Meg Benjamin's Blog, page 25

What I Learned At RT: A Thursday Thirteen

Me at the Book Fair

Okay, every other author has now blogged about the 2011 Romantic Times Booklovers Convention except me. This isn't because I have nothing to say about RT, it's because I needed time to sort out all the things I wanted to say. Some of them are totally irrelevant (e.g., I completely hated the glass elevators at the Bonaventure), but some of them are more significant. Herewith, a selection of things I learned at RT:

1. The Nine Naughty Novelists (or at least the seven who attended RT) are the coolest women in the universe! You always worry that people you only know on line will turn out to be less nice in person. That so did not happen. And Skylar Kade became our go-to person for any and all organizing concerns.

2. For a midday book signing, be sure to have a Clif Bar in your purse. The mammoth event (over 300 authors) lasted from 10:45 until 2:00. By the time we emerged, I was ready to eat anything that wasn't moving!

3. If you win an award, you'll be expected to say something. I don't know why I didn't realize this. For some reason, I pictured a big cocktail party where I'd show my badge and be given this award that was sitting on a table somewhere. Instead, along with all the other award winners who attended the convention, I was seated in a reserved section and brought up on stage to say a few words. The more practiced award winners were locked and loaded. The rest of us stammered through something we could barely remember afterward (although Lindsey Faber, my redoubtable Samhain editor, assured me it was okay).

4. Boas, while fine in theory, have certain problems in reality. Ours left little trails of pin feathers whenever we wore them. After Kinsey Holley sat on my bed with her block boa, it looked like a large blackbird had molted on my pillow. And to add insult to injury, Kinsey herself sat on sombody's purple boa that stained her white pants.

5. Five days of heavy earrings are about three days longer than my ears can stand. My earlobes are still aching.

6. Never discount the importance of comfortable shoes. I desperately love my Jambus (thanks REI), and I'm still stunned by Kelly Jamieson's ability to wear stilettos at all times with ease and grace.

7. If you become Big Time, you can afford to be a mensch. I sat next to no less than Catherine Coulter at the awards ceremony, and she couldn't have been nicer. On the other hand, some authors who weren't quite into the Pantheon yet tended to be a bit more snotty, particularly with lesser authors in the vicinity.

8. Desiree Holt, whom I knew when I was a member of San Antonio Romance Authors, is phenomenal. A hundred books and still going strong (and still giving advice to all aspiring authors who ask). I do want to be Desiree when I finally grow up.

9. If someone offers you something to eat, for heaven's sake take it! Between cocktail parties, balls, costume parties, etc., etc., etc. you never know when you'll get a chance to dine. Unless, of course, PG Forte is one of your company, in which case you can always drop by her room for a nosh.

10. At book signings, you're usually placed alphabetically. This meant that this year, unfortunately, both Juniper Bell and I got placed next to one author's eleven-year-old son who was selling his self-published children's books. This is a truly lousy idea, no matter how sophisticated you think your kid is, and it's very tough on the authors who have to try to decide how to arrange their books and promo so that they don't seem to be contributing to the delinquency of a minor. So the take-away from this is leave your kids at home, or at the very least, do not set your kids up with a stall at an adult book signing.

11. RT will help you get over your hang-ups about male sex objects. Sort of. All these cover models are wandering around competing for Mr. Romance. After a while I was able to ignore my impulse to ask what they really did for a living (I think it was Erin Nicholas who pointed out that guys never ask the female models at auto shows about this).

12. Impromptu parties in publishers' suites sound like a good idea, but they don't always work out, particularly when the neighbors call security because of the noise (but it was only nine o'clock or so).

13. Costumes require a great deal of panache, more than I have anyway. Next year I think I'll stick to large earrings and black pantsuits. Hey, it works for Nora Roberts!

