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

I LOVE to find romances, or mysteries, or ‘most any book, set in places that I’ve lived or visited, even if they aren’t places most people would think of as “romantic”.  It makes the story really come alive for me, as I can picture what the characters are seeing so clearly in my mind.  One of the things I love about Jenny Crusie’s and Susan Donovan’s books is that they both tend to set them in thinly-disguised southern Ohio locales, which is where I grew up.

That said though, I also love reading stories that take place somewhere I’ve never been.  They seem more exotic and it sometimes gives me ideas about places I’d like to see. (I’ve wanted to visit Greece ever since reading several Mary Stewart romantic suspense stories set there about a gazillion years ago.)

So I guess the location itself doesn’t matter much to me...it’s what the author does with it.

I don’t choose reading material based on setting—at all. *shrugs*

I would love to read more historical romances set in Australia. It used to be one big prison way back when. Imagine all the cool adventures some sweet young thing could have with a wrong-accused (of course!) gorgeous male??

Or New Zealand. I don’t know much about the history of that country. I am sure it is fascinating. Instead of having the old Native American/anglo romance, what about changing it up and having some forbidden love with a Maori?  All those tattoos? That would be cool!!!

Oooh, what an awesome book that would make. Female criminal sent to be bride of some starving male criminal!  Her crime could be something minimal. Like maybe she was thrown into debtor’s prison or something. And she thinks this will be her salvation. Maybe she was led to believe Australia was a great place to be.

The guy could be a murderer who, of course, murdered for some good reason.  He is forced to take this woman on, even though he has no way to feed her, shelter her, clothe her.

Love it!  Ok, some historical romance author, please write this for me.

ISTR Candace Proctor (sp?) writing some good historical romances set in Oz.

As far as settings go, they can make or break a sale because sometimes it’s an issue of marketability.  I had more than one agent tell me he/she’d have a difficult time selling my 19th C. Florida historicals because it was difficult to pigeonhole the book’s setting--not Civil War, not Regency, not Western, not Revolutionary War.  One asked if I could move my 1821 novel to Scotland, ‘cause that’s an easier sell.

It’s not just guessing what the readers want, it’s also how you’re going to get the bookstores to buy and shelve these “odd setting” novels.

Thanks for the link to the documentary!  I would love to see it. Maybe I’ll have to buy the DVD or something.

That’s sucks that you were told, Darlene, that a novel set in Florida wouldn’t be an easy sell. No wonder most of the historicals I’ve been seeing lately all take place in England. It’s getting very boring to me.

I love to learn a little bit of history while being entertained. I am now obsessed with this convict romance. Wish I could write a novel like that myself.

Appropos of nothing...in my freshman year of college, lo these many eons ago, I had the lead in a production of “Female Transport,” a play by Steve Gooch about women convicts shipped to the Oz penal colonies. Not so much a romance as a commentary on the political conditions of the time, but cool nonetheless.

It’s 1807 and the petty crimes of a hundred women have resulted in their forced transportation to the British penal colony of Australia. What begins as a riotous group of disparate cellmates transforms during the six month sea journey to a tough, unified matriarchal society—ready to change the wild land they are about to inhabit into a more just place than the England they left behind. As songs of the period punctuate and underscore the action, these women strive to prove themselves more civilized below deck than their male captors above.

Talk about synchronicity. If you can get BBC2 this Friday night, there’s a new Timewatch programme about the Juliana where three Australian women trace back their ancestry to this ship.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/timewatch/index.shtml

All this and what appears to be a week-long series of late-night channel 4 features on the male member, including extreme plastic surgery of the kind that makes my eyes water. My televisual cup runneth over.

There are a lot of novels set in New Orleans, a city I love and continue to love despite the recent catastrophe.  I always enjoy those.  Living in Tucson, I was happy to find some of the novels of Vickie Lewis Thompson set in this area and in other parts of Arizona that I also know well.  I’m a sucker for anything set in the Southwest and my mystery reading reflects that with my choices of Hillerman, Michael McGarrity and local favorite Sinclair Browning.

I’ve set my first novel (unpublished) alternately in New Haven, CT and Venice, Italy.  I’m working on the second set in Fair Haven, CT (terribly depressed area with seriously scary projects and lots of up-and-coming potential) and 8th century Rome, France, and England.  I chose the CT locations because that’s where I’m from and I wanted to create heroines that I would know or even be friends with.  I know Connecticut isn’t particularly sexy or romantic, unless you happen to have a fetish for W.A.S.P.s and ginormous casinos, but now I’m wondering if my unpublished status persists in part because of my blah location.

