Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 103

Working Wednesday, February 24, 2021

I’ve been shoveling snow which is finally at an end, I think, because the temps are going to be in the forties all week which means a massive melt. I’ve also been hearing huge crashes outside which I’m praying is just ice hitting the ground and not my gutters. So exciting.

What did you do this week?

Argh Author: Deborah Blake’s Furbidden Fatality

. Our own Deb Blake has a new book out today, Furbidden Fatality, and since it has a lot of rescued animals in it, it’s right down Argh’s alley. Also, great cover!

A lottery winner uses her good fortune to save a local pet sanctuary, but when a body is discovered on the property, she just might be in the doghouse in this first book in a new, charming cozy mystery series.

Kari Stuart’s life is going nowhere—until she unexpectedly wins the lottery. The twenty-nine-year-old instant multimillionaire is still mulling plans for her winnings when rescuing a bossy black kitten leads her to a semi-abandoned animal shelter. They need the cash—Kari needs a purpose.

But the dilapidated rescue is literally going to the dogs with a pending lawsuit, hard to adopt animals, and too much unwanted attention from the town’s dog warden. When the warden turns up dead outside the shelter’s dog kennels, Kari finds herself up a creek without a pooper-scooper.

See more about Deb’s books here.

Go buy Forbidden Fatality here.

Happiness is Some Sun

Finally, it’s sunny here. The light makes the snow gleam (so much snow) and the sky blue and even warms thing up a little. I think the sun is like opposable thumbs: all too easily taken for granted. Which I will not do from now on.

What made you happy this week?

This is a Good Book Thursday, February 18, 2021

This week I discovered that iBooks has a page of free books, each one the beginning of a series.

This week I also discovered why they’re free.

Okay, that was bitchy, but honestly, 90% of them I flip to the back at chapter three and the ending is worse. I am grateful to every author who puts “This is a stand alone novel” even though it’s part of a series because I know that means there’s no cliffhanger (that’s a crime against readers).

Bitch, moan, bitch, moan. At least I can hit the space bar without pain now, so I’m good here.

What did you read this week?

(Also, if you’re in Texas, I’m thinking of you. We get snow here, too, but we expect it. Snow in Houston? Who’s ready for that?)

Working Wednesday, February 17, 2021

This week, I slashed the top of my right thumb open, bringing symmetry to my life since I’d slashed the top of my left thumb open back when I was an art major making engravings. Dueling scars. I know they’re supposed to go on cheeks, but I’m a hands-on woman. Except not this week because my thumb hurts.

What did you do this week?

Thumbs

What you don’t need thumbs for:
Typing if you don’t hit the space bar.

What you do need thumbs for:
Everything else.

I cut my thumb open on a can lid yesterday, and now I can’t do anything. Plus ice storm tonight (please please please let the power stay on) and eight inches of snow on Thursday. Thus I am typing short posts for Wednesday and Thursday and setting them to go up on those days, but I will probably be absent in the comments because I’ll be in the fetal position waiting for my thumb to be usable again. Obviously I can type, I’m typing this, but it hurts and I’m a wimp.

Next week, it’s supposed to be in the forties. I can make it till then. I have Diet Coke and chocolate. It’s do-able.

Y’all have a good time in the comments.

Happiness is Candy on Sale

I love those fat, juicy red candy jujube hearts that show up every February. (Valentine’s Day, not so much, but the candy hearts, yes.) And starting today or tomorrow, they will be on sale, along with all the rest of the heart-shaped sugar in the world. February is the Month of the Dead (as far as I’m concerned) and then there’s the snow problem, and it’s cold as hell here, too (except isn’t Hell hot?) but at least the candy is on sale. And delicious.

Also Happy Valentine’s Day. Or Happy Lupercalia, which had priests slapping women with bloody strips of goatskin, which is still marginally better than getting generic red roses and a sappy card with bad chocolates, not that I have bitter memories or anything. Why yes, I do write romance; why do you ask?

What made you happy this week?

Romance, Sex and Context: A Theory

I’ve been thinking about sex in romance novels lately. (This is going to ramble some. My Deep Thoughts often ramble.)