Judge Not

I've been judging contests for a few years now. I started doing it because I figured since I benefitted from contests as an unpublished writer, I should pay my dues by serving as a judge too. Judging contests for unpublished writers is pretty straightforward. As a rule, you only see the first couple of chapters along with a synopsis. And the basic principle you go by is whether you'd want to go on reading this book if you had the whole thing in front of you.

Since unpublished manuscripts are also, usually, unedited, you also have to deal with typos, clumsy phrasing, and, occasionally, mechanical errors. Some contests tell you to pay no attention to this, but I always think that's a mistake. Anything that detracts from the overall impression of a manuscript should be noted, and that definitely includes problems with the writing itself. Too many, and the chances are an editor or an agent will toss it on the discard pile.

However, this year for the first time I became a judge in contests for published writers. And suddenly, you're in a whole different category. These aren't manuscripts, they're books. And they've been edited, so most clumsiness is gone. You're now judging the book the way the book should be judged—on its story, its characters, its pacing. Only, of course, you're not really doing that, at least not only that.

When you sign up to judge a contest, you indicate what genres you're willing to read, so that you can avoid the kind of romance you'd usually avoid in your book-buying decisions. But you soon discover that these broad categories include both the kinds of books you normally read and the kinds of books you may avoid. Maybe you signed up to judge paranormal, but you suddenly realize you meant vampires and they're sending you werewolves. Or you signed up to judge romantic suspense and you come to the conclusion that you really don't like books with paramilitary heroes.

Erotica is a particularly charged genre. Some contests have a specific category for erotic romance, but many don't. And some judges get a little crazy when it comes to erotic content. I know one judge who sends any book with "erotica" on the cover back to the contest administrators with a stiff note saying she refuses to read this stuff. Another judge marks all erotic books "wrong category" because they're the wrong category for her. This latter judge, by the way, violates all kinds of judging guidelines when she does this, but she's on her own personal crusade and woe be anybody who gets in her way.

So what do you do if you end up with a book in a category you don't particularly like? In my case, I try to take on a different persona as I read, i.e., I may not read paramilitary romance as a rule, but if I did, would I like this? That may sound a little insane, but it sometimes works for me. You can ask yourself whether the problems you encounter are genre related (i.e., are they ones that a typical reader wouldn't object to) or whether they really are a problem for the writer herself. You have to ask yourself if, leaving aside the paramilitary stuff, the plot works, the characters are interesting, and the story is engrossing.

The point is, when you read a contest entry, you can't entirely read it as yourself. You've got to be able to judge the book on its own merits, not on some personal scale that's largely specific to you. Does that work? Maybe. You hope so anyway. And I'd suggest it's a lot better than deciding that you're going to rid the world of dirty books, one contest entry at a time.

 

Sisterly Love

I recently finished reading Karen Abbott's American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee. It's one of those historical biographies that includes a healthy dash of something approaching fiction (e.g., Abbott recreates Gypsy's last thoughts as she's rushed to the hospital in an ambulance). I enjoyed it—sort of. It's very well written and it presents a vivid picture of America in the twenties and thirties. But it's not exactly what you'd call a fair biography of Gypsy Rose Lee.

For those of you who have never heard of her, Gypsy was a stripper in the thirties and forties. But she was a stripper with a difference—she kept a running monologue going as she took her clothes off, spoofing herself, her audience, and even the very idea of stripping. She was also a writer, appearing in venues as sophisticated as The New Yorker, and her autobiography, Gypsy, was the source of the well-known musical.

I remember Gypsy—not well, but well enough to know she was the archetypal example of a "dame." Smart, funny, pragmatic, and outspoken, she was a helluva broad, and, like a lot of other people, I liked her. In Abbott's portrait, she's all of that, but she's also conniving, selfish, vulgar, and somewhat depraved. Abbott doesn't really approve of her, and biographers who don't like their subjects frequently don't do a particularly good job of portraying them fairly.

