Kerry Allen

You Should Be a Romance Novelist

You see the world as it should be, and this goes double for all matters of the heart. You can find the romance in any situation, and you would make a talented romance story writer… And while you may be a traditional romantic, you’re just as likely to be drawn to quirky or dark love stories. As long as it deals with infatuation, heartbreak, and soulmates - you could write it.

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

Fo shizzle. And I didn’t even cheat by purposely selecting romancey answers. (Actually, I shunned the sicky-sweet ones that made me want to puke.)

Lifted from March 20 Blogger entry

Ah, the ever-popular heroine who is dumpy and frumpy until she takes off her glasses and suddenly becomes the uber-hot object of every male character’s lustful fantasies.

No makeover. No change of clothes. Not even a shower. The metamorphosis from bore to babe required nothing more taxing than removing her specs.

Those must be some DAMN ugly glasses to overshadow not only her “cover girl” facial features but also her “generous cleavage,” her ass that is so extensively lauded I can’t select a single quote, and her “long, shapely legs.”

Get thyself to Lens Crafters, girl!

Not only that, but this heroine never seems to really need the glasses, since she can discard them to become a sexpot with no repercussions, such as squinting unattractively and tripping over furniture and ramming her car into oncoming traffic, so she appears to have been given glasses solely for the purpose of taking them off and revealing the startling beauty concealed behind the, um, clear plastic lenses.

Having been stuck with one form of corrective lenses or another since the age of six, that just pisses me off.

How about a myopic heroine who’s sexy with her glasses? Do any exist, or will I have to write one myself?

I know bathtub sex sound like loads of wet, slippery fun, hence its repeated appearance in romance novels, but let’s pay just a little attention to the mechanics, shall we?

First, the cold, hard, unforgiving surface and narrow confines of the average tub are not particularly conducive to team bathing.

Second, nobody in Romanceland ever has soap scum or mildew in their bathroom. Do they all have that sprayer thingy that cleans the shower every day with the touch of a button? (I really need one of those.)

Third, there ought to be a safety advisory about bathtub vigilance on the cover of every book containing tub woo-hoo (Simmers unite!). When you become distracted from bathtub safety, you slip and hit your head and drown, and then it’s not so fun anymore, is it?

Fourth, hardly anyone ever mentions the water displacement and the subsequent mess on the floor when you plunk an extra person into a tub already filled to the rim. Who cleans that up? And how do they get out of the tub without slipping on the wet floor and suffering an injury? The whole thing sounds very dangerous to me.

But I have to say, in my twenty-something-year span of reading romance novels, this is the first time I have come across this one:

The heroine is soaking in a bubble bath, tub full of water and suds up to her neck. The hero joins her in the tub. The heroine chooses to welcome him with a bit of felatio.

Either she has gills and a fondness for the taste of soap, or he has a 24-inch periscope that rises above the water level.

Either of which really should have been divulged previously in order to save me the squirming when my child demanded to know why mommy was screaming with laughter.

Maybe Bam should have a “realistic tub sex” writing contest.

Winner gets one of those sprayer thingies.

If you’ve tried to visit and been unable to get the site, it’s because my server has been hacked, causing outages. The host is migrating to a new server and assures me the problem will be completely resolved within 24 hours. (Until the next time it happens.)

On the up side, not being able to post has spared me from posting a couple things I would have ended up yanking anyway. (A thousand more apologies to friends who got an earful in lieu of those posts.)

I redirected the effort I would have spent writing venomous posts to creating Interactive Fun for future readers. I created a “What Breed of Djinn Are You?” quiz on Quizilla (not available for consumption at this time) and found one other thing that amused me to the tips of my stubby toes, but I’m keeping that one to myself for now. (I’ve never seen it done before, and I’d like to keep it that way until I can benefit from it.)

My TBR list is actually up on its page now, so you can gape at my choice of reading material. (Vampires, vampires, vampires… Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse?)

While the Suckish Book Plague of 2007 persists, there have been shining moments of remission, and I’ll be writing a decent plug for Lover Unbound (as opposed to whatever that last failed attempt was) and an equally decent plug for Demon Moon (delayed because Colin distracts me every time I pick up that book—I’m going to try bribing him with his own HOTM adoration-fest if he’ll let me concentrate on the rest of the story for an hour or so) in the near future.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled Monday, Wednesday, and Friday programming.

