Meg Benjamin's Blog, page 5
March 6, 2018
Doing Sex, Historically
Now that I’ve got your attention, as they used to say… Romance novels have sex scenes. That’s not a big revelation to those who read and write romance. But some writers have an easier time of it than others. Assuming your hero and heroine are consenting adults, in contemporary romance you can usually work a sex scene into the plot. Historical writers, on the other hand, have to use a lot more ingenuity in inserting a sex scene, which is one of the reasons I enjoy reading historical romances. Dealing with periods in which extra-marital sex is regarded as social suicide and in which women were tasked with maintaining their chastity at all costs makes sex scenes that much more difficult, and that much more interesting.
Take regencies, my favorite kind of historical. Unless the hero is a true cad, which is a contradiction in terms, he won’t attempt to seduce a woman he knows is a virgin—it simply isn’t done. Ergo the easiest way to set the hero and heroine up for sex is to make the heroine a widow. Not a grief-stricken one, since she needs to fall for the hero, but a woman with sexual experience. In this case, the writer just has to figure out the exact circumstances in which hero and heroine can get together, something considerably easier than trying to figure just what would make an unmarried woman risk possible ruin.
Unmarried women aren’t always virgins, of course, even in regencies. Another standard trope is the heroine as a woman who’s been seduced and abandoned. In this case, the hero not only has to woo the heroine, he has to convince her that he’s worth her trouble—these women have a justifiably jaundiced view of men in general.
If the heroine actually is a virgin, the writer has an even more difficult task. Often, the virginal heroine ends up being interested in having sex for her own reasons, like advancing age or the conviction that she’ll never be married and this is her best chance to see what sex is like. Usually the hero has no idea what she’s about, in which case he can be justifiably annoyed when he discovers the truth of the heroine’s virginal status. However, unless the hero is a cad (which he isn’t—see above), sex with a virgin leads promptly to an offer of marriage, which means the writer has to devise reasons why the heroine doesn’t want to accept or wants to accept but is somehow prevented from doing so, which keeps the plot spinning.
As I say, it’s always fun to see how historical writers work through these conventions. One of my favorite writers, Grace Burrowes, actually has done versions with all of them. Other novelists play around with the conventions. The heroine of Mary Balogh’s Seducing an Angel is both a widow and a virgin (it makes sense—trust me). The heroine of Loretta Chase’s Don’t Tempt Me is simultaneously virginal and far more experienced than she should be. But in all cases, historical writers have to keep the social conventions of the time in view. Historical sex is never easy, and the hero and heroine can never treat it as if it were.
Those of us who write contemporary books do have it easy. Our hero and heroine can have sex whenever they want to (and they frequently seem to want it a lot). Historical writers have to work for it. And that’s what makes their books so much fun.
February 26, 2018
Hello Again, World
A couple of years ago, I stopped blogging. At the time, blogging seemed like a lost cause—all the social media gurus were telling us it wasn’t worth the bother. Plus it seemed to take a lot of time. Plus, frankly, I wasn’t sure I had anything to say that anyone wanted to hear. Surely there was already enough chatter in enough venues and I was already posting on Facebook and Twitter. Couldn’t I just get a bye on blogging?
But a funny thing happened about my blog—I missed it. I’d been writing blog posts in various venues (including MySpace, y’all) for almost a decade. I wasn’t always regular about it, but I kept doing it. It gave me a chance to talk about things I was reading and writing and thinking, although I usually avoided politics and other controversial topics—something I’ll probably still do.
So here I am again, reacquainting myself with WordPress and how my patient site designer set it up so that I could keep blogging (sorry, Dee—I know you tried to make it happen). I know those social media gurus probably still think blogging is a lost cause, but it’s a cause I can work with. I’m definitely not a Snapchat type (hell, I can hardly get Instagram to work, living in a cell phone dead zone as I do), and my interest in Twitter is sort of limited.
Will anyone read this? Who knows? I may well be talking to myself, and I may occasionally need to remind potential readers that this little venue exists. But I promise this time I’ll keep at it. It may not be the best platform from a marketing point of view, but it gives me a place to maunder.
And mental healthwise, that’s worth a lot.
November 15, 2017
Night Owl Reviews Winter Wonderland Scavenger Hunt
I’ve got a winter treat for you. I’m one of the sponsors of the Night Owl Reviews Winter Wonderland Scavenger Hunt.
During this event I’m going to help you find some great new books. Make sure to check my featured title out along the way.
The grand prize is a $100 Amazon Gift Card.
Enter Now at: https://www.nightowlreviews.com/v5/Blog/Articles/Winter-Wonderland-2017
Event Dates: Nov 20 – Dec 13
October 22, 2017
Ghoulies and Ghosties
My first paranormal novel, Medium Well, is still one of my favorite writing experiences. The three novels in the Ramos Family trilogy are ghost stories because, well, I’ve always been sort of intrigued by ghosts. Haven’t you?
When I was a kid, I devoured every ghost story I could lay my hands on at the local library, and I still enjoy reading those “ghosts of Colorado” books they sell to tourists. So when I started working on my ghost books, I found that I knew quite a lot about what ghosts were supposed to be like. I knew that a lot of ghosts were looking for closure, and if you could figure out what they wanted, they’d go away. I knew that twilight was ghost time, or at least you were more likely to see them then than at other times of day. And I knew that ghosts tended to stick around places where they’d had traumatic experiences, sometimes places where they’d died.
But that was all pretty standard stuff. As I started to work on my medium books, I found lots of questions I didn’t know the answers to. How do you protect yourself from ghosts, for example? Different cultures had different answers, but elements like iron and salt seemed to be pretty standard. Did ghosts ever threaten humans with anything besides just a good scare? Yes, as it turned out. Most cultures have stories of malevolent spirits that could really do a number on the living if you weren’t careful.
All of my research gave me ideas to play with. What if you had ancient ghosts who were a little like vampires, drawing strength and “staying power” from humans? What if you were a reluctant medium who really didn’t know how to go about using your power? And what if your “spirit guide” was a real pain in the posterior?
In the end, I came up with a mixture of traditional ghost lore and my own inventions, all of it set in a very real place—the King William District of San Antonio. And I had a lot of fun doing it. After all, who doesn’t like a good scare, assuming there’s a happy ending somewhere down the line!
Here’s the blurb for Medium Well:
Medium Well
Real estate agent Danny Ramos has always had a knack for selling homes, but when his boss saddles him with a neglected carriage house, Danny discovers that his abilities are more than simple intuition…
On his first visit to the house, Danny is confronted with visions of a violent murder. His assistant, Biddy Gunter, doesn’t seem affected, and Danny starts to think he’s going crazy—until he gets a visit from his mother, who suggests that Danny’s uncanny talent to sell old houses may stem from his family inheritance: psychic empathy.
When Biddy reveals to Danny her own strange dream about the carriage house ghosts, they team up to investigate and discover both the house’s dark history and their own unexpected attraction. But as the hauntings turn from unsettling to downright dangerous, Danny and Biddy need to figure out how to rid the house of its ghostly inhabitants, before their budding romance meets an untimely end…
To get your copy of Medium Well, go to the Ramos Family page on this site.