I think the real problem, though, lies in Abbott's source for much of the "intimate" detail about Gypsy—her sister, June Havoc. June was an actress and director, but she never achieved the level of fame that her sister did. Gypsy died in 1970 at the age of 59. June died in 2010 at the age of 95. Unfortunately, it's the survivors who tell the stories, and much of American Rose has the slightly nasty smell of revenge. It's June who supplies all the evidence of Gypsy's depravity, including the rather shaky implication that Gypsy was a murderer. It's June who claims that Gypsy's striptease act was degrading, and who regards her sister's fame as evidence of her corruption. It's June who claims that she threw a fur coat Gypsy gave her for Christmas into the fireplace because she refused to take anything purchased by stripping (and I found myself thinking, Yeah, sure you did).

Abbott repeatedly damns Gypsy for providing fictional versions of herself, but it apparently doesn't occur to her that June was equally capable of inventing the version of herself she wanted Abbott to see. Despite an occasional reference to June's earlier peccadilloes, Abbott calls her a "national treasure" without really questioning her motives in slamming her sister.

There's a moral here, and this is it. When you die, who'll be around to tell your story? Will your relatives be kind, or will they take the opportunity to give you a couple of good kicks when you're down? If ever I needed a reason to make sure my relations with my family are good, American Rose definitely supplies it. However, if you want a more enjoyable portrait of Gypsy, even if it's a highly sanitized one, I recommend her own version of events in her autobiography rather than her sister's version that Abbott provides. As they once said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

 

Touchy, Touchy, Touchy

Okay, I came late to the train wreck that is the Jacqueline Howett/ Books and Pals fight, but a comment on one of my discussion lists stuck with me. One author said she'd stopped editing self-pubbed authors because, like Howett, they were just too hard to work with. This was her polite way of saying they were writers who considered their words to be pearls and their editors to be swine.

I've worked with a few writers like that myself, including a couple of academics who were so arrogant they refused to allow any changes to any of their words, no matter how bad those words were. But editors and reviewers have at least some things in common. And I've gotta say, I love good editors because I've been through the worst myself.

For most of my twenty-five-year academic career, I specialized in textbooks. In my field of professional and technical writing, textbooks were considered a legitimate type of research and I enjoyed writing them. Now notice, I said I enjoyed writing them, not revising them. That's because of the way textbook publishers handle the whole editing process.

Rather than hiring editors who acquire the books and then work with the author on revisions, as fiction publishers do, textbook acquisitions editors hand the actual editing off to contractors, other academics in the same field who are hired to read and comment on the manuscript. That would be fine and a good idea (since the acquisitions editor may have no expertise in the field) except for one thing: some of those contractors secretly believe they should have written this book themselves. In a worst case scenario, these contractors have, in fact, written a similar book, but they haven't yet published it. In this case, they have every reason to want to see the book they're reading consigned to the deepest, darkest part of limbo.

Imagine what that's like, if you will. Rather than being charged with helping you make your book as good as it can be, these "editors" are gunning for you. They don't really want your book published. They want your publisher to offer them a contract instead. Fortunately, publishers are well aware of this tendency. My editor never forced me to accept hostile revisions, but he did require me to explain my reaction to what all of these "editors" had to say. I developed several tactful versions of "this guy is a total moron who doesn't know what he's talking about." Sort of what Jacqueline Howett wanted to do but didn't.

In contrast, my editor at Samhain is trying to help me make my book better. I usually don't argue with her recommendations, I just do what she says (or I try to). If the copyeditor tells me to change some punctuation, I'll do it unless I know for a fact that it's wrong (and I can find the passage in The Chicago Manual of Style that backs me up). Working with textbooks taught me a big lesson—your words aren't actually engraved in gold upon celestial tablets. They can be changed, rearranged, and sometimes dropped altogether and the result may be better. And if you don't want to change them, you'd better have a much more effective argument than "My writing is fine."

