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

Methinks you forgot to close an italics HTML tag somewhere…

Your link opens on a Wiki article on Pidyon ha-Ben, which is an interesting ceremony I never got to do.  CSection babies don’t count ‘cause they don’t “open the womb.”

On the other hand, I got a pretty and not squished firstborn.[g]

I have a VHS of Paperback Hero.  If I can dig it up, I’ll be glad to wing it your way.

I would spend a wonderful night with Hugh Jackman. I do not know if I would want him to speak but I am sure I could find other things he was good at.

Oh, if you are doing Aussy films.

Get The Sum of Us an early Russell Crowe film. He plays a gay plumber and looks dang good in the shower scene.

I’ve got the Jackman DVD in US format.  Write me privately and I’ll send it to you.

Men, on the other hand, are not taught to read the experiences of a female protagonist as representative of their own experience, and when it does happen that a male writes a female protagonist accurately, it’s remarkable.

Nah, it just means they have great girlfriends and probably a man at home to torture, I mean provide research.

For a long time, there was an ebook author that went simply by J Morgan.  Their books were light, funny, and very sexy.  Just recently, J Morgan ‘came out’… as Bill.  Bill is a happily married man with a teenage daughter, a wife he adores and a cat.  He works in a lumber yard, and you look at a pic, and you’ll never see anyone more masculine.  But, Bill writes romance.  And he does it very well.

So, it happens.

I like Naomi Neale, who is a male friend of mine.  His/her books include I Went to Vassar For This? and The Mile-High Hair Club.  He also writes “juveniles” that stray into the romance category under the name of Naomi Neale.  I loved You Are SO Cursed!,
Chloe, Queen of Denial,
Beaner O’Brian’s Absolutely Ginormous Guidebook to Guys,
Senses Working Overtime and I Am SO Jinxed!.

Geek advice:

It is also usually pretty easy to hack your DVD player to set it to all regions, so it will play UK and Aussie DVDs. 

Put the model and brand name of your player into Google, along with the words “region hacks” and see if you come up with anything.

Often, it takes just a few button punches on the remote to get to a secret menu, and set the region to ‘0’. And a whole new world of viewing is wide open.

Half a world, anyway.  But it’s the half with Hugh Jackman. 

And did anyone mention Bernard Cornwell, yet?  I think he thinks his first books are romance, and he had a female pseudonym.  But judging by the one I have, I’d say “Historical Ficiton”.

You might also look for Paperback Writer on VHS.  I managed to get my hands on it several years ago, and thankfully it’s NTSC and not PAL.

D’oh!  Make that Paperback Hero.  Jackman, not the Beatles. [facepalm]

Oooh!  I know one: Tori Carrington, who writes categories for Harlequin and then some chick-lit about a Greek girl for Tor, is actually Tony and Lori Karayanni.  I met him once.  He’s very nice.  But yeah, it’s a husband-and-wife duo.

They’re from my hometown and have set at least 3 of their books there. :)

I lived in Japan for a while, and had the same problem with any dvds i bought there. if you’re willing to watch it on your computer, or hook your computer up to your tv (via an s cable), then i recommend downloading VLC media player. it’ll play anything, regardless of the region. :)

I don’t mind men who write romances since one of my favorite authors is Jennifer Wilde aka Tom E. Huff. Coming from the perspective of a minority woman whose voice in literature is doubly absent, I’ve been conditioned to view the voice of any white person as the ‘representative of humankind in general’.  I’m only wowed and bug-eyed when a non-black person gets the black voice ‘right’. (tongue in cheek)

I heard Dean Koontz wrote under a female pen name for romance. I could be wrong, but I believe I read that some where.

May McGoldrick is another husband and wife team that wrote historical romance. I’ve only read one, The Thistle and the Rose, but I enjoyed it. The historical aspect (set in the Scottish Highlands) was well written and the love story was sweet, not too angsty. Most of the conflict in the relationship, if I remember correctly, was external, which I find refreshing now and then. I guess they are now writing contemporaries under a different name. They used to live near me (don’t know if they still do) and I believe the husband taught at one of the local colleges.