I used to get reviews that said my romances were pretty hot. I reread a couple of those books recently and compared with what’s out now, they’re barely lukewarm. That’s fine with me, but I’m wondering now what the blurring of the lines between romance and erotica means to the genre. That is, how is it redefining romance? I have no problems with erotica, but it doesn’t have the same aims as romance, any more than women’s fiction is romance-centered. I’m not even sure chick lit is romance, but then I’ve never really been sure what chick lit is. The point is, romance is the only genre that’s romance centered, so what happens to romance within the genre is important.

And I think sex is mugging it.

At this point somebody will call me a prude. Nope. I’m a wonk, that’s worse. To take this out of the romance context, I once got into it with a guy on a pop culture board over one of the last scenes in Kingsman, the one where Eggsy ignores people in trouble to accept anal sex from a imprisoned princess. The guy mansplained to me that many people enjoy anal; I said I knew that, but as Eggsy had been carefully set up through the movie as someone who was devoted to protecting the women in his life, the idea that he was ignoring a female partner stranded on a remote arctic plain, not to mention not knowing what’s happened to his mother who was last seen menacing his baby sister with an ax, all in order to have sex with a woman who had been portrayed earlier in the movie as sophisticated and bi-lingual and who was now in a cell at his mercy and talking baby talk to him, all so the director could get off one “dirty” joke (Eggsy smirks as I remember) REALLY pissed me off as a writer. I don’t care how much anal Eggsy gets, just don’t destroy his character for a stupid joke. That is, it’s about the character, not the sex.

Where was I?

Right. In the same way, don’t destroy the romance for a lot of pointless sex. Erotica is a fine genre, go over there, but remember that romance is about the power of the relationship, not the power of the moving finger or penis, which very often in real life moves on. Convince me the romance is real, and the sex becomes an illustration of that, not the end itself.

Then I reread Georgette Heyer’s No Wind of Blame because I posted about it here in the comments, except I just skimmed through for the Vicky and Hugh parts. It’s one of my favorite romance subplots ever though Heyer is very subtle about the way she puts it on the page, the two of them gravitating toward each other, the excitement when they see each other disguised as banter, the final scene that shows how perfect they are for each other, and yet not only is there no sex, they never kiss. I don’t think they ever touch, aside from Hugh handing her out of a car now and then.

And then there’s Connie Willis’s Take a Look at the Five and Ten, a novella (not much time to develop a romance) that takes place between Thanksgiving and Christmas about two people who also never kiss but instead develop a strong friendship based on the memories of an old lady who’s smarter than they think. It has one of the most optimistic and cheering thematic endings ever, but the romance ending is just as strong, no marriage proposal, no protestations of undying love, just the very work-focused hero saying to the heroine “We’re going to be stuck going to dinner there and putting up with Sloane and her mother every year, aren’t we?” It’s one of the best commitment lines ever because he doesn’t say, “I’m with you forever,” just betrays his commitment with the assumption that they’ll be together for the far distant future.

Both of those romances are in my favorites list, while a lot of the hot-and-heavy new age books turn out to be DNFs, so what I’m thinking now is that a lot of sex in romance novels obscures the romance, the need to put the physical cues on the page overwhelming the emotional cues. Please note, this is not about morality, this is about page real estate for genre.

The problem is that if the only thing pulling the lovers together is the physical attraction, that’s not convincing. Physical attraction can go pretty quickly. On the other hand, physical attraction is a large part of courtship, so there has to be a balance there, something that grounds the physical passion in something stronger and deeper.

What I’ve come to believe is that physical attraction is contextual in a successful romance novel (successful by my definition only).

