Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

There are a couple of tv shows, particularly the crime dramas, that I have lost patience with because the writers were relying on cheap and easy methods to demand an emotional response from the viewer, methods I could not tolerate because they were weak and easy, and because they, if I could indulge in a moment of presuming the writers’ motivations, demonstrated little respect for my intelligence, my sensitivity, and my ability to care about the plight of adults.

Of course, it’s tv, and generally the set in my living room doesn’t stand up when I sit down, proclaiming to one and all that I am to be presented with the finest in erudite entertainment. Unless, of course, I am watching Thirteen or my local PBS affiliate, because then it is usually “Game on, Bitch. Hope you brought your brain with you.” Most of the time, when I watch tv, I am hoping to engage in entertainment, not in having my heart handed to me by thoughtless and inappropriate pathos in the dramatic narrative.

That thoughtless pathos has made its way into romance of late, and I have to say: stop. Stop it. Stop it right fucking now.

Stop using the unresolved and shabbily revealed death, injury, and irrevocable harm of children for dramatic impact in your stories.

Knock it the hell off already.

Romance novels are not hour long television shows that can introduce a secondary story and forget to give it closure. I have higher expectations of romance than I do of most tv shows, which is why I am presuming to write an open letter to writers of romance to beg them to back away from the same cheap, easy, thoughtless pathos.

It is not entertaining nor enjoyable to read about horrible, hideous, dreadful things happening to children, particularly when that backstory is used as the slowly-developed basis for a rather grumpy or wounded character, but even more specifically when the big theraputic reveal of the reason behind the emotional wound is at the end of the goddam book.

For example, I could not review The Secret Passion of Simon Blackwell no matter how many times I sat down to write it, even though it was a book I should have loved. It touched on all my favorite romance tropes: wounded hero! Secret passions! Hidden depths! Rar!

But (spoilers alert) what was the secret passion of Simon Blackwell? More like secret pain that was revealed in the last few pages of the book: his children and first wife were killed in a fire, and his last memories of his toddler son are of the boy crying for him because Simon had scolded him, then gone out to tend to the horses. While he was gone, the building his family was in caught fire, and his family died. I can’t even think about it without feeling ill. That final twisting of the emotional screw in the last pages completely dissolves the happy ending for me. Grief is not the feeling I want when finishing a romance.

This is not to say that hearty emotional damage has no place in romance. That’s not my point at all. What infuriates me is what I call The Cheap and Easy Hurt Child Pathos. Specifically, I hate the placement of that pathos in the backstory of a character, so that it is revealed in full in a big historically anachronistic therapy session so the character can get over it just in time for the happy ending - leaving me, the reader, just beginning to deal with the fallout of the mental image. No happy ending. Just grief.

It absolutely enrages me. Books hit the wall for this reason. I could love every other element of a book, but one dose of The Cheap and Easy Hurt Child Pathos drops a book any number of grade levels, and I feel more like warning people, “OMG, Prepare to have your heart thrown at you” than examining what worked, because what didn’t work left me feeling fucking terrible. I can’t review a book when it means giving away the ending and discussing how much it depressed me.

So please, consider this a plea from the sensitive reader: don’t think of the children. I know in historical times, children were kept in horrible conditions, and certainly there are numerous examples of how children in the backstory of a character helped craft the hero or heroine that readers loved, but the last-minute denouement of cheap and easy pathos to reveal and heal the character’s pain over a hurt or lost child comes at the expense of this reader’s happy ending. Please. Don’t think of the children.

Edson Financial Group has a website and a search of the whois reveals a potential individual to contact for Administrative and Technical reasons:

Corey Malison, from Montreal, Canada, is listed as the Admin/Tech contact for edsonfg.com. In addition, Malison has a Facebook but it’s visible by friends only.

A search of Edson Financial Groups reviews doesn’t seem to reveal any Smart Bitch reviews (Too many cursewords?) or Dear Author reviews (Letter-to-author format not worth swiping?) but there are plenty that seem very, very familiar. If you find a review you wrote, let me know.

I’m contacting Malison to see if I can get a response, but in the meantime, reviewers beware. Thanks to Katie for the heads up. 

