Ros Clarke's Blog, page 11

Review of the week (hah!)

So, two months ago I said I was going to try to review one book every week. Hahahahahaha!

Sorry about that. But hey look, a review!

What I’ve read this week:

Blush, Nicola Marsh (it was okay)

Million Dollar Christmas Proposal, Lucy Monroe (I loved this)

The Admiral’s Penniless Bride, Carla Kelly (I liked this quite a lot)

Anything for You, Sarah Mayberry (I like her Superromances better than her Blazes, but I did enjoy this)

Fate is Remarkable, Betty Neels (It’s a Betty Neels. That’s all you need to know.)

And this week’s pick for a review: What The Bride Didn’t Know

Author: Kelly Hunter

Publisher: Mills and Boon Modern Tempted.

Date: 2013

Cover Art

 

US cover:

UK cover:

Hey, look, it’s the same couple! And the same title! Released the same month! Almost like they aren’t trying to fool people into buying the same book twice any more. Awesome. I don’t love the covers and I don’t think they quite capture the Turkish setting of the book or the characters, but it’s not a bad effort. For once, I think I slightly prefer the US version. The blue of the M&B framing detracts from the image.

Hero: Adrian “Trig” Sinclair. I am not telling you how he got his nickname but it is AWESOME. Trig has been friends with the West family forever and served in an elite intelligence unit with Jared and Lena, right up until Lena got shot and Jared went missing (this is mentioned in the earlier books, Flirting With Intent and Cracking the Dating Code. You should read those, not because you necessarily need the backstory for this book, but because they are some of Hunter’s best work. And her best is very, very, very good indeed.) Trig is strong, clever, kind and desperately trying to be honourable towards his best friend’s sister.

Heroine: Lena West. It’s pretty tough being a clever kid in a family of geniuses. When you come top in the state for maths aged 17 and know that both your younger siblings are already streets ahead of you. When you have to work for things that come easily to them. Lena is competitive, courageous and self-doubting. She’s also just spent 19 months in rehab after being machine-gunned down on an operation. She’s a mess of scars and walking is hard work. There is a certain amount of ‘what could Trig possibly see in me?’ which I think derives partly from her injuries and partly from being the normal one in a family of extraordinary people. Mostly, she’s pretty good at not letting this become maudlin self-pity, and when Trig tells her how he feels, she accepts it.

Other: Jared. Who barely has a speaking role, but is all over the book. I want Jared’s story NOW ALREADY. Also brief appearances from Damon and Ruby, and Sebastian and Poppy from the other books in the series. Several Turkish taxi drivers.

Marriage: Yes, and multiple proposals, all of which are very sweet indeed.

Enjoyment factor: What’s not to love about a book that begins with someone doing trigonometry? Also, this is possibly the first amnesia book I’ve ever enjoyed. There was a point where I just wanted to shake Trig and make him tell Lena what was going on, but mostly I bought into the reasons for keeping things secret. I liked Trig and Lena together right from the start, and I liked the scenes before the amnesia which helped to ground what came next. I really loved Ruby’s relationship advice, too.

Epilogue: Yes, the wedding. No magical infertility cure, hooray! Also, no magical disability cures, hooray! The wedding was lovely and also, did I mention, I need Jared’s story NOW ALREADY.

I really liked this book a lot. I think it probably does work best if you’ve read the previous books in the series, but for me that is simply an added bonus since I love this whole series.

The secularization of Romanceland

aka: Why are there no Muslim sheikhs?

In my introductory post, I mentioned that my romance reading tends to be limited to contemporary, category and some historical romances. Within those genres, I read books set in Europe (I have a strong preference for the UK, but have also read books set in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and made up European countries), North America (mostly the US), Australia, New Zealand, occasionally Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore and India that I can think of), and the Middle East. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book set in a real Middle-Eastern country; they are always made up. The nearest I can think of are some historical romances set in Egypt. For the moment, I’m going to focus on the contemporary settings and then I’ll come back to historicals.