For example, the lovers in The Flatshare don’t meet for most of the book, they communicate only in post-it notes (he works nights, she works days). But the way they get to know each other, understand each other, care for each other is on every page. She bakes for him, he cooks for her. She worries about her ex, he worries about his brother, and then she worries about his brother and he worries about her ex. By the time they meet by accident, the fact that he’s naked (shower) and she’s in her underwear (going to shower) has a huge impact on them, but not just because they’re undressed; it’s because they know each other so well, they like each other so much, they’ve connected so strongly through the post it notes, that the context of their (almost) nudity raises the intensity level to eleven. Without the months of post-its, they’d still have been attracted to each other, they’re both attractive people; with the post-its, their brains melt and run out their ears. This isn’t two naked people, this is Tiffy and Leon and they’re naked. And freaked out.

The lovers in The Year We Fell Down have more awareness of each other as attractive people, but it’s set in a context of shared disability: he’s temporarily coping with a badly broken leg and she’s in a wheel chair because of a permanent spinal injury. He’s got a girlfriend so they start as friends, playing digital hockey because neither of them can play the real thing (her spinal injury is from hockey); talking about the problems of coping with crutches, stairs, distance; helping each other navigate the university and their own issues about being hurt. They don’t just hang out, they connect. So when his girlfriend stands him up and he invites her into the bedroom, the sex scene there is more about disability and exploration and recovery, they don’t whisper words of love to each other, they talk about her fears and his hopes for her future; it feels like a logical extension of their friendship. Except it’s more than that so when the relationship finally evolves into the Real Thing with a Real Thing sex scene, it’s clear that it’s more than “god you’re hot” sex; they’re connecting in a context that takes things beyond lust into mature love between two people who understand each other and the relationship they’ve developed over time.

I think context is always the key.

I think the fact that modern romances are so much more explicit can skew a writer’s focus away from establishing the romance, shifting it toward establishing nudity without understanding that the nudity is only story-telling if it reflects and arcs the context.

I think that the first thing a writer has to do is establish the context of the sex, that is, establish the emotional relationship that’s the backdrop to the sexual relationship because that’s what gives the sex meaning beyond orgasm. Nothing against orgasm, but it’s not romance.

I remember doing this on purpose in Charlie All Night, starting with a one night stand, followed by a celibacy bet, followed by sex in the context of the relationship they’d established. And then I did it again when I started Anna, playing with the trope of the one-night-stand-who-turns-out-to-be-part-of-her-life. I think one of the reasons I stalled on that one is because the relationship that follows is built on banter–good banter but still just banter–instead of connection, that the banter has to show the arc of the connection. If the context doesn’t change, the relationship can’t arc and intensify, and the sexual relationship can’t arc and intensify, and it becomes just body parts meshing again and again.

I have no idea if I’ve done that in my work (aside from Charlie All Night where I did it deliberately for another reason), but I think it’s going to be key in everything I do from now on. (Oh, wait, I think I did do it in Faking It, since it started with bad sex and then okay sex and finished up with great sex after they trusted each other.) What it really comes down to is that a romance has to be about the arc of the emotional relationship first, and the sex has to be written to reflect that context.

And now that I’ve come this far, I’ve realized that’s a big DUH, OF COURSE. But still, I’m thinking deep thoughts and knew you’d want to know.

Note: Bob also has a theory of writing sex (aka YEC, Yucky Emotional Crap):

Email from Bob last week:
Just wrote
and now some YEC stuff in manuscript.
Moving on

Reply from Jenny:
You wrote YEC?  And you’re still alive?

Reply from Bob:
I didn’t write YEC.
I just literally wrote
and now some YEC
the reader can figure it out.

So there’s another approach to writing sex. Over to you, Readers.

Questionable: Re-Reading Crusie When You’re Crusie

Sure Thing wrote:
I love when authors reread their own work. I wonder, does it feel like catching up with old friends or looking through an old picture album? Slap a bold on this and call it a questionable if you like.

It feels like rereading a book by somebody else.

Keep in mind, both the books I reread are about twenty years old, so it’s been awhile. The biggest factor is that distance; I can see flaws pretty clearly and also see why those parts didn’t work. That’s helpful, but I think the most telling was the comparison of what I wrote then and what’s being published now. I used to catch a lot of flack about being too explicit in the sex scenes, for example, but compared to what’s published now, my books are pretty vanilla. The tropes are still the same–marriage of convenience/fake dating, friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, etc.–but the way they’re interpreted because of social changes are different.

