by SB Sarah • Saturday, December 01, 2007 at 11:04 AM
JaneDrew, recent winner of Barb Ferrer’s Name That Character contest, is a grad student in medieval/early modern European history, and, as she says, “yes, that DOES make reading historical romances as difficult as it sounds....”
How difficult, I asked? What are you top most egregious historical inaccuracies?
The reply was so funny I had to share with you. Enjoy!
Jane Drew says:
Oh, boy… horror stories of historical inaccuracy… tricky question; I actually haven’t even tried to read a medieval romance in years; too many attempts to slog through the morass of shiny knights, distressed damsels, oversexed Saxons, and brawny Highland-types with excessively large.. err.. sporrans.
The main problem is that the vast majority of medieval or Renaissance romance are the Middle Ages filtered through nineteenth century Romanticism (which is basically the actual Middle Ages shorn of all the naughty bits and dredged in sparkles). So I’ve kind of blocked it all out by sheer force of will, selective amnesia, and the occasional blunt object (of course, now my roommate wants me to start reading them. And blogging about it. But that’s only because she’s evil).
Things that stick in my memory and won’t. go. away. ... well, I remember one book where the heroine was the only daughter in a family of boys, and her family was feuding with the family next door, so she basically spent her time running around disguised as a boy, so that nobody would know that she was actually a girl (and thus kidnappable, weddable, beddable, etc.)… except that the hero, who was the oldest son of the family her family was feuding with, sees her in the woods during a skirmish, and immediately knows she’s a girl (and, as I recall, is baffled that the rest of his family is too dumb to have figured this out). So, of course, she gets carried off and married off, and is understandably not happy about any of it. Except that then she falls in love with her husband, and decides to go to the standard crazy old witch-type to get a love potion so that he’ll fall in love with her. And she gets dressed up for the Special Dinner of Potion-Giving… in a cloth-of-gold dress, the theme of which is MY CLEAVAGE LET ME SHOW YOU IT… which… just… no. I think hero-boy dumps the “potion” out, but she thinks he’s taken it (because he starts rhapsodizing about the aforementioned cleavage.. the word “melons” is used… it’s all very unfortunate), and then freaks out due to her guilt at forcing him to love her. Cue explanation that he didn’t take the potion, and then they.. um.... get on with the naked, I think. I just remember the dress and the fake potion.
Another scene that will not die is from Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux.. umm. Modern woman gets dumped by horrible boyfriend; her crying calls Elizabethan knight who is about to be executed for treason into the present; he runs around and tries to deal with modern life for a bit, then goes back into the past; she figures out a way to follow him back to before he was arrested, etc.,.. except of course he doesn’t remember her. So she tries to prevent the things that lead to his being executed the first time around (that part was actually interesting). Except that she’s also the sort of modern woman whose reaction to being dumped in the past is “I am modern, enlightened woman and can thus rip my _own_ bodice! *rip!*”… so she gets the stableboys to rig up a primitive shower. In the garden. And she uses it. Every. Single. Morning. And _does not care_ that her object of affection AND THE ENTIRE MALE POPULATION OF THE CASTLE all know. And most of them find reasons to be wandering about the garden in the morning. And the hero doesn’t care that she’s getting naked in public either.
The most recent brain-searing experience was actually last spring; I was teaching Renaissance Europe, and decided (silly me) to use the film Dangerous Beauty in class—a friend of mine had used it (and she warned me; yes, she did...), and I had good historical documents to pair with it. Veronica Franco—the real Veronica Franco—was a Venetian courtesan, very famous; wrote wicked poetry and arguments in favor of a women’s right to have an education, was actually tried for witchcraft at one point… so, really, very cool person, historically. The film Veronica Franco… yeah… so… ok, Veronica Franco became a courtesan after having been married, had two kids, got divorced. And they turned her into the Gawky Smart Well-Read Virgin who was hopelessly in love with her best friend’s brother, who she of course couldn’t marry due to finances/social politics. Cue her mother dramatically saying that Veronica can still have him.. she can become.. a Courtesan!!! So the whole thing is framed around this Hollywood-style star-crossed romance. Including the witch trial, which involves her defending herself by arguing that she’s a lovestruck woman who sleeps around due to being in love with love, and it is her mad sexxoring skillz that bring the boys to the yard, rather than evil witchery.. which is.. umm.. so much better? (medieval romances love to inflict witch trials on the spunky heroines… or have witches who are crazy old potion-making bats… or witches who are misunderstood proto-feminist wise women… and yet, do the medieval romance witches ever run around stealing men’s penises and hiding them in nests in the woods? No, they do not.. which just proves that romance novel authors have never read the “Malleus Maleficarum”. Heh.)
