advances: 3 4 (How could I forget the licking incident?)

Violent deaths: 2-1/2 onscreen, though not graphically described; 117 offscreen (estimated)

Violence toward children: 0 (threatened but not fulfilled)

Miscellaneous: References to nontraditional theology

Have I overlooked any other potentially offensive material that needs to be red-flagged?

Charlotte Dillon, my new Xena Wonder Woman Buffy heroine, has demystified synopsis writing by providing examples of synopses of books that went on to be published. Romances, no less, which take a different touch than other types of fiction. Seeing it in practice is so much more effective than being told what you’re supposed to do. (”Map the emotional journey.” What the bloody hell…? Well, now I get it! Less detail about the event, more about what effect it has on the character, which doesn’t make any more sense than the frickin’ map thing, but you can see for yourself here.)

After days of much **headdesk** and hair pulling and being near tears, I think I finally have the hang of it. Thank you, Charlotte Dillon. You are the wind beneath my wings.

I have converted my child to the cult of John Cusack worship.

Obviously he’s a fine specimen of manhood, but I wondered what about him would appeal to an 11-year-old. Assuming 11-year-olds have superficial interest in boys (I freely admit I was all about the pretty at that age), I was expecting something about his eyes, his lips, his hair…

My child pondered the question for a while and finally said, “He looks… smart.”

Hallelujah. She goes straight for a quality. There is hope for this one yet.

I buy books online. I buy because I hear good things. I buy because I hear bad things from people I know to have no taste. I buy because it showed up in my Recommended for Kerry list on Amazon and sometimes they’re not totally wrong. I buy on impulse. I buy a lot.

Prior to buying, I read the description. I read a couple of reader reviews. I never read an excerpt (which is crazy, but I hate reading online that much).

But I remember my bookstore shopping days, when I could get my hot little hands on the books and stroke them and sniff them and call them George… and flip through them a little to find the Buy Me Now, Dammit incentive. My TBR pile has almost as vast a selection of reading material as my local book vendor. I wanted them all at one time or another. How do I decide what to read next? Yes, mood is involved, but if my mood demands a steamy vampire romance with gritty suspense elements and I have four books meeting that description, how do I choose one over the other?

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of that little excerpt when you flip open the front cover. Two of the four books nominated for consumption today had no such excerpt. Straight back to the shelf. The third was a seduction excerpt. Sorry, I don’t know you yet, I don’t want to watch you gettin’ it on.

The fourth took only a few lines of the excerpt to reel me in:

“Sit down,” said J.

I did. When he continued staring in silence, I raised my eyebrows and looked up at him as if to say What the hell is your problem?

A girl with some attitude. Gimme.

(That’s from Beyond the Pale by Savannah Russe, by the way.)

I have never understood why every book doesn’t have that little excerpt up front. How nice for you that you have 50 reviews lauding your last book as “sparkling and sinfully delicious,” but frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn about your last book or what anybody had to say about it. I have this one in my hands, and I want a taste before I commit to ordering a whole plateful.

Am I the only one who pays any attention to that page, or are the books lacking them missing out on a crucial opportunity to snag reader interest?

The Dream Thief by Shana Abe
Mass Market Paperback, 336 pages
ISBN: 0553588052
Available Now
Retail Price $6.99
Second in series

This book and its predecessor, The Smoke Thief, are so beautiful, I don’t know where to begin singing the praise. On second thought, maybe my singing (reminiscent of a dying cat’s caterwauling) isn’t the greatest way to praise something, so I’ll stick with the written word.

Zane is the only human allowed to move in the world of the drakon. He knows their secrets, which would earn him a death sentence if his talent as a thief wasn’t so useful to them. They enlist him to find a very special diamond. If he can do it with the scant information provided, he will receive a sum that will allow him to live like a king the rest of his days.

Lia, one of the drakon, has heard the diamond’s song all her life. For almost as long, she has had troubling dreams of the future. One thing in the dreams never changes: She and Zane are lovers.

Aside from his mental hangup (he’s a street kid, a criminal, not good enough for the beautiful princess), Zane has a more concrete reason to keep his hands off Lia: not only will the drakon kill him, they’ll kill her. (Kind of a harsh, inflexible bunch, the drakon.) However, he needs her to find the diamond. He could endure the forced proximity along the journey. He could resist his own desire. But when she offers herself freely, what’s a thief to do other than take what he can get?

When the stone’s secret is revealed to Zane, he realizes he could have everything he’s ever wanted, including Lia, and her nightmarish visions of the future threaten to become reality.

What I love about Zane: He’s a thief. He acts like a thief. He thinks like a thief. When presented with an opportunity to acquire wealth and power, the first thing he does is envision himself with wealth and power. Consequences and morality are a secondary and iffy consideration.

(I can’t stand a character who always, always, always does the good and noble and right thing and never even considers the bad one. Boring. As. Hell. Not to mention completely unrealistic. Everything you need to know about good characterization can be learned through the study of DBZ: Goku got killed five hundred times for a good reason. Gohan was a dork. Snarky little Trunks was way cooler than big mama’s boy Trunks. And Vegeta, who never made a move, bad or good, without first evaluating what was in it for him, made the whole thing worth watching. “Will he? Won’t he? He did what? What a bastard! Yay, it was a ruse! Nope, he really is a bastard. Aw, but look, now he’s redeeming himself…”)

What I love about Lia: She had no qualms about breaking rules that got in the way of what needed to be done, which nicely narrowed the gap between Spoiled Rich Girls and the Criminals They Love. She consistently took action. She went after the diamond, and she went after Zane, and there was no question either would elude her.

Typically for me, I was far more interested in the hero (I like men, what can I say…), but I felt Zane was well matched in Lia. She understands and accepts him, bounty on his head and all, and will be tough enough to stick with him when the excrement hits the ventilation device back home.

Book Three in the series, starring Lia’s brother and the drakon princess who doesn’t know her future has been decided for her (and boy, will she be pissed when she finds out), will definitely be a must-read-immediately (even if I wasn’t thrilled with the cover, which breaks the theme I’ve really liked in the first two).

I do read more than one book a month. I’ll sometimes read five a week. Right now, when I’m bogged down in revisions on my own manuscript, I’m limiting myself to junky-fix reads (The Dream Thief **squee**), but my consumption is never less than one book a week.

You’ve seen only three “reviews” from me in the past couple of months because if the best I can say about a book is “it didn’t suck,” it’s not worth taking the time to write about it. I read more than a few that do suck. (Occasional disappointment is a fact of life—despite the encompassing magnificence of Peanut M&Ms, you still sometimes get one that tastes like a dirty sock.) Most books I read qualify as satisfying entertainment but aren’t stellar enough to recommend without reservation.

If a book shows up here, rest assured it’s because I love it, wish I’d written it, and am panting for more.

Sometimes I’ll skip “reviewing” even a great book because you probably found your way here through a romance-related site, and while I have faith that the majority of romance readers read far more widely than “their own” genre, those who would appreciate a fabulously written gory serial killer thriller, for example, seem to be a minority. Everything good, regardless of subject matter, makes it to the sidebar under “The magnificent seven,” but unless there’s something I think can appeal to a fairly wide range of readers or I’m SUPER EXCITED about it and just can’t contain myself, I’m not doing in-depth plugging.

I will be plugging the hell out of The Dream Thief sometime in the next week.