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

First one to correctly identify the book will get a Smart Bitch Title - and no, this isn’t our Lonely Heart contest for the day. I’m just trying to provide some motivation by Greed & Bribery!

Teresa Wilde writes:

Dearest Bitches:

My romance writing group got a cry for help recently, as follows:

“Hi, I have an extremely difficult question for you. I have been looking for a book that has been written by a Canadian author written about a widow who have been left a series of letters written by her late husband designed to help her face the future and carry on with her life.

I know it’s a difficult task as I do not have the name of the author or the title, but it is for my 84-year-old mother, who loved the book when she read it a number of years ago, and would love to read it again.  If you could help me I would be eternally grateful.
Sincerely
Norah”

I wonder if you could help by posting this so your gentle readers could chime in? I’ll monitor the comments to see if one of your fellow bitches has the answers.

Someone suggested that, since Norah is from England, the book might be a Harlequin Presents.

So - if you know that book, leave a comment or email me at the SBTB address! Thanks! 

So, who has seen Brokeback Mountain? I confess to being one of those many who say, “Oh, I want to see that!” but hasn’t yet been to the theatre. But it’s not the homosexuality that keeps me away. It’s my 2.5 month old son. It’s hard to see a movie - I don’t have two hours to do any one task right now!

But of course you want that which you cannot have, and while I’ve never had much of a bladder to make it through a movie in one sitting, now that I can’t really get to a movie, I find that’s all I look at: movie listings. I’m so perverse. And I keep looking for movies that would blend my requirements - romance, happy ending - with Hubby’s requirements - must be good.

So yes, Brokeback Mountain is on my “I would see” list, mostly because of the forbidden romance, and there’s nothing that catches my attention like hidden, clandestine hotness between two characters.

Then, there’s Underworld: Revolution which I would not touch even if you paid me. I dragged Hubby to see the first installment, Underworld, and we renamed it ‘Underwear” because it was so almighty bad. Great special effects, but monstrously (har) lousy story. And, worst of all, there could have been a GREAT romance in there - vampire and werewolf? Hoo damn! But no, the two leads had as much chemistry as the wet sponges in my sink. There was one moment where it was Time for Them to Kiss and the whole theatre GROANED out loud at how forced and contrived it was.

I turned to Hubby and apologized in a normal voice, not even bothering to whisper, “I am SO SORRY I made you see this.” And this dude behind us nudged his wife and said, “See?!”

So yeah, the Revolution of Underwear is not on my radar.

Now, we do have digital cable and OnDemand, and there’s a movie in the listings that I am most curious about: anyone seen Playing By Heart? It’s from 1998 but it’s listed as a “recommendation” in our OnDemand menu. And hey - OnDemand means I can pause to go pee, change diapers, resettle the baby into sleep, or restart it when I fall asleep in the middle! 

A writing duo working under the name YourNovel.com will customize a pre-written romance novel with your name, your spouse’s name, and add 26 different identifying characteristics from physical descriptions to best friend’s names. Your name will appear on every page,

So you can star in your own romance novel, with prices ranging from $50 to $120.

I’m not sure what I think about that. But there are excerpts to entertain me while I ponder if this adds fuel to the already-old allegation that romances are paint-by-numbers publications with no originality to them.

I’m coming in late to this (work: KICKING MY ASS; the mess in my apartment: KICKING MY ASS; life in general: KICKING MY FUCKING ASS) and am jumping in the fray only because an alert reader very kindly *snort* provided us with linkage, but in case you’re a blind or somehow incapacitated and completely unable to do your blog rounds: Angie managed to blow things up quite nicely yesterday on RTB with her article about credible reviews, and Karen Scott picked up the torch, and MaryJanice Davidson provided some hilarious commentary, even if I said “bitch, please!” more than once while reading what she had to write. Which really isn’t too different from how I am when I’m reading her books, heh.

Y’all know how I feel about reviews, reviewing and authors who think readers aren’t qualified to review. If you feel any doubts, then check out this little bit of mouth-frothing from days of yore. (Tangent: Smart Bitches is almost a year old. What the fuck, y’all?)

I only have one more thing to throw into the discussion, and it’s probably nothing particularly new (I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t read all the comments in all the threads about this issue): Authors who snip and snipe about how readers just aren’t qualified to review a book because they don’t know what it’s like to give birth to precious, precious babies all by their little selfses survive the rigors of the publishing process love to draw similes to professions like medicine, law, engineering and the hard sciences. Look, no schlub off the street is qualified to critique, say, a research paper on quantum mechanics. And that’s a perfectly valid point. Y’all need to be certified to do that shit. The implication is: the average reader’s view is invalid, and only authors can know another author’s pain and be qualified to provide commentary on a published novel.

Oh, you know what I’m gonna say next: BITCH, PLEASE. What I want to know is: how many published authors--especially authors who write genre fiction--have advanced degrees in, say, English, Linguistics or Fine Arts? If these standards are to be accepted as logical, then off the top of my head, Sara Donati is allowed to review books and THE REST OF US (myself definitely included) need to sit down and shut the fuck up.

Here’s the terrifying part that authors hate, just hate to own up to: you really don’t need any special qualifications to get a novel published, much less write one. I’m not saying it’s easy--it’s patently not. But unlike a doctor, or an accountant, or an engineer, you don’t need any sort of professional certification to be recognized as an author. People who have successfully published books--massively bestselling books, even--have come from all over the economic, education and class spectrum: high-school drop-outs, college professors, single moms scribbling story ideas on the backs of napkins, teenagers, ex-cops, accountants, bored English majors. Shit, if books like The Lighthouse Keeper are any indication, you don’t even need to be particularly literate to write a novel that’s consquently slobbered over by readers like a 10-year-old boy at a NAMBLA meeting. And experiments like Naked Came the Stranger have proved that crap, well, sells.

So on one hand: Kudos for being published.

But on the other hand: Your masterpiece is sharing that honor with books like Desire’s Blossom and To Tame a Renegade.

And one last thing: I’m also amused by the people who are swearing off MaryJanice Davidson because of her views. My personal opinion is, yeah, she’s being an asshole, but she’s a funny asshole, and that’s some hard, hard shit to pull off. I can sympathize with the urge, but hell, if I swore off asshole authors entirely, my list of authors I could read would be very slim indeed, and frankly, I’m too selfish for that because I’m such a book whore--I like ‘em big, I like a LOT of them, and often several different ones at the same time. There’s only one reason I no longer bother to read anything MJD releases, and that’s because I’ve decided her recent books have sucked a lot of ass, even though I enjoy her distinctive, snarky voice.

Check it, motherfuckers: I posted a guest column for Romancing the Blog today. It’s kind of incoherent, but since when have you guys read my ramblings because they were coherent, eh? Anyway, I head down some truly weird paths while pondering erotic and paranormal romances, and I hope that y’all get a good chuckle out of the article, if nothing else.