I suspect that Jacqueline Howett wouldn't accept this advice. She's already sold lots of books as a result of this controversy. But the question is, will she sell any more? If she's satisfied with being a self-pubbed author, she may not have any problems. But if her real ambition is to be published by a real publishing house, I'd say she can kiss that particular dream goodbye. If you want to write, you have to learn to accept criticism. Otherwise, you can just keep those golden words clasped to your generous bosom.

The Dumb Heroine

So here we are in this regency historical. The heroine is one of those "spirited" types who's going to assert herself come hell or high water. She has a ring belonging to her dead sister that identifies the sister's lover, the man responsible for her death. Our heroine is determined to unmask said cad by finding the owner of the ring. And what will she do then, a friend inquires. Why she'll tell him she knows who he is and how he's responsible for her sister's death and that she intends to reveal his identity to polite society so that they can shun him.

This being a romance novel, her friends do not respond "Are you out of your freakin' mind?"

This particular plot development is an example of what I think of as the hopelessly dumb heroine. Granted that regency romances are not always well known for their adherence to realism. And granted that in this particular historical the heroine doesn't make good on her plans. Still, even in a slightly fantastic romance, the heroine can't really ignore human nature like this unless she's a dingbat.

Heroines who do things that we know full well will lead to disaster (without, apparently, being aware that disaster looms) don't sit very well with me. It's one thing for a heroine to undertake desperate measures because she has no choice, to do so, in other words, with the full knowledge that she may end up in terrible trouble. It's another for a heroine to undertake some foolhardy activity because she's too dim to understand the possible consequences.

In many cases, I think the author intends that we'll see this as the heroine's adorable naïveté. But there's a very thin line between naïve and stupid. When the heroine ventures forth to do something harebrained without any idea of the danger she's getting into, she loses a lot of my sympathy. Now granted, I've done this myself—sort of. Deirdre in Brand New Me walks into a trap because she doesn't take the time to either think about what she's doing or let anybody else know what's going on. But in her (and my) defense, she doesn't have a lot of time to think about it under the circumstances, and she regrets taking that step almost as soon as she does it.

Of course, a really skillful writer can take this trope and play with it. My favorite example of this is Linda Howard's Open Season. The heroine is a librarian who stumbles into a hazardous situation without realizing just how hazardous it really is. In the end, the hero sets a trap for the villain. And you, the reader, keep expecting (with a sinking heart) that the heroine will stumble into the middle of it because, well, that's what usually happens. But she doesn't. And when the hero commends her on it, she's somewhat annoyed. After all, she's not that dumb.

Amen, sister, amen.

 

Avast, Me Buckos

Normally, I don't comment on pirates and piracy. Yeah, it's wrong. Yeah, it's a royal pain in the ass. Yeah, it's probably siphoning off some of my royalties. On the other hand, people who regularly download books from piracy sites probably aren't going to be buying my books anyway since they don't pay for books in general.

However, a recent discussion of piracy on Reddit.com got my attention (via Twitter) and finally prodded my out of my reluctance to get involved in this discussion. Several of the commenters on the site had what they considered a righteous reason for pirating ebooks. Publishers, they argued, were pricing their ebooks at the same level they priced their print books. That wasn't fair, since ebooks didn't come with the same benefits that print books did (e.g., no way to share, no way to sell used copies, requires expensive ebook reader, etc.). Therefore, those who pirated books were striking a blow for intellectual freedom. Down with corporate publishers and their cluelessness regarding ebooks!

Now let me say right here that I think some publishers are dumb about their ebook pricing. There's no excuse for pricing an ebook at the same level as a hardback given that ebook production costs are so much lower. Having said that, however, I find this particular argument to be horsecrap.

It might work if the only books being pirated were by Steig Larsson and Stephen King, but we all know that isn't so. In digital form, my books sell for somewhere between $4.50 and $5.50, depending on where you buy them. In other words, my books sell for about as much as a Vente Starbucks Frappacino. And when somebody pirates my books, they aren't striking a blow against corporate publishing, they're striking a blow against a relatively small, independent publisher (owned and largely operated by women, by the way).