The subject of Cole’s titles came up in a discussion with a few nefarious bloggers, and I pointed out that I can’t tell them apart if you pay me. In fact, even making that list right there meant one tab had the Cole backlist in order, one tab had the ISBN lookup, and one page had cover illustrations to try to nudge my memory.

And you know, now that I think about it, the covers don’t help me that much either. If you list them by cover art, it’s

Mr. Chest
Vampire with Blonde Chick
Red Background with Pleather Girl
Snape Gazes at Redhead’s Jugular
Nathan Kamp
Nathan Kamp

Mr. Kamp, this is not helping.

Jane from DearAuthor suggested retitling them as if they were Harlequin Presents Novels:

1 - The Billionaire General’s Marriage Revenge
2 - The Lykae’s Virgin Mistress
3 - The Russian Tycoon’s Reluctant Bride
4 - Bedded at the Beastlord’s Convenience
5 - Under the Vampire Lover’s Command
6 - The Rich Mercenary’s Secret Baby Plan

Not bad. She also suggested a more simple list that cracked me up like damn and whoa:

1 - Mysty the Vampire Slayer
2 - The Lykae’s Secret Virgin Mistress
3 - The Amazing Hie
4 - The Witch and the Beastlord
5 - The Ghost and Mr. Madman
6 - Lick My Horns

I’m more literal in my memory needs, however, so I’ve been playing with a few styles of Renaming Kresley Cole’s Books. The best names are the ones I’m trying desperately to memorize alongside the more interchangeable actual titles. It’s “Friends” style subtitling, and is utterly unimaginative.

The one with in the anthology.
The one with the Vampire and the Valkyrie
The one with the Hie
The one with the Lykae and the Super Witch
The one with the Hot ghost and the Crazy ass
The one with the Slacker Demon and the Prissy Mathematician

No marketing department is going for that, right? So here’s my last group. I think this set really rocks:

Myst Mountin’ on Top
The Vampire and His Little Lady
The Hie, The Cold, and the Warlord
Monkey Sex on a Dusty Tree
Wicked Pee on an Electric Fence
Demon Desires Swamp Girl

Come on! That’s sales gold, right there, is what that is.

Back in the day, when I taught remedial composition, I had a class that was part kids who didn’t pass the entrance exam into College Writing I, and part kids who had varying levels of learning disability that affected their writing. One girl in particular could orally recite an incredibly erudite argument that synthesized multiple texts and maintained a balanced comparison and contrast of points with a really groovy conclusion. Could she write one word of that recitation down? Nope. Horrible horrible block between her mind and her fingers that was easily overcome when she talked.

Or, to my surprise, when she used instant messenger. The same girl who froze into a complete inability to write could write for damn pages over IM, or in email. I noticed the same was true of many other students, those with learning disabilities that they disclosed to me, and those who didn’t have anything to say about it. I started having office hours half on IM and half actually in my craptastic cubicle. I had a much higher level of interaction making myself available over IM and over email.  IM and email were a lot easier methods for writing and typing, and I received some outstanding writing samples through email or through IM than from the venue that is Microsoft Word.

My thesis for my nonaquired MA was that IM and email are more like speech for the current population of college students and are thought of as “speech typed out” or “Speech through fingers” rather than as writing, and as such could be great tools for composition instructors who struggle with students who say they “cannot write.” My research was going to explore varying methods of communication, and there would have been some very liberal sprinkling of Ong and Derrida in there (side note: I had a graphic novel of Derrida’s Of Grammatology that was so freaking awesome and hilariously weird. I loved it.) and discussions of logocentrism and deconstruction and the inversion of speech over writing and writing over speech. Of course, I was looking at ways to redefine what is speech and what is writing in the context of writing instruction through speech (lecture) and writing practice, to an audience that values one over the other for an entirely different, non-philosophical set of reasons.

Hobb’s assertions that blogging isn’t writing, that it’s written socializing that bleeds away your creativity? Maybe for her, but for every writer? I think I’m a better writer because I blog, because I read the daily writing of other writers, and because I work at it every day. And I think blogging is writing because I don’t talk this much in real life. Not to people I don’t know, anyway. But I also don’t write fiction for public consumption (I do write it occasionally, mostly to remind myself as a reviewer that that shit is hard work) and I don’t blog as a tool to steal time from other writing. But I am a blogger, so blogging is my medium. And while I’m ruminating, can I state again how much I hate the word “blog?”