Ha, I just mentioned one on my Vampire Wire blog, http://www.vampirewire.blogspot.com: Rob Pearce.  Kate Rothwell interviewed him and said, “It normally takes Rob at least three drinks to admit he started reading romance because there was this one romance with a heroine on the cover with truly outstanding assets.”

I also recently read about a husband/wife team who write paranormal romance, but unfortunately I can’t remember their names.

I read Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone before Oprah discovered it.  I assumed Lamb was a woman because the character was so true.  Henry James wrote damn fine novels with women as central characters.

Regarding PAPERBACK HERO, I did some research for Darlene Marshall on this a couple of weeks ago and found a US compatible version at http://www.sell.com/22QDRG

Turn Me On by Cherie Jeffrey is actually a new chick lit novel written by a male/female writing team. However, I don’t think it’s being labeled as chick lit (the voice certainly is, though).

Also, one of the former mentors in my grad program--Steven Harper/Steven Piziks--writes SF/F mostly, but was writing for the Harlequin Bombshell line under a female pseudonym before the line folded. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what his pen name was.

There are a few other teams tha are MF, Lee & Miller and Leda Swan.

He’s not a romance novelist, but I’ve always thought Charles de Lint wrote incredibly believable women protagonists. It’s one of the reasons he’s one of my favorite authors.

On the issue of men writing as women, there are two extremely interesting case studies, one of which is still something of a publishing scandal (though I side with the author, myself).

Rahila Khan. In short, Khan wrote a book of short stories that Virago Press picked up and praised to the skies in the 80s. When they found out that Khan was, in fact, a middle-aged white vicar, they not only dropped him/her, they pulped all the books. Finding a copy of that book is extremely difficult these days.

Yasmina Khadra’s story has a happier outcome. It’s now fairly well known that Khadra is man, formerly a soldier in the Algerian Army. To protect himself during his military career, he borrowed his wife’s name to publish his fiction. But Khadra, at least, hasn’t been disavowed by the publishing industry.

What does it say that men who write sensitive, thought-provoking books often feel the need to write as women? (For that matter, what does it say that I’ve never seen a spy thriller with a woman’s name on it?)

You will find few other women who will celebrate the eye-candy that is Hugh Jackman more than moi, but, alas, after tracking down Paperback Hero, I was exceptionally disappointed.  Not by Hugh, natch, but the script was meh and the notions of what constituted “romance” novels seemed sadly out-of-date.  Plus, the woman who was his love interest annoyed the fuck out of me.  That’s why I like to play with Hugh in the privacy of my mind. 

On another note, my husband and I have been discussing men writing romance for some time now.  I’d read on the RT posting boards that some readers felt betrayed if they learned a romance author was a man, which, to my mind, seemed rather bigoted.  Does the author’s gender really matter when determining whether or not a book is a good read? 

I have just written a literary novel under my real name, and the narrator and protagonist is not only a man, but a womanizer and all-around antihero.  It would deeply sadden me if an editor or reader rejected the work without considering it on the basis of my sex.  (BTW, the book is out to editors now.  Please, my dear fellow Smart Bitches, keep your fingers and pudendas crossed for me!)

You know it was only about 6 months ago that a guy who was trying his hand at writing romance showed up at the RT magazine forum.  He wasn’t treated terribly well at the onset.  I think I remember a woman actually saying a man being there made her uncomfortable.

That’s sexism.  It kind of surprised me.  Dark ages, anyone?

Anyway, I wouldn’t “out” any of the guys on my other loop, though I nudged them this way with a link.  I don’t necessarily want my pen name and actual name out there TOO widely, and wouldn’t want to violate anyone’s privacy. 

But on one of my favorite author sites there are three guys I know of.

A book is a book is a book.  Good or bad.  It’s weird… sci fi/fantasy seems to suffer under a similar (though reversed) bigotry.  Many men just won’t read sff written by a woman. And when I taught I noticed the younger the male, the more resistant to reading females he was.  I didn’t notice a similar bias in girls/teens/college beginners.