How secular is the real world?

It’s easy to think that we live in a secular world. Well, it’s easy to think that if you live in a Western country with secular media and education. It’s easy to think that if you’re in a society that is significantly more secular than it was, say, 50 years ago. Religion is easily dismissed as a thing of the past. For many, many Westerners, this is simply true. There are a lot of people with no belief in God, with no religious affiliation, who take no part in religious activities, and who see religion as having nothing to say to their contemporary experience of life. But even in the most strongly secular countries, that is not the whole picture.

In the 2011 UK census, the religious affiliation of the population was as follows:

59.5% Christianity

4.4% Islam

1.3% Hinduism

0.7% Sikhism

0.4% Judaism

0.4% Buddhism

0.4% other religions

25.7% no religion

(7.2% did not state an answer).

More than twice as many people claimed a religious affiliation than claimed no religion. But, of course, people tick a census box for many reasons. Things like family loyalty and ethnic identity can be as important in claiming a religious affiliation as faith and practice. Wikipedia cites an interesting survey done by the Guardian:

An ICM poll for The Guardian in 2006 asked the question “Which religion do you yourself belong to?” with a response of 64% stating ‘Christian’ and 26% stating ‘None’. In the same survey, 63% claimed they are not religious with just 33% claiming they are. This suggests that almost a third of the non-religious UK population identify with Christianity out of habit.

People identify with a religion even if they are not religious. I’m not sure it’s just ‘habit’ that makes people do this, but it’s true that for many people a religious label is not much more than a label. However, even if 33% of the population are ‘religious’, rather than the 67% from the census, that’s still a sizeable part of the population claiming that religion plays some active part in their lives. That’s not the same as regular attendance at religious meetings, though. Only 18% of the UK population consider themselves practicing members of a religious organisation. Just 6% regularly attend church. People who claim non-Christian religious affiliations are much more likely to be active in their religion:

One study shows that in 2004 at least 930,000 Muslims attended a mosque at least once a week, just outnumbering the 916,000 regular church goers in the Church of England. Muslim sources claim the number of practising Muslims is underestimated as many of them pray at home.

Around a third of the UK population say they believe in God and about 20% pray daily.

Statistics aren’t everything, obviously, but those statistics suggest to me that religion is still an important, active part of the lives of a substantial minority of the UK population.

What of other countries? Here’s the percentage of the population affiliated to the dominant religion in each of these countries:

France – 63% Christian

Italy – 83.3% Christian

Spain – 78.6% Christian

Greece – 88.1% Christian

USA – 78.3% Christian

Australia – 67.3% Christian

New Zealand – 57% Christian

Hong Kong – 14.3% Christian (by far the biggest group in HK is unaffiliated at 56.1%)

Singapore – 33.9% Buddhist

India – 79.5% Hindu

With the exception of Hong Kong and Singapore, all of these countries have a dominant religious affiliation. Most of them have much stronger religious affiliations than in the UK and in some of these places, religious affiliation is also more likely to involve active religious practice than it does in the UK.

Since Romanceland sheikhs almost invariably live in their own, made-up countries, it’s impossible to gather actual statistics. But for actual Middle-East countries, here’s some numbers:

Bahrain – 70.3% Muslim

Iraq – 99% Muslim

Kuwait – 74.1% Muslim

Oman – 85.9% Muslim

Qatar – 67.7% Muslim

Saudi Arabia – 93% Muslim

The Middle East as a whole is 88.94% Muslim. In most of these countries, Islam is the dominant cultural force, influencing every aspect of life, the legal system, government, education and so on.

What to make of all the numbers and what do they have to do with romance novels?

If we were to assume that fiction merely reflects its surrounding culture, we would expect that to be true with respect to religion as much as any other aspect of culture. Since most of the romances I read are written by UK, US, Australian and NZ authors, I would expect them to reflect the religious culture of those countries most accurately, but I’d also hope that when the books are set elsewhere, they would reflect the religious culture of their setting. That is, I’d usually expect books set in southern Europe to have characters who are Catholic or Greek Orthodox, books set in India to feature Hindu or occasionally Muslim characters. For books set in the Middle East, I’d automatically assume characters were Muslim unless the book made it clear otherwise.