Those assertions that blogging is a cheap counterpart to writing made me wonder about all the papers I read nitpicking at the value of speech vs. writing. Derrida theorized that speech is valued over writing, just as presence is valued over absence, and then tore up those arguments against writing ... so I’m just fascinated by the ways in which deconstructive analysis could be applied to Hobb’s argument, that blogging isn’t writing. Speech is historically valued over writing, but in this case, it’s writing over blogging: in Hobb’s argument, immediacy of response and feedback coupled with subject matter that is intensely in the present is of lesser value and a distraction from, if not derivative of, fiction that exists apart from and separates the writer and the reader.

Now that I’m kicking the ass of long-sleeping brain cells that used to do deconstructive criticism on anything that wasn’t nailed down, I ask myself, what would Derrida think of blogging? That’d be a hell of a good time right there: return Derrida to life and give him an LJ account. The hilarity ensues. I wonder if he had a blog somewhere. He died in 2004; it’s possible. (Now I’m going to ponder for shits and giggles what his LJ name would have been.)

While I get what Hobb is saying, the assigning of value to writing for novel publication over writing for blogs is irritating. If you blog or bake cookies or just chew your thumbnail instead of respecting a deadline you have professionally, then it’s not the blog’s or the cookie’s or your nail’s fault that you didn’t get your work done. But saying that blogging isn’t writing, to say that…

[c]ompared to the studied seduction of the novel, blogging is literary pole dancing. Anyone can stand naked in the window of the public’s eye, anyone can twitch and writhe and emote over the package that was not delivered, the dinner that burned, the friend who forgot your birthday. That is not fiction. That is life, and we all have one. Blogging condemns us to live everyone else’s tedious day as well as our own.

...positions blogging a running memoir as of lesser value than fiction writing and implies that it’s easy because of it’s sexiness and quick familiarity of use, that life doesn’t matter but fiction does. Obviously, Robb is not marketing memoirs.

The affronted blogger from her take-me-seriously (ha!) hot pink website says, “Say WHAT now?” What say you?

But no, that’s not the best part. Aside from the images I get when I read the words “pamper hamper” (two words: dirty diapers), and the flinching I do at the conflation (2pts!) of “bodice rippers” and category romance, it gets better and better. Get a load of this:

Tips for writing in the Mills & Boon style
- characters should have unusual names
like ‘Slade’, ‘Blaze’, ‘Calliope’ and
‘Sergio’ (Yes, because nothing makes me giddy like a hero named Calliope)

- detail and description is extremely important (But they’re short books and this is a short contest so break out the adverbs, she said sarcastically.)

- love interests are often Princes, Earls, surgeons, pilots or thieves (Sing it with me now: “Princes, Earls and Thieves! But every night all the men would come around… and lay their money down” )

- giving a character amnesia is a useful narrative tool (for bugging the shit out of your reader.)

- the bachelor rogue always has a heart of gold, he just needs the right woman to tame him (if he can break free of the amnesia and remember who she is)

- the first kiss between the lead characters is perhaps the most important part of the book (after the amnesia affecting Slade, the Earl of Blaze, of course)

Oh, dear, oh dear. And to make matters extra more special with a side order of what-the-freaking-shitfuck, the contest announcement thoughtfully provides three cover samples at the bottom with classic M&B/ HQ: Presents title samples, like The Greek Tycoon’s Convenient Bride.

But the worst part is that I cannot get over one of the cover images at the bottom of the message. Now, I fully understand that the world is not tuned into US news at every moment, and my reaction is solely my reaction, but there is no way I could every buy a book with this image on the cover were it marketed in the US.

A baby in the arms of a firefighter in front of a giant blaze? NOT SEXY. NOT ROMANTIC. In fact, SCARY AS FUCKING HELL.

And if you’re like me, the image brings up a tragic memory. After the Oklahoma City bombing, one of the images that was circulated most often was of a firefighter carrying a 1 year old girl, Baylee Almon, from the wreckage of the building. The image won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 and came to symbolize the victims of the attack. Baylee Almon died of her injuries. Bottom line: that’s not a romance cover. And if anything underscores the dance across the line of revolting that is played out every month by the titles and cover images of category romance, that’s it.