Interesting, at any rate.

I also wonder whether people opposed to men writing romance fiction featuring female protagonists even consider this issue in reverse: does anyone think that women writers can’t write believable male characters because they’ll never really understand how the opposite gender thinks?

I’ve read Charles de Lint’s work, but I don’t think I’ve hit any of the rest of them.  Marta, do you mean Barb and JC Hendee their series is the Saga of the Noble Dead first one is Dhampir? 

Am I the only one who has had issues with two authors writing a book together?  I find, most of the time, that the differences in the voice of the authors comes out.  I’ve noticed inconsistencies with the writing, and it just bugs the heck out of me. 

It would be interesting to conduct a survey of the husband/wife teams and find out if they are both writing, or if one plots and one writes, or how they work in general.

You know Janice, I’ve heard that some men say women writers don’t get the sex right from the male perspective.  Don’t know how accurate that is.

Although he doesn’t write “romance”, NYT bestselling author, Eric Jerome Dickey writes awesome women’s fiction, doing the female pov amazingly well. He’s a hell of a great writer. He’s an author I plan to get you ladies’ editor hooked on. I owe her. She has gotten me hooked on a few authors, knowing I don’t want to add more to my long enough list ;)

Hi, my name is Johnny, I am a man and I write romance. Although I usually don’t write in 1st person, my first novella will be published in October was written from the hero’s POV. How well it is received is yet to be seen.

My current WIPs, I can’t seem to do just one, are written in 3rd person. I am more comfortable writing in this POV and it is a more “gender-neutral” way to write. A love story is about love and interaction. I think a person can look at the interaction of two people and see and feel why the couple are falling in love no matter who writes it. If it is written well.

Why write romance, or more specifically in my case, paranormal romance? That is easy. When I started to write, no matter what type of story I toyed with, it always ended up with a love interest at its core. Why fight what comes naturally?

Maybe one day the person at the RT boards, and it was only one who was extremely rude, will be able to say “I used to hate that guy when he was unpublished, now I hate him when I see the bestseller’s list”. That would be sweet.

LOL Johnny.

You rock, dude.

I do remember that whole minor kerfuffle over there and it stunned me.  I can’t think of very many places/situations/communities/groups that are, for me, gender sensitive.  And I was a director of a women’s center in college!  We had male members. 

How do we expect men to embrace feminism and-- well, women-- if we don’t invite them in?

*shruggles*

hheheheheehh

I said “male members.”

Hehehehehe… snort.

LOL but you didn’t say “embrace male members” heheheheheheheeee

I love reading anthologies especially.  One publisher in particular. Revolving groupings of authors.  One author in particular I did not like--skipped through/over “her” stories on a regular basis and then found out it was a man.  Went back over the stories and realized why I didn’t like them.  I really did not feel any connection to any of his heroines.

Just food for thought.

As long as a romance is well written, it doesn’t bother me one way or the other. Although, I am convinced Susan Johnson is a man who does NOT write well.

It’s really odd, but very prevalent: women dubbing both published romance and the fandom and fanfic version, as “women’s safe space.” It’s like a clubhouse, “No Boys Allowed!”

As if every other kind of writing, every other creative space, is Boy Space, so, hey, this is ours?And I think that’s such a weird assumption to make!  Isn’t it exactly like saying a woman cannot and should not write from the male perspective?  We shouldn’t write Westerns or Sci-Fi because it would make the guys “uncomfortable”? 

But then you look at the televised version, at soap operas, and most of the head writers and executive producers are male. Sure, there are female script writers on staff, but guys have been helming romantic stories for women for decades.  Yeah, some of them write things where husbands shoot their wives in the head, but generally they get the genre conventions right and provide viewers with a lot of fun, strong, women and well-crafted love stories.  Douglas Marland, William J. Bell, they’re pretty much considered visionaries in the genre.