Now, all of this would have been _fine_ if I’d been watching it at home with friends. Well, possibly not “fine,” because, dear Lord, they had every upper-class man in Venice stand up to admit that he’d slept with Veronica and _everybody was ok with this_, and the Inquisition folks just said, “Dang, you Venetians are way oversexed, but whatever, we do not care and will go back to Rome, la, la, la...”
I, however, was showing this to my class. Of which I was the teacher. And thus responsible for order, decorum, and not snarking the hell out of something I wanted them to write a paper about. EVEN the part where Veronica’s mother, after announcing that Veronica shall become a courtesan just as (dramatic pause) she herself had been before, subjects her daughter to a compilation of every bad sports movie/Ugly Duckling story training/prettification montage as Veronica gets her hair done, learns to dress in an elegantly slutty fashion, works on her posture, and endures lectures from her mother on sensual eating (neeeeeehver eating a banana again, ever).
...Although it was almost all worth it for tbe bit where Veronica’s mother brings her into a room with a naked man and proceeds to demonstrate the, err, functioning of the male anatomy. To which Veronica reacts with an expression of, “Wow! Can it do any other tricks?”
As I said to JaneDrew, I have to confess that I love Dangerous Beauty because it’s so visually beautiful, even if it’s historically nutty.
It fascinates me the way that romance readers can easily - myself included! - participate in selective amnesia about some things, like the disease free hero who has sexed half of London, or the medieval heroine who dresses like a boy and frolics in the woods, and enjoy the historical romance escape.
Meanwhile, there are other historical anachronisms, like the Viscount who marries the courtesan and lives happily ever after (except what about the social ostracizing of their children who are deemed unacceptable because their mama’s a ho?) that some readers - again myself included - can’t overlook long enough to suspend reality and enjoy the drama. We all have different historical inaccuracy buttons, probably based on the areas we know the least about. It never occurred to me to find the shower in Knight in Shining Armor completely over the top, though the giving-his-mama Benadryl scene made me wonder why mama didn’t freak out at the witch’s pills and have her burned alive immediately.
I’m so curious why some authorial liberties with historical accuracy don’t bug some folks in the least while it makes others want to pull their hair straight. But either way, I LOVE hearing what drives some folks bananas about historical liberties, because, well, it’s freaking hilarious.
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by Candy • Monday, November 05, 2007 at 07:13 AM
I’ve been having issues lately with my leisure reading. Part of it is certainly lack of time--instead of immersing myself in high adventure, slick passages, throbbing stalks and Love Conquering All (and by “all,” I mean 350 pages of limp conflict and the hero’s ability to think with things other than his fiddly bits), I’ve been drowning in the endless procedural minutiae of the federal courts, which is just about as fun as it sounds, and also arguing whether New Jersey barring Philadelphia from shipping its garbage into its borders is constitutional, which is, weirdly enough, a great deal more fun than it sounds. (The term “gerbil jurisprudence” actually came up while discussing that particular issue, which is one of the many reasons why I enjoy my Constitutional Law class immoderately.)
So yes, law school is fun and challenging and HOLY FUCKMONKEYS a lot of work. But besides the paucity of reading time, I find myself feeling very restless and impatient with the fiction I picked up in recent months. What has been galling me, in particular, has been how distressingly predictable a lot of the stories have been.
I’m not complaining about overarching structure here, nor about genre requirements. Knowing there’s going to be a Happily Ever After at the end of a romance does not, and likely will never bother me. Neither is knowing that the mystery will be solved at the end of a detective novel, or that the hero will survive mostly intact (if not necessarily mostly sane or healthy) at the end of a thriller.