I also went back and read the Amazon reviews for those books to see what people cited as reasons for liking or not liking, and that was illuminating, too. A lot of the people who gave the books one stars said to read Janet Evanovitch instead. The thing about Evanovitch is that she writes very differently from me; not worse, not better, just a very different voice and approach to story. So while we both write romcoms, we’re not at all alike, which means the people who prefer her are just Not My Readers. Nothing wrong with them or Evanovitch, but nothing wrong with me, either. They were also the readers most likely to cite too many characters as a flaw, which I think is also a reflection of a way of reading, again, not good or bad, just reading style.

The helpful criticisms were about specific things like slow starts (Faking It definitely starts in the wrong place). I tend to spend too much time setting up the protagonist and the love interest. It’s really better in a romance to get the lovers together in the first scene, and I generally wait until later in the first chapter, so I needed to look at that and, yep, Nita and Lily take forever to set up. Anna hits the ground running, though. So do Liz and Alice. It really makes a difference.

Some of the things I was expecting to find weren’t there. I used to get grief from some Harlequin readers about my female protagonists asking for sex; they thought it made the women look pathetic and needy, but there was also an undercurrent of giving up an advantage; that is, they thought of sex as transactional instead of consensual partnership. I’m pretty sure that was a generation thing, and it appears to be gone from criticism now. I remember there was a kerfluffle at the time Welcome to Temptation came out about the language, but re-reading it now, it seems clear to me that the language was the way the characters safely violated social norms which don’t exist any more, so the language now is just . . . language. No big deal. The things that are big deals now, like consent, were pretty much always in my work, albeit not usually explicit.

Mostly I read both the books and the reviews to see if I could isolate bad decisions in my writing and try to avoid them as I revise. The slow starts are a good example. I need to cut a lot out of the beginning of Lily and Nita. Lily will be easy; Nita a lot harder. With Lily, I was mostly writing to discover, so if I move the beginning to her confronting Sebastian on the steps of the diner and then going inside to meet Fin, I think the book will open in the right place. Nita’s harder because there’s so much set-up, but set-up is the reason my books start slow, and it’s something I warn writing students about all the time (do as I say, not as I do).

The other thing that’s specific to my books is the balance between the external plot (like the movie in Temptation or the paintings in Faking It) and the romance. The strongest scenes in Faking It, I think, were the cons that Davy and Tilda pulled to get the paintings back, not because those scenes were about the plot but because the situations put the lovers together under pressure and arced the romance in action. It reminded me that the only reason the plot exists in romantic comedy is to show that arc; it’s the “What genre is this?” question. Faking It is a love story told through a screwball caper plot; it’s not a screwball caper. Nita is not a supernatural screwball comedy, it’s a love story told through a supernatural screwball comedy. It’s the romance, stupid.

I did a lot more deep thinking about sex scenes, both mine and that kind of scene in general, but that’s another post. Basically, I reread my books because my writing has evolved and I needed to know the weaknesses in my prior work so I don’t revert to them in the new stuff. It feels a lot like looking back on my life in general: equal parts of “That was a good thing I did” and “Not gonna do that again.”

And now I must cut the hell out of Nita’s beginning and revise Act Two so that Nick and Nita are together, OBVIOUSLY. Well, now it’s obvious. Re-reading is good.

(Thank you for the question, Sure Thing.)

This is a Good Book Thursday, February 11, 2021

This week I reread Welcome to Temptation and Faking It, mainly to see which parts I don’t skim when I read now. Those are almost always the scenes between the H and H. It’s the romance, stupid. Now, back to cutting Nita. And figuring out the rest of Anna and Lily, not to mention Nadine and Alice. And Liz. Also, do you know how old Dillie would be now, give the date of publication when she was 8? Twenty-nine. That’s almost in my heroine age range. Of course she probably still doesn’t have her driver’s license, but still . . . (That also means Sophie and Phin and Wes and Amy and Davy and Tilda are somewhere in their fifties. And having a wonderful time, too.)

What did you read this week?