If you can write it and write it well, then I don’t see why gender has to be a block.  That’s like saying I can’t write about white people effectively because I’m not white.

Hey Kyra, what were the anthologies and do you remember which was the guy?  I haven’t read any of these other ones listed but I read a *lot* of anthologies.

Wayne Jordan, founder and publisher of Romance In Color, is a published author with Kimani. Likewise, Rob Preece who runs Books For A Buck also writes romances, some under the pen name Robyn Anders.

But speaking of guys, no love for the male editors? I know one, Chris at Dorchester. He is involved in projects like 2176, Crimson City, and now the Shomi thing, which I like. Call me stereotypical, but I like how these projects take what is usually a “guy thing” (science-fiction, cyberpunk") and incorporate it with romance pretty.

Perhaps if we have more male editors who can bring in some fresh way at looking at things, maybe things will be more interesting in the genre.

There’s a guy in my local RWA chapter. He’s not published yet so he can’t be outed. *g*

The web comic Questionable Content includes a guy character named Jimbo (I think) who writes romance novels. Successful ones, too. He doesn’t appear in the comic very often, but it’s always nice to see him when he’s there.

There’s obviously Bob Mayer, Jenny Crusie’s other writing half.  Don’t Look Down pretty much sucked, but Agnes and the Hitman (just out) is amazingly fabulous.

From an historical perspective, the 18thC is filled with men writing women.  Daniel Defoe’s Roxana and Moll Flanders, Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, Fielding’s Amelia, just to name the big three.

Funnily enough, legions of 18thC and 19thC scholars have examined how men write women, how women write women, and are now examining how men write men, but very few have looked at how women write men, believe it or not.  I’m trying to change that, but it’s a very strange lack in the academic community.

I don’t read male authors.  I can’t be bothered, because I generally just don’t like their voice.  But I have discovered an area in which I ADORE the male voice:  gay male erotica.  So I’m going to plug, again, one of my all-time favorite *romance* authors:  Matthew Haldeman-Time.  His short stories are to die for, and his novel, Off the Record is one of the most emotional, true romances I’ve ever read:  a story of falling in love, having it betrayed, and the process of true forgiveness and acceptance.  No mysteries, no suspense, no outside anything.  Just love and all that it means.

There’s other gay male authors who are actually men themselves (although lots use male or gender neutral names and are women).  I’ve only made my way through a small fraction of them, but they’re worth reading.  Great *romances*

Then there’s women who do the male voice particularly well:  Suzanne Brockmann, Nora Roberts, Laura Kinsale, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Joey Hill.  But that’s another post.

Let’s post this and see if I closed all my HTML.

James Patterson wrote a couple of “love stories” (not necessarily romances...I don’t consider Nicholas Sparks’ books to be romances either...they’re love stories). In Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas, he has two major female protagonists: Suzanne (who’s diary Kate is reading) and Kate.

And in his Women’s Murder Club series (nowhere near as well known as his Alex Cross series), he writes in 1st person POV of a woman. OK, not romance...it’s mystery, but still, it’s female POV.

I’ve done a few romances, mostly novellas. Aspen Mountain Press will be releasing an anthology of them shortly under the name Gillian’s Place.

Those stories were posted on a website for a while. I received a lot of feedback on them that said I did a good job with my female characters.

And two of the stories were told from the man’s POV. This didn’t harm their popularity at all.

Personally I think the dichotomy between male and female writers is a false one. They experience the same emotions. The only difference is those enforced by the society we live in. Men are supposed to be ‘strong’ for which read unemotional. That makes it hard for them to express those emotions.

But that’s nothing a good writer can’t overcome.

That’s a writer’s job, to explore emotion and write in a way that the reader is drawn into it.

I see no reason why that ability should be limited to a single gender.

I know a few aspiring male romance writers, and I don’t see why men can’t want romance as much as women. I think it’s a question more of disposition than sex. Some people like romance, some people don’t. There are plenty of women who would drop dead before they’d write romance, too.