What I’m talking about is my current ability to see plot twists and character fates writ large on the wall. It’s sort of the equivalent of having a very large, very loud person walking up to a tree, poorly concealing himself behind it and yelling that he’s not really there, and there’s really no way I can ever guess his location, oh no, because he’s a clever one, he is.
I don’t mind a certain amount of predictability in my fiction, but when it comes down to it, I am most truly delighted when I have my expectations quite thoroughly fucked with. It especially fills me with glee when an author take some sort of shorthand that we’ve all taken for granted and turns it upside down or just molests it in unspeakable ways.
For instance: I am sick unto death of picking up a certain sort of genre work, encountering a male character in the military who has a wife at home who’s just had a kid, and knowing just from those facts that he’s a) a Good Guy, and b) going to make it through the book in one piece. Just once, I’d love to have that guy die painfully and pointlessly, or have him reveal some sort of genuinely horrific perversity--the Goebbels, for example, genuinely loved their children and killed them out of loyalty to Hitler and to spare them what they thought was an untenable future. In short, I am sick of many things, and one the biggest peeves I have right now is how being a good guy means loving kids and puppies and kittens, and being a bad guy means being child molesters and puppy kickers and kitten killers. Not that I can imagine a good guy being physically abusive towards the weak and vulinerable, but one can dislike something without acting violently to that dislike, just as one can love something soft and cuddly while being a thoroughly evil bastard.
We’ve talked before about how there’s a tendency for this sort of shorthand to stand in for actual characterization. Is your hero dark-haired and large? Odds are high you have an alpha on your hands, whee! Is your heroine redheaded? Then please choose from either the Awkward or Feisty variants. If there’s a psychotic killer on the loose, just look for the one character who gets significant airtime in the book who a) doesn’t have a sense of humor and/or b) is not especially attractive. If you’re the Other Woman? Expect to be older than the heroine, being fond of orgasms for their own sake and considerably more savvy about make-up and nail polish.
Certain plot conventions also tend to have shorthand resolutions. Have an impotent heroine? The hero’s super sperm will save the day and bless her with many bouncy bairns, guaranteed. Identical twins? The True Lurve is the one who can recognize the difference with no apparent effort. Is the hero surly and jealous, and is there a more easy-going male secondary character who becomes a good friend of the heroine’s? There will almost definitely be a blow-up in which the hero will accuse the heroine of being a dirty, dirrrty hoor.
I don’t like the implications of some of these standards, but mostly, I get really goodamn tired of them when they crop up over and over and over again. That’s not to say that talented authors can’t create convincing, nuanced iterations of these archetypes, but it’s so good when somebody takes the norm and deliberately, thoroughly flouts it. For example, when the protagonists don’t want children, as in a couple of Jennifer Crusie books, I just about keel over with glee. Loving And Desperately Wanting Children is such a marker of being a Good Person, and enjoying fucking without some sort of greater Family and White Picket Fence agenda lurking in a background is usually reserved so much for the villain that characters who are about to violate those particular conventions tend to get automatic props from me, if only because they don’t seem to rely on what seem to be somewhat lazy character-building methods.
In short: right now, I want something to surprise me, and surprise me good. I don’t want to read a book and be able to predict the character and story arcs for just about every damn thing within the first 50 pages or so. The enjoyment I get from being right is a poor substitute for being delightfully surprised or having my jaded expectations thoroughly fucked with.
by SB Sarah • Monday, September 10, 2007 at 11:33 AM
After the discussion about labels on romance novels, and prior discussions about series books in the romance shelves, one author and I had a rather lively discussion via email about series books and whether the same rules and expectations should apply to them as to romance novels. Since this author doesn’t want to be seen as trying to sell her own books, she asked that I post her rant anonymously so that it would be evaluated on content and not as a potential marketing attempt. Normally we’re all about owning your comments, but I can see her point - she wants her argument to stand on its own without being judged as an attempt to build buzz around her series. So - Anonymous Author defends Series in Romance, take 1.
AnonyAuthor says:
Ignoring the whole OMG-bad-language-naughty! aspect of what Madeline Baker wrote, her comment that “Lately I’ve read several books that have ‘paranormal romance’ on the spine. In my opinion, a good number of them haven’t been romances at all...” got me thinking: are there still hard and fast romance rules? Or has there been a gradual change with the new guard of readers taking over the old when it comes to what a romance “should” have?