But the thing is, I don't think the average pirate really believes she's doing anything like undermining the publishing industry. She's getting something for free that she'd otherwise have to pay for. That's basically all this is about—getting something free. In doing so, she's refusing to pay me for my work and she's refusing to pay Samhain for their work, but my guess is that's not a big concern for her. The people who download dozens—even hundreds—of books are mainly chortling at having avoided paying anybody for anything.

Okay, so now, the rest of this post is addressed to the pirates; everybody else can take five because I'm honestly not talking to you (not you good, book-buying souls. Honest—please don't think I'm talking to you). You're stealing, bubbeleh. Yes, you are. And this isn't Robin Hood we're talking about—believe me, stealing my book is definitely not taking from the rich. And it ain't giving to the poor either, unless you're referring to poor little you. So don't pretend that you're making some kind of political statement. You aren't. You're just stealing. You think books are too expensive? Fine. Search out your local library; they'd probably be glad of your patronage. You want to read ebooks? Fine. Some libraries have them available, but even if yours doesn't, you can confine yourself to Amazon freebies or low-cost publications.

But if you go on stealing, don't pretend you're doing something else. If you can't be honest about buying somebody else's work, at least be honest about what you're doing here. You're a thief, toots. And that's all there is to it.

 

 

A Matter of Luck

For the most part, I'm not a very superstitious person. I'm not particularly nervous about ladders, although I may avoid walking under them simply because you're more likely to get something dropped on you if you do. I had a black cat for many years and it never bothered me, although he did cost me a lot of money in veterinary bills (he was the model for Nico in Venus In Blue Jeans). I don't have any particular rituals I go through in my daily life.

But there's one big, honking exception to this lack of superstition—my writing. If I'm not careful, I find I can fall into magical thinking about my writing very easily.

Before I was published, when I entered lots of contests, I used to wait to drop my entry in the mail if I'd been having a bad day in other areas. I didn't want my MS to go out if my mojo seemed negative. Now, when I send most things out electronically, I may wait until afternoon before hitting the "send" button because I want to make sure this day feels like the right day to do it. Or sometimes I'll send it out first thing in the morning, before my luck has a chance to go bad.

For a while, I even let my morning ritual solitaire games determine how my luck was running. If I won my first game, my luck was running hot. If I lost, maybe I'd wait a day or so before sending that MS off. I managed to break myself of that habit, but it wasn't as easy as it should have been.

I think the reason my writing makes me superstitious is that it's one area of my life that's out of my control. I can polish my MSS to their brightest and send them off, but I can't determine how the person on the other end is going to react to them. Maybe she just read something very similar and she either hated it or loved it—either way, she's liable to read my MS a lot more critically. Or maybe she just had a fight with her SO. Or maybe she had a bad lunch or she's coming down with a cold or she's mad at her kid. Or maybe she just doesn't like my style because she's in the mood for something very different. Any or all of that can have an effect. And there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

All I can do is rely on the fates and luck. Many of us like to downplay the role that luck plays in our work, but the truth is that luck is a major factor for most of us.

So I find myself going back to practical magic. Rubbing good luck charms. Muttering incantations as I drop something in the mail. Not opening emails until I've written my minimum number of words (lest I jinx myself with a rejection too early in the day). None of it has much effect on the ultimate outcome, of course. And in my rational moments, I know that. But writing isn't always a rational business, and who knows, maybe one of these days I'll happen upon the right incantation.

Knock wood.

 

The Trouble With Sex

I'm a romance writer, which means I write sex scenes. It goes with the territory. It's also the hardest part of my job.