As far as voice, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell. In fact, I’m almost sure I wouldn’t. Good writing is good writing. :)

I always suspected Jennifer Wilde was a man because “her” heroines hopped from bed to bed without ever once thinking about birth control. 

But I’ll give Jennifer/Tom credit for writing heroines who were independent and went after what they wanted.  I always liked his books.

I knew Jennifer Wilde was a man!  Ha!

I really liked those Marietta books.  The heroine was so amazingly practical and such a breath of fresh air to my teenaged self.  Especially after gorging myself on Jennifer Blake.  Is she a man?

I’ve recently discovered Jude Morgan (who is a guy), an English writer who’s got at least two books out in the US: INDISCRETION, which is his Austen tribute with a great beta hero; and PASSION about Mary Shelley and the girls and boys (Byron, Caroline, Claire, etc. etc)--both wonderful and brilliant.

One author that comes to mind is husband wife duo that write historicals under May McGoldrick and romantic suspense under Jan Coffey.  They tend to be hit and miss for me, but I don’t think that is soley because a man is partially writing them.

Not only can a man write the female perspective, but can they write the male perspective as females want to read it?  Obviously men writing romance have to relate to women somehow if they’re comfortable enough to write to mostly a female audience.  My question is can they write the heroes we love?  Can they write the alpha that we love to hate, but just love by the end of the book?

I didn’t pick up J.R. Ward’s first book b/c I thought she was a man.  Biased?  Sure.  I am glad I flipped to the back though, wondering what a man writing romance looked like.  LOL

a book is a book.  it stands on it’s own.  this is the era of cyberspace- no one is who they say they are.  how could someone say they were “betrayed” at discovering a gender?  what about race? socio-economics? education? we’re ghosts in the machine, and the romance is subjective.  people who read literature based on the author’s biography (example: the people hounding laurell hamilton) are gossipy biddies.  i say bring on the men.

Now wait a minute. Hounding Laurell K. Hamilton?

Not likely.

She has a mouth and a foot. She has shown she has both of these by demonstration on her own blog.

Sure, men can write romance. Most don’t want to.

Typically, male writers tend to produce stories that are more plot-driven, and their characterizations are not as deep as those produced by women.

Why? Because women are trained to focus on emotions and feelings and men are trained to focus on action and results.

There are always exceptions, of course. This is not a hard and fast rule, but something I’ve noticed over the years.

Interesting timing on this topic as I’m in the middle of a book by Laura London called Gypsy Heiress that I got at a garage sale. To be honest I bought it because the cover and the blurb made it sound like dated, slightly campy fun, but it’s actually quite good. I do find the writing style different from the usual romances I read in that there’s a lot of what Jenny Crusie calls info-dump, but I’m still enjoying it.

I recently read a “romance” written by a man and was struck by two things: 1) there was precious little dialogue, and 2) what little dialogue there was came mostly from the hero.  It was every man’s fantasy.

Dean R. Koontz wrote as Leigh Nichols, and I admit I loved “her” books. When I found out that Leigh was Dean, my first thought was, no wonder I liked “her” so much! LOL.

Well, since Love’s Tender Fury was probably the first romance novel I read—and one that I can read again and again without getting tired of it—I would have to say I don’t mind male romance writers. And OMG! Dare to Love! I threw glassware at men for YEARS after reading that one.

I actually find some of Charles deLint’s female characters a little annoying, but I know I’m in the minority there, since most people I know love them. It’s just that Jilly Coppercorn has always seemed too perfect to me, like some geeky guy’s idea of The Ideal Woman. I did love the heroine (and her mother) in Greenmantle, though.

(I hope this doesn’t show up three or four times; every time I preview it first, it tells me to enter the verification text, but doesn’t give me a space to do that from the preview)

I actually find some of Charles deLint’s female characters a little annoying, but I know I’m in the minority there, since most people I know love them. It’s just that Jilly Coppercorn has always seemed too perfect to me, like some geeky guy’s idea of The Ideal Woman.