But books are about individuals, not societies.

Well, yes. And also, no. Yes, it’s true, every romance novel will have specific characters. And writers are free to give these characters any background they like. They can be the exception. They don’t have to conform to the majority expectation. Why not write about a French Muslim character? Or a member of the Jewish community in London? (I’d read both of those books in a heartbeat, by the way.) Why not pick the atheist living in an Islamic Arab nation? Or, as mostly seems to happen, why not write about the atheist with some Christian background that means they want a church wedding in the UK? There are plenty of those in real life, why not in romance novels? No reason at all.

What’s interesting to me is not the individual characters, but the overall effect. That’s why I’m talking about the secularization of Romanceland. If Romanceland is the accumulation of all the romance novels I’ve read, it’s a place with all sorts of odd biases and divergences from the real world. Enough billionaires to go round, for one thing. Extreme whitewashing, for another. And it has almost no religion, even in the parts of it that reflect the most religious places in our world, like the Middle East. When was the last time you read about a sheikh who attended mosque, prayed five times a day, or kept Ramadan? No, I can’t think of one either. I’ve lost count of the number of sheikh books which include a ‘Western-style wedding ceremony’ or end with babies being christened. Yes, really. No, I have no idea.

In the Teach Me Tonight post I referenced in my introduction to this series, three reasons for using religion in romance were suggested, the first of which was ‘to advance a religious agenda’. I can’t help wondering if Romanceland as a whole is unconsciously advancing a secularist agenda. Characters of faith are exceptionally rare outside of the inspirational subgenre. Much rarer, I think, than they are in real life. Religious ceremonies still sometimes mark out significant events such as births, marriage and deaths. But regular religious practice is all but non-existent in Romanceland, and faith is rarely a factor in character motivation. Religion, where it exists, is relegated to the periphery of romance. That AAR list of romances featuring characters of faith is significantly shorter than most of their other special lists* (29 historicals, 34 contemporaries, 7 alternate realities = 70 titles. Compare cross-class romances: 245 titles, addiction: 88 titles, mixed-race: 92 titles.) When I’m reading romances it often feels like I’m in a parallel world where there simply is no place for religion or faith.

The existence of a separate subgenre for inspirational romance encourages, I think, the marginalisation of religion in mainstream romance. That’s problematic to me for a number of reasons, but especially because inspirational romance really only represents one tiny sector of the religious community. It’s exclusively Christian and a very specific brand of Christianity at that. That leaves no room for characters of other faiths and other forms of Christianity in the romance genre at all. In fact, it’s very noticeable on the AAR list that there are only two Jewish and one Muslim characters – all of whom are matched with a Christian partner.

It’s interesting to note that the secularization of Romanceland extends into historical romances too. If religion is a thing of the past, then perhaps we might have expected it to feature in historical romances even if not in contemporaries. In Jane Austen’s Regency novels, the clergyman is a central figure in the community (Mr Elton in Emma, Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice; both Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park aspire to be clergymen). In Regency romances, not so much (Jackie Barbosa’s Hot Under The Collar is a great counter-example to this). Historical romances are written for modern readers and reflect modern sensibilities with respect to religion.



So, why are there no Muslim sheikhs in Romanceland?’

Truthfully, I don’t know. But I can speculate with the best of them!

My first guess is sales figures. No, really. This is a business and publishers are savvy about what sells. I bet Muslim characters don’t sell, especially in the huge North American market. You don’t need me to tell you why.

My second guess is sales figues. I know. But I think it’s probably true that religious people are more likely to buy books without religion in than vice versa. My top favourite romance featuring a character of faith is Laura Kinsale’s masterpiece, Flowers from the Storm. Reviews of that book show that a LOT of readers hated Maddy and found her priggish and prissy. Many couldn’t understand why her religion was such a strong motivating force in her life. I think that it is always going to be difficult to write characters of faith in a way that makes them accessible and sympathetic to readers who don’t have that experience, or who have negative experiences of religion.