With the recent popularity of paranormal series novels, where happily-ever-afters aren’t automatic, does the Romance label on the spine still imply to people that there are certain formulas inside? Or has the romance genre changed to where formulas/guaranteed HEA’s/Heroes with Big Cocks are more, to quote Captain Barbosa from Pirates of the Caribbean, like ‘guidelines’ than actual rules?
I could be biased but I think there should be some leeway for series novels when it comes to a HEA. If a book is a true stand-alone with NO other novels being written containing the same characters and it’s labeled a romance, then I can see how people get their bacon burned when there isn’t a HEA. But if you have a series, be it paranormal or mystery or whatever, then you know there’s more to say and the HEA might be just delayed, not eliminated.
I guess what bothers me is how readers blame the authors. Unless you’re an established money-making author, you have NO say over how a publisher markets your novel. Especially if you’re a new author, you do a lot of smiling and nodding, not much else, because the publisher doesn’t give a shit that your newbie hasn’t-made-them-a-dollar-yet ass disagrees with their marketing scheme.
But when some people get upset about a book not having a HEA if it’s labeled a romance, they don’t email the editor or pub house - they bash the author. If a book has “romance” on the label, yet no HEA, or perhaps half the plot isn’t about the romance, remember that the author didn’t chose the marketing label. The publisher did. After all, it’s not like an author can pull a fast one and sneak in a non-HEA after a novel’s been edited - the publishing house would have known it wasn’t there when they bought it.
Several of my author friends are in the same boat, having a “romance” label when their books don’t follow old-school romance formula, but what’s a new author to do? Pull out of their contract in protest when they see how their book’s being labeled?
So to wrap up a loooong ramble, IMO, I’d say series books should have a somewhat different set of rules when it comes to romance. But if that still doesn’t appease, then readers who are unhappy about not having their expected formula/HEA should go to the person who did the labeling with their complaints, not the author (unless the author is self-pubbed, then yes, readers can bring on the bitching to us!)
I personally am not fond of series, though I do see this author’s point. She’s right that the issue isn’t that the publisher said to the author, “Hey we really like this romance but it should be a series - think you can hack off the happy ending and make it so the book doesn’t really come to an end?” The series idea was there from the get-go, and the publisher knew it when the book was sold. There are also plenty of series books in romance now - from paranormal to contemporary to historical - and there are those readers that LOVE series books and write the date of the next issue down in their planners so they can buy the next one.
I, with my shoddy memory and inability to remember things and my terrible recall and...um… oh, my bad memory, am not one of these people. I like my happy ending in hand, thanks. Not only will I not remember to pick up the new book in the series, I’ll likely not remember what happened in the last book. And I’ve said a few times how irritated I get when I am 30 pages from the end and I realize there’s no way the romance and the plot can be sewn up satisfactorily in that time. But is the publisher subject to a smack on the wrist for putting the label “romance” on the spine? Does the designation “romance” demand a happy ending? Is there another subgenre descriptor we need to use to designate a series with a pair of primary protagonists and a plot that continues over multiple books? I think the term “series romance” is already taken.
But really, my biggest beef is one that I bring to the author AND the publisher: there are several series that start out fantastic and fizzle . I don’t even have to name them - I’m sure you can tick them off on your fingers for all they’ve been discussed here and elsewhere. And I blame both parties for that problem - neither the author or the publisher seems to have an end or at least a resolution in sight, and both keep churning out new issues of the story without the larger story arc in mind. It reminds me of everything that went wrong with television shows I loved - characters change into villains for no reason other than easy tension, the triangle of “who will s/he choose?” gets old and stale far too fast, and there’s no consideration for the larger story and the smaller story within each issue.
So if the publisher hangs a “romance” label on a series that doesn’t have an end point in sight, much less a HAPPY ending, I do get irate. It’s not a question of violating formula; it’s neglecting to mention that the book in my hand is not going to meet what I hold as the most important tenet of romance: everything will be ok in the end. With a lot of current series, there is no end and it’s definitely not ok!