The 2008 Harlequin Romance Report has the theme Confessions. Confess your sins here and be absolved. Or just provide fodder for the mockery cannon that gets aimed at romance readers every time this thing is released.

Harlequin puts a great deal of time and expense into producing and distributing the Report. Do they take the opportunity to showcase the diversity of romance readers and portray them as intelligent members of society who have a soft spot for a good love story? Not this year. This year, we’re going to Hell because we are ssssinners.

I’ve come to expect something along these lines from the Report. What blows my mind is that people are participating in the degradation. Here are the total posts by category as of this writing: 

Lust (190)

Greed (10)

Envy (20)

Pride (16)

Anger (23)

Sloth (17)

Gluttony (17)

Other (42)

I gotta admit, I’m curious about Other.

Note the preponderance of entries under Lust because, of course, romance readers are all sex-obsessed.

What I would like to see is a category where those of us who choose not to expose our inner evil for a publisher’s publicity campaign can say so, so that when the results are tallied, the more circumspect portion of the romance-reading community is represented along with the seven deadly dwarves, Lusty, Greedy, Envy, Pridey, Angry, Slothy, and Gluttony, and their mutt who answers to Other.

Am I alone in thinking painting one’s customers with a big brush of biblical reckoning is tacky? Offensive? Insulting? Bad business? Or is this “all in good fun” and I’m missing out on a ripping good time?

Lover Unbound by J.R. Ward
Mass Market Paperback, 502 pages
ISBN: 0451222350
Available Now
Retail Price $7.99
Fifth in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series

I read this last week. It was, as BDB books always are, an engrossing, unputdownable read.

Here’s my problem with writing a “review” of the book I read: Lots of people were able to get hold of it a week before anyone would sell it to me and burned up the internets with their negative reactions to it, so I had those issues in mind when I read.

Did this poison my reaction to the book? No. What it did was pull me out of the story frequently with thoughts along the lines of “What the hell book did you people read?”

V’s thing with Butch was dismissed too easily? Half the damn book is about V struggling with it, talking about it with Butch, and Butch himself explained the source of it (the same way I always thought of it, incidentally). Some people just weren’t going to be happy unless they fucked, though.

Too much of the secondary characters? Without Phury, V would never have been free to be with Jane. Developing his reasoning for saving the day was oodles better than having him pop into Wrath’s office out of nowhere and offer to save the day.

All the secondary stuff? It’s called worldbuilding. You can’t clamor for it one minute and then bitch because there’s a world other than the H/H the next. Well, obviously you can, but it makes you look like an asshat.

Missing the lessers? (Too much secondary stuff, but missing the lessers? **headdesk**) Also explained. Laying low for a couple weeks while seeking to fill the vacant middle management position. They had no story to tell during the handful of days during which this story takes place.

The average romance novel is 300 to 350 pages in length. I haven’t counted and have no intention of doing so (though you’re welcome to take up the challenge), but I’m fairly confident V and Jane accounted for at least 300 pages. The extra 200 pages is bonus content, as far as I’m concerned.

Oh, the hue and cry over what happened to Jane! (And I am neither going to tell you flat out nor use a cutesie euphemism that is as subtle as telling you flat out. You can find that all over the place.) She was clumsy at first because she was adjusting to an altered state of being. She adjusted well enough that she proceeded with plans to be the Brotherhood’s live-in surgeon, and it never in any way affected V’s interaction with her, so what the hell is the problem? Together + Happy = HEA.

What I wrote was, I kid you not, a 10,000-word rebuttal of practically every negative comment I’d read in the past week (exceptions: Cormia actually is as much of a dishrag as Marissa, and while I have no problem with detailing John’s journey, I could have lived without watching him jerk off), complete with quotes and page numbers and foaming at the mouth with hostility.

(Oh, you think what we have here is hostile? Silly rabbit, this bitchfest is for kids.)

My reaction is not not because I’m a squeeing fangrrl and think J.R. Ward can do no wrong. (The spelling. My god, the spelling. It’s bad enough stumbling across a word in the text, but the glossary is downright painful to behold.) My reaction is the same as it always is when people disseminate misinformation to an unsuspecting public—pissed off.