My third guess is fear. Which is also about sales figures. Fear that if you include religion you might unwittingly offend or alienate parts of your readership, or even the wider religious community. It’s 25 years since Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses but the response to it is still vivid in my mind and although I think a romance novel is unlikely to create anything like that sort of outcry, it is still a reminder that religion is not a subject to treat lightly or cavalierly. It’s something that people feel passionately about. It’s a powerful force, even in increasingly secular societies. Religious groups still get books banned.

I admit, I don’t see the secular landscape of Romanceland changing any time soon. I’m sad about that. I’m sad because I’d like romances to give people of all faiths and none a chance to see their experiences reflected, valued, and challenged in their reading. I’d like women of all faiths and none to know that they can love and be loved. I’m also sad because I think the absence of religion diminishes the genre, by excluding such an important part of the human experience.

*I don’t want to pretend that the AAR list is anything like a rigorously-examined representative list of the genre. But since this is a blog post, not an academic paper, I’m using it as an easily available guideline to what’s out there. If you’ve got things to say that challenge its usefulness, please let me know in the comments.

Religion and Romance

I’ve been thinking about blogging on this topic for well over a year. No, seriously. I just keep getting overwhelmed by the subject and the multiple audiences and various different things that I think about it, so I don’t know where to start. But now I have a plan! It’s not a brilliant plan, but at least it will mean I say something, even if I don’t say everything and don’t say it perfectly. The plan is to make this a series of posts, coming at the subject from different angles, rather than trying to form one coherent thesis.

Teach Me Tonight blogged about Romance and Religion several years ago. The post mentions a number of ways in which romance novels relate to religion:

1. to advance a religious agenda

2. to give deeper meaning or significance to romance

3. to offer an imagined or recovered religion

Go and read the post. It explains what these mean much better than I could. The novels that come under (1) more or less correspond to the inspirational subgenre of romance. I think (3) is possibly most common in paranormal/fantasy, although they also give interesting examples of ‘self-help theology’ found in contemporaries. (2) is very interesting, since it suggests that religious discourse can be used in almost any romance novel as a way of heightening its meaning without explicitly invoking a religious setting or religious faith for the characters.

Mostly, I’m more interested in non-inspirational romance, since that’s what I prefer to read. I’m also interested in characters who have faith (and their absence). I’m also interested in the way that romance draws on theological themes – and vice versa. So far, I have plans for posts on:

The secularisation of Romanceland (aka Why are there no Muslim sheikhs?)

Reading the Christian gospel as romance, and reading romances as gospel allegories

The limited religious world of ‘inspirational’ romance

The revirgination of Israel and the virgin heroine

If you have ideas for other related blog posts, I’d love to hear them. There was a call for papers on the subject from JPRS a while back, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing the results of that at some point.

The other reason I’ve procrastinated for so long about these posts is because I am painfully aware of my limitations. So this post is mostly by way of a disclaimer.

I do read (and write) romance. But I am pretty picky about what I read. Specifically, I read a fair bit of category romance, some historical romance, and a sprinkling of single-title contemporaries. I don’t read any paranormal, SFF, UF, YA, NA, romantic suspense or any other subgenre you can think of. I can’t speak for the whole genre and I’m not going to try. I’m not planning to do a whole lot of research, because these are blog posts, not an academic paper. I’ll just be talking about what I’ve noticed in my reading. I’m very willing to be corrected and to have the discussion widened by those who know the genre more deeply and broadly than I do.