Why? Despite the usual heavy-handed jokes ("Bet you do a lot of research, har, har, har"), trying to come up with an interesting way to describe sex between your hero and heroine is usually tough. Add to that the fact that the rules against head hopping mean that you have to stay with one POV for at least a large part of the scene—you can't show what both of your characters are feeling, or at least you can't do it simultaneously. And then there's the fact that I write contemporary romance rather than erotica. That means I'm limited in the kind of sex my characters can have. No ménages, no exotic sexual accessories, no acrobatic positions. Actually, that's not something I get wistful over. The thought of having to come up with something new and different each time my characters get busy makes me cringe.

Then there's the whole vocabulary problem: what do you call genitals anyway? When the Nine Naughty Novelists did our first serial (The Zillionaire Vampire Cowboy's Secret Werewolf Babies) we had a lot of fun using outrageous euphemisms for body parts, but in reality there's a very thin line that most of us have to walk. Usually, you can't use the more clinical words for genitalia without sounding like a sex ed textbook. On the other hand, certain euphemisms are too raunchy for regular romance, although they're permissible in erotica. Predictably, there are more acceptable words for male genitalia than there are for female, so you have to make do with certain generalities (e.g., "opening" or "core" or "nub"). Sometimes they work, but sometime it sounds like the sex is taking place in a very dark room with a couple of people who have no idea what they're doing. Jennifer Crusie once wrote a blog post about saying something like "his sex" to describe male genitalia and how it seemed to reduce the male character to his genitalia alone. But using a phrase like that is a mark of how desperate you can become in trying to find a word that's both acceptable and specific.

And then there's the actual act itself and the description thereof. The toughest part in doing this is not falling back on the same description you used in the last book or the one before that. Actually, I know one prominent and quite successful romance writer who basically writes the same sequence of moves in each of her novels. Nonetheless each of her books includes longer and longer sex scenes, largely because she concentrates on the feelings of the protagonists rather than the actual physical activities they're engaging in.

That's a good strategy, but again it has its down side. Unless you're into something tantric, the average sex scene can only go on so long, particularly if it's a sex scene in a genre other than erotica. The more time you spend talking about how neither of your characters has ever felt anything this wonderful in their whole, entire lives, the more you bog things down.

I remember once having a conversation with some other writers in which we concluded that what we'd really like to do is write something like "And then they went into the bedroom and had the absolute greatest sex they'd ever had. Afterward they slept in each other's arms."

Sigh. Don't worry. I won't do it. But don't think I'm not tempted.

 

The E-Books Are Coming, the E-Books Are Coming!

A few weeks ago, Amazon announced an interesting statistic: their e-book sales, which had earlier eclipsed their hardback sales, had now exceeded their paperback sales. E-books were officially Amazon's best-selling format.

The response from a certain segment of the romance-writing community was immediate, although not exactly what you might expect. Amazon, they said, was lying. E-books couldn't be more popular than print. They never would be. It was all marketing—Amazon just wanted to sell Kindles. E-books were just a passing fad and e-book readers were selfish swine who were destroying independent booksellers and probably responsible for the bankruptcy of Borders. Lalalalalala—I can't heeeeear you!

Those of us who write e-books may not have found this response all that surprising. For years some segments of this community have tried to marginalize us or pretend we don't exist. We were told our books weren't "real" books. We were told that the "stigma" of electronic publishing would prevent us from ever being published by a print publisher. For a few years, we were even kept out of the Professional Authors Network of RWA because membership required a publisher's advance of twelve hundred dollars, and most e-publishers give higher royalty payments instead of advances (the membership rules have since changed). One former president of RWA wrote editorials in the organization's magazine that were so patronizing to e-book authors (and so dismissive of their work) that several e-book authors I know dropped their membership in protest.

RWA has become somewhat more ebook friendly since then. The current leadership is much less inclined to dismiss us and changes have been made to contest rules and rules for discussion and special interest groups to make it easier for us to participate. But the old attitudes still lurk around the edges, especially when the topic of e-book sales comes up.

Now let me go on record here as saying I believe Amazon is telling the truth: their e-book sales probably have exceeded their other sales. But I also believe that e-book sales in general are still not as great as print sales in general. I own a Kindle myself, but I read more hardbacks and paperbacks for the most part (courtesy of my trusty local library).