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Ranty McRant
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by SB Sarah • Saturday, September 01, 2007 at 09:20 AM
So Myers, in the ages-old crusty article I linked to a few days ago, picked the nits off various passages from literary fiction, but didn’t cite the best examples of any genre fiction to support his argument that it’s just as good. Whine!
Now, I’m not near any of my books at the moment, but, I can recall a few passages that are marvelous from genre fic. I’ll have to transcribe when I’m nearer to my bookshelf and a keyboard.
But- what about you?
What’s your favorite excerpt from any recent genre fiction (and not just romance)? Please share, as a sample of “damn fine genre writing!”
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by SB Sarah • Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 11:51 AM
From the school of “slap one hand to raise the other,” we have a thought provoking article from The Atlantic, emailed to me by Bitchery reader Deb, on the nature of “literary fiction.”
I was nodding and giving a chorus of, “Uh huh, sing it, yup, I’m so with you,” as the author lined up the sad differences between what is considered genre fiction and literary fiction:
Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be “genre fiction"—at best an excellent “read” or a “page turner,” but never literature with a capital L. An author with a track record of blockbusters may find the publication of a new work treated like a pop-culture event, but most “genre” novels are lucky to get an inch in the back pages of The New York Times Book Review.
Everything written in self-conscious, writerly prose, on the other hand, is now considered to be “literary fiction"—not necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful attention than even the best-written thriller or romance....
The dualism of literary versus genre has all but routed the old trinity of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, which was always invoked tongue-in-cheek anyway. Writers who would once have been called middlebrow are now assigned, depending solely on their degree of verbal affectation, to either the literary or the genre camp. David Guterson is thus granted Serious Writer status for having buried a murder mystery under sonorous tautologies (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1994), while Stephen King, whose Bag of Bones (1998) is a more intellectual but less pretentious novel, is still considered to be just a very talented genre storyteller.
But when he starts flailing away at Proulx, Guterson, and others, I felt a little bad for them. Proulx, for example, gets a mighty spanking, and while I know what he’s talking about, and for the reasons he outlines I don’t enjoy her writing, damn, he done beat that horse for a good two hours. Then he moves on to McCarthy.
Nothing makes me snicker like seeing people prick holes in the self-inflated, self-important opinion some people have of the quality of their reading material, especially when Myers writes of Guterson and other writers, “it more important to sound literary than to make sense.” But then, few things make me twitch more than folks who take themselves too seriously, and certainly this is an examination of what is held in serious, lauded regard.
And then, as my empathy for the writers getting spanked tipped the see-saw against my enjoyment of seeing the self-important taken down a bit, I read this about Guterson:
Only the sex scenes, which even his fans lament, are laughably bad.
“Have you ever done this before?” he whispered.
“Never,” answered Hatsue. “You’re my only.”
The head of his penis found the place it wanted. For a moment he waited there, poised, and kissed her—he took her lower lip between his lips and gently held it there. Then with his hands he pulled her to him and at the same time entered her so that she felt his scrotum slap against her skin. Her entire body felt the rightness of it, her entire body was seized to it. Hatsue arched her shoulder blades—her breasts pressed themselves against his chest—and a slow shudder ran through her.
“It’s right,” she remembered whispering. “It feels so right, Kabuo.”
“Tadaima aware ga wakatta,” he had answered. “I understand just now the deepest beauty.”
If Jackie Collins had written that, reviewers would have had a field day with You’re my only, the searching penis, the shudder’s slow run. Thanks to that scrotum slap, which makes you wonder just what Hatsue’s body felt the rightness of, the passage fails even on a Harlequin Romance level.
You had to go there, huh, sir? Fails “even on a Harlequin Romance level?” Someone get that man a few well-crafted Blaze excerpts quick, so he can experience what well-written sex is like. Myers lauds King and other thriller writers who are dismissed as only good enough for the subway, but oh, so easy to dis the romance.
*le sigh*
The highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow are alive and well, it seems. And romance landed somewhere in the moustache. And that’s really a bummer, because if he’d (a) flailed a little less at Proulx et al, and (b) championed specific examples of genre fiction writing that were “quality writing” according to his definition, the article would have been a welcome change to the usual “literary pretention” vs. “genre fiction - but not romance omg it suxx” debate.
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