I am a Christian. My faith informs what I do, what I read and what I write. And because Christians do not all have an identical experience of faith, it may also be relevant that I am British, that I’m an Anglican, that I’m reformed and conservative. I work for a church part-time, and I’ve spent the past 11 years in theological education at various seminaries (yes, I’m a slow learner). I am not an expert in religious studies and although I know something about some other faiths than my own, that knowledge is patchy, limited and theoretical. I can’t speak about all faiths with equal knowledge and insight, and again, I’m very willing to be corrected and to have the discussion widened by people with expertise beyond mine.

In the meantime, here’s AAR’s list of romances featuring characters of faith in case you want to get ahead with the reading. If you have any other suggestions of romances I should be reading while I think about these issues, I’d love to hear them.

Last Night Of The Summer

Coming soon

 

News and reviews

So, Flirting With the Camera has been getting around! I already mentioned the post at Romance Novels for Feminists (and if you’re interested in how romance handles abortion, you might like today’s post at Read, React, Review). It’s also had a few actual reviews now. Karen Knows Best liked it quite a lot; Dear Author gave it a B- which I am very pleased with indeed; though sadly Love in the Margins HATED it! Who’s right? There’s only one way to find out! *points to buy links in the sidebar*


Today I sent back the second round of edits on the French footballer story. I’m really pleased with how it’s shaping up. Every time I come back to it, I like this story and these characters more.
I didn’t get picked for the top 50 in the So You Think You Can Write contest. It’s still possible that they could request a partial or a full in the next couple of weeks, and even if they don’t, I’ll finish the revisions and submit it through slush. I’ve got a full draft and I think a pretty good handle on the story and characters. I suspect one of the reasons it didn’t get picked was not enough hero/heroine interaction in the first chapter, so I’ll have a think about how to change that, too.
Last Night of the Summer (formerly known as Hot Summer Night) is coming soon! I know, I’ve been promising this for months, but it really is nearly there now. It’s finished and edited. I just need to get it proofed and formatted and so on. Hopefully out by the end of the month. It has a new cover to match my other books and its new title.


If you want to know when it’s available to buy, the easiest thing to do is sign up for my newsletter. It’s not really a newsletter. I won’t be in your inbox with cute snippets of info about my writerly life or any of that nonsense. I’ll just send info when I have a new book available, so you’ll never miss out.

#allthewords

Today I have to write a LOT. I’ve got two mad crazy deadlines in the next 10 days. So to make it a little bit more fun, I’m having a twitter/FB contest. Guess how many words I’ll write before midnight (here, BST) and the nearest correct answer will win an extremely rare paperback copy of Flirting With The Camera. Happy to post it internationally.

Enter EITHER by tweeting @ros_clarke with #allthewords OR in a comment to the FB post here.

Good luck!

Unintended books

I seem to have written a feminist romance. Which is interesting because I’ve had a long and complicated relationship with the label of feminist. I think now I am in a place where I feel able to claim it, but I still have a lot of opinions that are not really mainstream feminist. On abortion, for instance. I do truly believe that life begins with conception and, therefore, it is as wrong to kill an unborn child as it is to kill a baby after it has been born. Hattie, however, the heroine of Flirting With The Camera, thinks differently from me on this issue. She had an abortion in her early twenties and she is okay with that. It was a hard decision in difficult circumstances, but it has not ruined her life.

Abortion is a rare occurence in romance novels. Accidental pregnancy is EXTREMELY common, but almost every heroine I’ve ever read dismisses the notion of abortion instantly. Partly this is for plot reasons – a baby is an ongoing potential source of conflict. But I think even more than that it’s because there is an idealised notion of a romance heroine: limited sexual experience and preferably a virgin, not bitchy, often lacking self-esteem and having low body-confidence. And she must be a maternal woman who would never dream of having an abortion. Hattie is, um, not exactly like that. She’s confident in herself and her body, she enjoys sex, she can be a little bit bitchy at times, and she not only contemplates having an abortion, she does it.

I love her.

I really, really love her.

Usually, I’m very sanguine about criticism of my books. I don’t think they are heartbreaking works of staggering genius. I don’t expect everyone to love them. It’s fine.