I’m going to have to come back to this one when I cool off enough to actually write about the book, but it was important to me to show some support. It’s a good story about a damaged hero soothed by the love of a good woman and lots of sex that will make you wish a hot vampire would tie you up and spank you.

Hollywood’s still my favorite, but this one beat the crap out of Butch’s book.

Name: David
Classification: Supernatural Stud
Subclass: Djinn

Found In: Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden series (all books listed below). For the sake of performing the introductions, I’ve excerpted from Ill Wind, the first book in the series, but I assure you, David gets even better over time.

The Meet Cute: Joanne picks up a hitchhiker while fleeing for her life.

The Catch: David’s kinda sorta responsible for the circumstances necessitating the fleeing and wants to make amends, not that he confesses this, and by the time Joanne figures it out, she’s too in love with him to hold a grudge.

The Pretty: When Joanne first sees David, she describes him as “just a guy.”

A guy with brown hair that needed trimming and some silly-looking round glasses that reflected blazing sunlight. A nice face, with smile lines around the eyes that said he was older than first glance would take him for. He was wearing a patched olive-green trench coat that for some reason reminded me of World War I—a vintage clothing enthusiast, or somebody who could afford only Salvation Army couture.

(David almost always wears that coat. It has sentimental value. He also has a fondness for flannel shirts, jeans, and hiking boots.)

He had really dark eyes, but dark in a warm, earthy kind of way. If he were a season, he’d be fall.

(I love that line about fall.)

Skin like burnished gold, and under it the best kind of muscles on a man—long, lean, defined without bulging.

(Damn, I cut out the part where he was wet and wrapped in a towel. Use your imagination. Is lickalicious a word?) (This was later, by the way. She didn’t pick him up on the side of the road, wet and wrapped in a towel, though that would be an effective way to get a ride…)

Djinn tend to look like humans because blending in is safer. Once Joanne knows he’s Djinn and not “just a guy,” David lets his appearance slip enough to reveal his real eyes, always a dramatic feature in Djinn.

His eyes were deep, beautiful, and entirely alien. Copper-colored with flecks of bright gold. They flared brighter as I watched, then faded into something that was nearly human-brown.

(That’s how my imagination paints David: copper and gold.)

Endearing Qualities

• His dietary indiscretions include cheese doodles, Twinkies, and diet soda.
• He’s keenly focused on the object of his affection, as if her every word, every gesture, every breath is something he treasures.
• He smells like a cookie: “something cinnamon, exotic, warm.”
• He’s quiet, enigmatic, and wry.
• He reads popular fiction and likes The X-Files.
• He’s a rescuer. Car breaks down, demon incubating in your chest gets riled up, somebody tries to kill you—David to the rescue.
• And while he’s at it, why doesn’t he offer to sacrifice his freedom and his sanity to get that demon out of you because he loves you that damn much.

Handy Skills

• Magically hotwire a car when a quick getaway is called for
• Magically clothe you in the latest designer fashions
• Keep your spirit alive when your body has burned to bones and ash while you were out of it, trying to save the day
• Conceal you from prying eyes so you can make like bunnies in public

In David’s Words

“I don’t like you,” he said. “Like has no pulse. No fever. No fire.” His right hand came out of the water now, joined the left in gliding up my shoulders, my neck. I could feel my pulse pounding wildly. Both my hands on his chest now, mapping the golden territory of his body. “Like isn’t what I feel for you. It never was.”

The Drawbacks: David spends a lot of time as someone else’s property. As such, he’s often treated about as well as you would expect someone who would keep a slave to treat that slave. I know people who have stopped reading the series because they couldn’t stand the abuse he suffers.

The Up Side: If you stick with it, there’s a Djinn rebellion, and pity the fool who messes with David after that.

Get Your Hands On David: Linkage goes to B&N search page containing all the Weather Warden books, penned by Rachel Caine. (For a refreshing change, they’re actually listed as Book One, Book Two, etc. in the search, but I’ve also put them in order below if you choose to browse elsewhere.)

Ill Wind: Book One
Heat Stroke: Book Two
Chill Factor: Book Three
Windfall: Book Four
Firestorm: Book Five
Thin Air: Book Six