Kerry Allen

WARNING: Many mixed metaphors ahead. Proceed at your own risk. 

Maybe it’s just me, but the insistence that I don’t know what I really want to read—that I’m on some merry-go-round of crap reading because publishers print only crap so readers have only crap to buy so publishers continue to print the crap because that’s what sells—really pisses me off.

Look, I understand that you may be dissatisfied with the books you’re reading, but don’t try to drag me into that boat with you. I’m not drowning here; I’m swimming quite contentedly, as a matter of fact. I really, truly, genuinely enjoy many of those books that dissatisfy you and really, truly, genuinely buy them on purpose, not because I’ve been brainwashed into thinking that’s what I want.

Yes, I get the occasional wallbanger, but I lack your sense of entitlement that the entire publishing industry should revolve around my needs. When I get the occasional Peanut M&M that tastes like a dirty sweatsock, I bleh and scarf down more to get the nasty taste out of my mouth, whereas you probably advocate forsaking Peanut M&Ms altogether.

You do that. I’ll eat your share.

And Ye Olde Banana Analogy you think supports your “you don’t know what you want” theory?

“If the grocery store sells nothing but bananas, you have no choice but to buy bananas.”

Not helping your cause. Because, you see, I do have a choice. There’s another grocery store with a wider selection down the road, and then there’s the farmer’s market and also online shopping, where the food is packed fresh and delivered right to my door, not to mention digital foodstuffs if I have a craving for something really exotic. If the Banana Grocer doesn’t sell a shitload of bananas, they’ll be forced to expand their stock if they want to compete and stay in business.

But maybe they’re catering to a niche market of banana addicts you know nothing about, banana hater. There are people who do like bananas, regardless of how offensive you may find them.

I’m not wild about bananas straight from the skin, but I’m quite fond of them in banana nut bread, banana splits, and Bananas Foster.

I do not want to live in a world without Bananas Foster.

You have every right to despise bananas, but enough with trying to convince the rest of the world bananas are the root of all evil. Face the fact that pomegranate fetishists are a minority and might have to drive that extra mile to get what they want.

Myself, I’m violently allergic to pomegranates, so I’ll be at the Banana Store, stocking up.

Dessert at my place later.

… I use it in my carpet shampooer and to spot-treat Demon Dog stains.

The mental variety? Not so much.

I rarely purchase hardcover books. I have never purchased a hardcover romance novel, and a recent snit over a paperback caused me to proclaim I never would.

But horrible, evil beyotches are bombarding me with excerpts. Not the standard, first-chapter, get-to-the-story-already excerpts that rarely impress me all that much, but the kind of excerpts that make me want to lick somebody.

Me: “Uh nuh vunuh un huh. Nuh huhuhuh.” (Unintelligible, as I was trying to prevent my tongue from hanging out. Translation: ”I’m not budging on this. No hardcover.”)

Horrible, Evil Beyotch Uno: “You know you can’t a wait a year for this in paperback.”

Horrible, Evil Beyotch Dos: “You’ve been waiting, what, five years for him as it is? You want him bad.”

Horrible, Evil Beyotch Uno: “I think you need to read some more about his tongue.”

Me: *sobbing and making gimme fingers like a needy toddler*

In a video game, if you get poisoned and you don’t take an antidote right away, it takes a bite out of your health bar every couple of seconds until it’s all gone and you die. Well, this is Temptation chewing on my Resolve bar, and I am fresh out of antidotes and a realm away from the nearest item shop. *chomp chomp* I feel faint. All hope is lost.

I succumb.

Okay, so there will be this ONE exception…

(And they are Super Horrible, Evil Beyotches because even after they’ve destroyed my will, I still have to wait months for the bloody hardcover. With friends like these, who needs hemorrhoids?)