OMG, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. deLint seems to worship and revere Jilly Coppercorn, like he’s half in love with her or something. My husband suggested maybe she’s based on his wife, so that’s what I’m picking up. I don’t know, but she gets on my nerves with her embodiment of all virtues and constant sunshine in the face of adversity. I do like deLint, though. I think I’ve read everything he’s ever written.

In the 60’s and early 70’s there was a sub genre of romance called gothics.  Featured heroine who had to be TSTL in some bizarre peril, usually some wacked out castle.  The hero who was the bad guy at the beginning was usually pretty grouchy for at least the first 2/3 of the book.  Sounds bad I know, but I LOVED THEM.  And 2 of my favorite authors were guys--Jean Francis Webb and Madeleine Brent.

Aaah, crazy women. I fantasised about men writing romance… you can find them being romantic in a lot of places outside the romance genre (First book in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, maybe? Wizard’s First Rule. No HEAs, though… still haven’t reached the end of the series, though.)

Hmm, possible unexplored market. Romance novel for the straight guys. That would be very, very interesting. If a woman read those, it would be likely their feministic ideals would probably be offended…

Am I the only one who has had issues with two authors writing a book together?  I find, most of the time, that the differences in the voice of the authors comes out.  I’ve noticed inconsistencies with the writing, and it just bugs the heck out of me.

That can be the case, but not always.

Jenny Crusie and Bob Mayer say they write their characters separately, and it works because they have naturally similar speech rhythms.  I agree with Sarah Frantz--Don’t Look Down wasn’t good, but they’ve really hit their stride with Agnes and the Hitman.  In particular, I hear more of Crusie.  It reads like a classic Crusie, with an edgier hero than usual and lots of action.  I’m all for it.

Thirding the de Lint love, although I do agree that Jilly Coppercorn is not a woman who would ever exist in real life as I know it. But I think de Lint handles romance fairly well. The romance was my favorite aspect of The Little Country , for example.

Oh, even I agree that Jilly is quite a Mary Sue (tortured past but shines with all kinds of wonderfulness in her daily life), but for all that, de Lint still writes wonderful women, especially in his earlier work, I think. Though his later stuff has a few great characters--I’m partial to Saskia, myself. :)

Hooray to Gail for helping to push J Morgan out of his ‘cyber closet’

He’s a lot more romantic than I am, and I know as I’m the wife in the little blurb above. But the happily part varies, especially during football season. I won’t go into the cat or the teenager bits because the truth is scarier than fiction.

I dont know if someone else has said this, but I picked that movie up in England, and have a copy transferred to US DVD.  Let me know if you can’t find it and I can get a copy made.  Its cute!

I do like deLint, though. I think I’ve read everything he’s ever written.

Ann, have you read de Lint’s short stories he wrote for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s anthologies she edited for DAW?  I remember his stories for her Sword and Sorceress anthologies were always original and different.  Good stuff.

Jenny Crusie and Bob Mayer say they write their characters separately, and it works because they have naturally similar speech rhythms.

It could be, I tend to stay away from books that I know have been written by two authors.  I’ve tried them, mainly in sci-fi/fantasy, and the speech patterns, plotting, and voice in general, all seem to be off.  I’ve got one of the PC & Kristin Cast books in my TBR, so I’m going to give it another shot but I’m reserving judgement.

Hmm, possible unexplored market. Romance novel for the straight guys. That would be very, very interesting. If a woman read those, it would be likely their feministic ideals would probably be offended…

CM, this is brilliant.  I doubt if they would sell, but I’d be willing to read it just to see the differences, as opposed to a romance written for a female audience.

Quality is totally more important than author gender, silly bigots are missing some great reading.

Sandra D...Laura London aka Tom & Sharon Curtis, fabulous authors.  Anybody know where they disappeared to?

Although I invariably spot male authors writing heroines, it doesn’t change my enjoyment of a good story. I’s the differences in how the heroine relates to herself.