I don’t think I can be dispassionate about criticism of Hattie. I don’t think Flirting With The Camera is a perfect book and I can see why not everyone will fall for Tom. But I think that if – when – people start criticising Hattie, I will have to go and hide in the corner and have a little cry.

Anyway, you can see what Jackie of Romance Novels for Feminists thinks about her – and the whole subject of abortion in romance – here.

And Flirting With The Camera is finally on sale at Barnes and Noble and Kobo.

Update, a first chapter and a freebie

Well, it has been a slow and frustrating week while the mills of Smashwords grind slow and they grind exceeding small. I’m still waiting for Flirting With The Camera to be accepted into the Premium Catalogue. The other three books have all made it through and the new covers and editions are beginning to appear at Apple, B&N, Kobo and elsewhere.

The Tycoon’s Convenient Wife is now free! I think, though I have not completely decided, that it will be permanently free from now on. It’s already had a ton of downloads and it’s only been free for 24 hours or so. And now that there is better back matter with links to the other books and a sign up for news, and so on, I feel like that could be a really good way to boost sales across the board. Anyway, if you haven’t read it and would like to, now’s a good time.

I’ve entered So You Think You Can Write 2013. The competition is open to published writers this year, provided you haven’t been published with Harlequin/M&B. My manuscript is just over half done, and I need to have it finished by Nov 12th in case I get through to the next round. You can read my first chapter of Traitor in the Sheikh’s Bed here and comment, if you like, but there’s no voting at this stage. I can assure you that if I get through to a voting round, you’ll know about it!

Trying technology

Today has been a somewhat trying day.

After uploading Flirting with the Camera to Amazon yesterday, I got the email this morning to say that it had gone live. Except it hadn’t. The link in the email went to a 404 error page and searching Amazon brought up no results. I emailed customer support. Then checked the forums (should have done this first). Apparently, that is now a thing. So I waited and a few hours later, it appeared. Hooray! Except, boo, no table of contents. So I redid the file, converted it to mobi, checked it on my Kindle and uploaded it again. Except somehow I uploaded the Smashwords file instead. Disaster! You can’t make any changes until the book is live again, so I waited, and have finally just uploaded it again. If it’s not right this time I shall scream. Or cry. Probably both.

Anyway, once the link went live the first time, I was able to add it to the new editions of the other books and upload those. Hoping that they have the right files! I think they do. The kdp uploaded did spot a couple of typos in Reckless Runaway, so I have corrected those. And uploaded a corrected file at Smashwords.

So now, the state of play is that you can buy all the books at Amazon, though you may not get the best file of Flirting with the Camera if you buy it right now. You can buy the up-to-date editions of all the books at Smashwords. And you can buy old editions of everything except Flirting with the Camera everywhere else. This is because they are all still pending review at Smashwords, before they can be pushed out to the other retailers from there. This tends to happen in stages, over the course of a week or two. You’ll recognise when the new editions are available because they will have the new covers. And of course I’ll add the links for Flirting with the Camera here as they go live.

In amongst all this, I have been sending out Kickstarter rewards. So far, I’ve done all the non-personalised ones and one personalised one. The rest are going to have to wait until tomorrow, I think. I’m too tired and frazzled to do it right today.

Phew.

Dealing with criticism

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m doing The Artist’s Way at the moment. This week’s chapter includes a very helpful section on how to deal with criticism. She suggests the following process:

1. Get it over with. Read/hear the critic through to the end.

2. Make notes of any ideas or phrases that you find troubling.

3. Make notes of anything that seems useful.

4. DO SOMETHING NURTURING. She suggests reading a positive review or remembering compliments others have given you. Reassure yourself.

5. Remember that even if your work is bad, that might be a necessary stepping-stone to doing something really good.

6. Work out whether the criticism is triggering a painful memory or an old wound that hasn’t healed.

7. Write a letter to the critic, defending your work and acknowledging its flaws. DO NOT SEND THIS LETTER.

8. Get back in the saddle. Commit to doing new work.

9. Do it.