I had some time to read yesterday, and I knew exactly what I wanted. I was on fire to finish reading a particular book. I couldn’t remember why I’d ever put it down because it was so good, and I was going bonkers because I couldn’t find it anywhere. I freaked out because I thought it went in the donation box, and I couldn’t remember the title or the author to buy it again and now I’ll never know what happened…

Then I remembered it wasn’t a book. It was one of the entries in my GH judging packet.

I don’t get that excited about a lot of published books. That one has to final. Has to, or there is no justice in this world.

(And please, Santa, could I get the full manuscript to read? I’m jonesing here.)

I did a book purge, including a revisit of the Tower of Unfinishables (still unfinishable, even the two I forced myself to finish because I had quit more than halfway through them), and I believe I have discovered the source of my impatience with those books that frustrate, anger, and occasionally incite me to violent outbursts that damage the drywall.

At the beginning of 2007, which is when this heightened intolerance began, I turned a serious eye toward becoming published. This involved a lot of investigation into “What do they want?” and “What are they looking for?” and “What’s an instant turnoff?” and etc. (”They” being the agents and editors guarding the hallowed gates, and the answer to all those questions being “it varies, except when it doesn’t.”) Basically, I began trying to look at my own writing from more of an editor’s perspective.

Then followed a lot of cutting and tightening and reworking to strengthen those areas where my manuscript was clearly falling short. Not changing the story to make it fit a popular trend or to meet one particular person’s requirements, but ”this is a stronger starting point” and “less emphasis on this secondary character” and “this is unnecessary filler” kind of adjustments that made it even more the story I wanted to tell.

I can’t turn off the new reading style when reading for pleasure. Now when I read a book in which nothing happens in the first 50 pages or there’s idiotic chitchat (What year were you born?/1974./How old are you?—She can’t do the math? Why does she need his age, anyway? Is she filling out a freakin’ insurance form?) or there’s an intrusive amount of description or contradictory characterization (allegedly badass-warrior heroine stands around wringing her hands while her beloved sister is murdered five feet away) or any of the things I’ve had to work to weed out of my writing, I dismiss it as sloppy and lazy and don’t want to waste my time reading something the writer didn’t care enough about to shape up and the editor didn’t insist upon shaping up. I won’t invest my time when they didn’t, and I get grouchy that I invested my money.

It seems my enjoyment of reading has been permanently diminished. Which sucks, frankly. Used to be, every book I met was my friend, and now I view each one with distrust until it proves itself to me. But I feel better having Nancy Drewed the matter of one day at least liking 90 percent of what I read and the next day plummeting to half that, a threshold I can’t overcome.

It’s not you, Unfinishable Book That I Might Have Enjoyed Prior to 2007. It’s me.

But even though I may be judging you too harshly, I’ll still let the dog savage your carcass if you really piss me off, so watch your step…

I’m not even going to try Monday, Wednesday, and Friday blogging for the rest of the month. I got nothin’.

I downloaded a 30-day trial of Web Studio. I had only an hour to play with it, but it seems like a fuller-featured version of WYSIWYG drag-and-drop web design for morons. For instance, you can enter a descriptive tag that will pop up when you hover over a link (merely neat), and it WILL center the page on any size monitor (huge improvement). I’ll have to get deeper into it before I know for sure, but it’s looking good so far.

To combat my mehs, I picked up a book. Within the first few pages, the heroine was sexually assaulted and beaten within an inch of her life. Um… no. I’m not usually squeamish about stuff like that (the details weren’t even provided), but now is not a good time, thanks. My weary brain craves something fluffy. I need that Jennifer Colt in my TBR or a Stephanie Plum marathon. Now that I think of it, I have an Aisling Gray’s latest ludicrous hijinks and mayhem in the pile, too. If all else fails, I can read something kiddy.