Example...I just finished King’s Property by Morgan Howell (SF); enjoyed it and anticipating the sequil. By mid-book, it’s clear to me that “Morgan” is male. Although there is one early description of heroine, NOTHING thereafter, and the tell for me was the hair.  Not even casual references to cutting short for cleanliness & convience, nor mentions of braiding or care if it’s long.  Ergo, Morgan is a man because a woman would account for her hair.  Even as slave being dragged around and abused, the subject is going to come up even causually or in passing, if the author is a woman.

Yes! Gay erotica is my new favorite genre...esp. gay vampire stories.

AND...those of you who know budding male romance authors, PLEASE encourage them for the rest of us...quality writing is ALWAYS welcome.

I think it is a pity when any writing genre is seen as the province of only one group.  More power to the romance writing men out there!  That being said, I was startled to realize at some point that most of the books on my “compulsively reread list” (compiled across genres) were written by women.  I think that I just connected with their voices better at some level.

On another note, I’ve read a fair number of Charles DeLint’s books, and recommend either Trader or Yarrow for a nice romance sub-plot.

By mid-book, it’s clear to me that “Morgan” is male. Although there is one early description of heroine, NOTHING thereafter, and the tell for me was the hair.  Not even casual references to cutting short for cleanliness & convience, nor mentions of braiding or care if it’s long.  Ergo, Morgan is a man because a woman would account for her hair.  Even as slave being dragged around and abused, the subject is going to come up even causually or in passing, if the author is a woman.

Now see that is an interesting observation. It is also one I noted when the current rash of Marion Zimmer Bradley “Ghost” written Darkover novels hit the market.

Marion had an intelligent use of this. You knew the type of clothing and the hair styles and such.

The person who is writing now under her name goes overboard. It is jarring when there are whole paragraphs, hell pages even, dedicated to the heroines cloths and talking about their choice or their color or how the character feels about what someone else is wearing.

It is also a problem I have in Contemporaries when the author uses brand names as short hand constantly. Like you are reading an elaborate sales catalog. La Croix Sweetie La Croix

I just never thought of it as distinctly female author writing.

Now see that is an interesting observation. It is also one I noted when the current rash of Marion Zimmer Bradley “Ghost” written Darkover novels hit the market.

Marion had an intelligent use of this. You knew the type of clothing and the hair styles and such.

The person who is writing now under her name goes overboard.

Teddy, I wouldn’t even bother with those.  I know Marion wanted Darkover to continue after her death, she even wrote about it before she died, but they just aren’t the same.  Even some of the ones that are co-written prior to her death seem off to me.  Yes, I’ve read all of them, along with all of the Darkover anthologies, I was a nut about that series. 

As for the difference in her style vs. a contemporary author, that could probably be chalked up to when she first started writing.  She wrote sci-fi/pulp fiction when it was strictly a men only club back in the 50’s.  I would imagine she had to adapt to fit what would sell, hence her style might be spare on the descriptions and be more “male” in tone.

I wonder how many of the men writing wonderful, nuanced, gay-romance are really women using male pen-names?  Over the last thirty years, most ‘slash’, which is just gay romance in the guise of fanfic, has certainly been the province of women writers, and a good place where they could have honed their craft.

Gwynnyd

Dean Koontz’s Leah Nichols was romantic suspense, heavy on the suspense & supernatural. However, way back when, he also wrote five gothic romances as Deanna Dwyer. These were Koontz’s first novels and were intended to pay the bills. There is also a small possibility that he wrote an erotic novel under Leonard Chris. I want to say there’s another bigger name author who wrote romance early in his career, but I could be wrong. I have to check some of my reference books.

What’s the poop on the copyright page?  If something is written under a pen name, will it ALWAYS give the author’s actual name after the copyright?  Or is there a way to get around that so that it can be copyrighted under the pen name?  Just curious.

I caught about half an hour of Paperback Hero and since then have always wanted to finish it off.  I remember not really caring one way or the other about the story (even five, sixish years ago it felt dated) but Hugh Jackman as anyone is hot, and Hugh Jackman as a romance novelist/truck driver is super hottt.  Multiple t’s, no joke.