Still, I also believe the growth in e-book sales isn't going to slack off for a simple reason: my younger son reads his newspapers and magazines on line. I don't, you see. I have a newspaper subscription, also subscriptions to several magazines. I have no particular interest in reading them on my phone or on an iPad. But my son has no interest in reading them in paper. My son's generation will eventually be the major book buyers, and my son's generation has no problem with reading electronically. In fact, they seem to prefer it.

So will print disappear? Of course not. Will it become less common? I think so, but perhaps not soon. Will the romance-writing community learn to suck it up?

Lordy, let's hope so. I'm really tired of these discussions about how e-books are either a flash in the pan or the end of Western civilization as we know it.

 

Headhopping Down the Bunny Trail

Headhopping is one of those terms that's well known to most people in the romance-writing community and probably unknown to anyone who isn't part of it. It refers to shifting point of view from one character to another within a scene, and it's a no-no. Actually, no-no is too mild. It's a Mark Of Cain, absolutely forbidden, something that loses you major points in contests, that will convince editors and agents you're incompetent, and that will result in your never, ever getting that contract you want so badly.

If you're going to change POV for some reason within a single scene, you must indicate that you're changing it by inserting a space between sections, perhaps even including a line of asterisks, to indicate that you're switching POV quite deliberately. And once you've switched, you can't switch back unless you go through the same business again with the spaces, asterisks, etc. Too many of these switches and your scene's going to start looking like something out of a gossip column.

Everybody agrees that headhopping is evil, and that's all there is to that. Or rather, it would be all there is to that if it weren't for one large exception to this general rule, i.e., Nora Roberts.

Roberts headhops. She does it with abandon in every book of hers I've ever read. You'll be reading along in one character's POV and then the next paragraph will be in the other character's POV. You'll stay there for a few more paragraphs and then, as often as not, you'll switch right back. No spaces, no asterisks, no nothing. Headhopping with a vengeance.

Now if it were just Nora Roberts who did this, we could probably come up with something we could call the Nora Roberts Exception. But she isn't. Several other bestselling authors do it too. And yet they're all doing something that should get them drummed out of the romance writing pantheon. Does that mean that headhopping isn't such a dreadful crime?

Well, no. Not exactly. The reason headhopping is so strongly discouraged is that it potentially causes serious problems for readers. If you're not anchored securely in one particular point of view, you can easily become confused about what's happening and why. Now sometimes that's precisely what the author wants, which is why writers like Faulkner play around with POV so frequently. But most romance authors aren't interested in confounding our readers—we're concentrating on the story and we don't want to lose anybody.

Other aspects of POV are also very, very tricky, even if you follow the rules about not headhopping. Most romances are done in third person (except for Chick Lit, which is usually in first). It's axiomatic that you can't switch POV in first person, but even that's not exactly true. Margaret Maron uses both first and third person in her Deborah Knott books (first for Deborah, third for her husband Dwight), although never in the same chapter. Since there's clearly a shift in person, you're not likely to become confused. In contrast, Alan Gordon has two first person points of view in his Jester books, Theophilus and his wife Claudia. He confines each voice to separate chapters, but even then it's sometimes confusing when you lose track of which "I" is which. Even spacing out alternate points of view may not be enough.

POV is one of the most important, and slipperiest, parts of writing. Roberts and her fellow headhopping writers succeed because, despite the movement back and forth between points of view, you're never confused about whose eyes you're looking through. The rest of us struggle, perhaps because we're not quite that skillful.

So budding romance novelist, you're right to be confused when your critique group climbs all over you for headhopping. You're right when you say that Nora Roberts does it. But you're not right when you argue that you should do it too. Trust me, getting POV to work is harder than it looks. And putting in those spaces and asterisks is one way to keep yourself on track, even if it is a pain in the tuchas.