I maintained word count on WL on the latest edit despite the added info. (Die, speech tags, die!) Time to put it away for a couple weeks before another readthrough and get it back out there, which means it’s (drum roll, please) Query Letter Time Again! The most frustrating six sentences one will ever write. The new formula: hook, setup, disaster, disaster, disaster, resolution. I can fill in those blanks, but there’s no flow from one to the next, so it sounds choppy and disjointed. I can write two-thirds of every sentence, but the last bit of every one gets limp and soggy.

Where are the freakin’ voices in my head when I need them?

I found out about AAR’s Top 100 Romances poll far too late to even consider compiling my own list, but I was interested in seeing the results.

Whoa. Talk about confirmation that I am a romance misfit. Now I remember why I don’t hang out at AAR. I fit in like a street pup of dubious origins with fleas and mange at the Eukanuba Cup.

Analysis of the results reveals 43% European historical, 8% medieval, 6% classic fiction, 2% historical, 1% American historical, 1% traditional regency, and 2% category, for a total of 63% I wouldn’t even pick up at this point. I have read a total of 15 out of the 100 on the list, no more than 2 of those would have made it onto my personal Top 100 list, and several of them would qualify for my Worst 100 list.

Despite the exclusion of any representation of my exquisite taste, the discussion of the results is fascinating. They put a lot of work into analyzing and interpreting the numbers and comparing them to historical data from previous polls.

If you didn’t put in a ballot this year, start compiling one now, even though it will likely be a couple of years before the next poll. (I’ve been working on mine, and it will take some time if you’re starting from scratch.) I’d like to see a few more women who wear pants, men who don’t wear tights, electric lights, telephones, and horsepower that doesn’t leave droppings in the street. Some fur and fangs not associated with certain dark-hued pointy weapons would be nice, too. (I love me some J.R. Ward, but honestly, there are far better paranormals deserving of recognition I would have liked to see on that list instead of the BDB box set.)

Just like in political elections, if you don’t vote, you can’t complain.

Much.

Arf.

My little book “reviews” come in handy when I can’t come up with any inane babbling for my regularly scheduled post, but those “reviews” are even harder to come up with because I will only write one for a book I not only liked but liked enough to take the time to jot down my thoughts about it and organize them in a semi-coherent manner and track down a cover image and the ISBN and type it all up… It’s just not worth the effort for a book that only reaches the “it didn’t suck” bar—definitely not for one that falls short of that.

I was reading a book last night, a SF romance, and it was giving me a headache because it seemed like there were 50 non-English words on every page, and I wasn’t in the mood to keep track of a whole other language. The story itself was interesting, and I want to know what happens, so it’s a Put It Down For Now rather than a Do Not Finish.

I picked up a different book, a vampire romance, and while there were several things about it I found intriguing, there were also a number of things that had me groaning and rolling my eyes. I want to know how it shakes down, but not right now. Put It Down For Now.

I realized: In one evening, I had removed two books from the unexplored frontier of the TBR shelf. I know what they’re about, I know what frame of mind I’ll have to be in to finish them, and I know they’re not great enough to make it worth my time to “review” them. If they had really sucked, I would also know by this point they were discards.

I also realized: I waste a lot of time lingering over books I’m just not in the mood for. I’m in the middle of this one, so I don’t want to pick up another one, but I don’t really want to read this one right now, so I won’t read anything at all—hence the backup in the TBR pile.

These newfound realizations prompted a decision: I will no longer make a “til The End do us part” commitment to a book that doesn’t grab me and squeeze me and refuse to let me go.

This will enable me to: expedite the garbage purging process, more rapidly discover those rare unputdownable books, and sort everything in between into Read It Later When… categories.

If I can sort out two books a day, I’ll have that shelf cleared off and hungrily awaiting fresh meat well before New Year’s.

I’m particularly eager to do this now because at the end of December, I plan to hold the First Ever Annual Squeeie Awards honoring the best reads of 2007, and I would love to find a few more to flesh out my thus far emaciated list. (Have I mentioned it’s been a pretty sad year for books? The good ones have been outstanding but few and far between.)