I like Connecticut too.  New Haven is an absolute blast.  But I would imagine that the romance reading masses, while having heard of CT and even knowing some vague factoid about it ("isn’t Yale there?” sort of thing), wouldn’t dream of it as a place to experience a grand, adventurous love affair.

In conclusion, what makes one location romantic and another blah is because more people have heard of the one over the other.  Is it really that simple?

I love how the heading doesn’t mention a specific city or even a region, just the whole damn country. Perth? Melbourne? Adelaide? Sydney? Uluru?

But if you read on it mentions Chateau Yering in in the Victorian wine country. Fab. I had one of the best lunches there I’ve ever had.

I live in a cool climate tourist destination west of Sydney full of waterfalls and stunning mountainous views. Very romantic. And I’ve never written about it. Too familiar I guess.

Setting is not big for me. I think a good writer can make a boring setting interesting if the romance is good.

I saw an absolutely wicked awesome documentary, speaking of Oz, about the Juliana, a ship that brought convict women of childbearing age from England to Australia because there were too many men in the colony and not enough families. The government wanted to start a functioning society and that required women.

I’m descendent from convicts, horse theives who went on to become the first white settlers in a country town south west of Sydney.

There is a terrific story about the differences between America and Australia as illustrated by the first crime that was ever prosecuted in each colony. The story goes in America a clergy man was prosecuted for not preaching the right way, while in Australia it was a soldier who dressed in women’s clothing to avoid apprehension after a night of sex and booze with the newly arrived female convicts. His punishment was to be parade around in the women’s clothes. Set the tone for the whole city really. The Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is one of the premier events each year.

Wow, a lot to comment on, here, for an Australian with a degree in history and a convict g-g-grandfather. I’ll try to keep it brief ;-)

It used to be one big prison way back when.

The Brits always intended for it to be a colony, not just a penal settlement, but sending boatloads of convicts to establish the infrastructure and get farms going was a logical first move. The first few years it was predominantly convicts and marines (and their families) who came, but many of the convicts were given tickets-of-leave, and many of the Marines opted to stay and settle (with very generous land grants). Within a few years, convicts had earned their freedom and established their own businesses, trades, farms. Convicts serving time become a minority relatively on in the history.

I read a romance recently which had the sweet heroine, the convict hero transported for murder, the benevolent jailer-father with reformist ideas about allocating convicts to farmers… the problems? Hmmm… it was set in 1860 - and convicts had stopped being tranpsorted to NSW for ten years. The hero? Murder meant the gallows, not transportation. The father’s ‘reform’ ideas? Well, the whole system, right from the early days, was based on assigning convicts. Only a few of the most recalcitrant - like my g-g-grandfather - were not assigned and worked on chained road gangs etc, living in barracks, and then usually only for a little while.

And then there was the poor sweet herpoine, surrounded only by violent criminals.... when in fact, Parramatta had had plenty of genteel society for decades by then.

So, yes, there’s plenty of scope for some fascinating stories - but if you look beyond the common ‘myths’ and preconceptions, there’s way, way more interesting stories than you could possibly imagine ;-)

Damn - who put that soapbox there??

BTW, there’s a book about the Juliana too. It’s The Floating Brothel by Sian Rees. Out in 2002. I have it prominently displayed on my bookshelf next to Courtesans and A History of Orgies. At some point, people will stop letting their children play at my house, I’m sure. I can’t wait.

BTW, I’m planning to write g-g-grandfather’s story one day. It has about all the elements of a great romance - bad boy, alpha hero with a heart under the ‘tude, heroine with grit and guts and a lousy first husband, escape from authorities, hidden affairs, children out of wedlock, two long, harsh overland journeys, a ‘secret’ wedding, and yes, a HEA ;-)

Location?  I love romances set in random-ass nowhere locations.  I’m tired of New Orleans, LA, and New York.  I like it when they’re in nowhere Georgia (Spencer’s Morning Glory), nowhere Ohio (Crusie’s Welcome To Temptation), etc.  Those places work for me because a nondescript nowhere town allows the author to build the locale to the needs of the story, rather than having the locale be a character in the story.

I hate stories that only play up the public faces of cities - like Romances set in New Orleans that take place only in the French Quarter.  Usually, the touristy places are the least romantic aspects of a city.  It’s kinda hard to get all lovey-dovey when someone’s always trying to sell you a t-shirt.

Personally, I would love to see a Romance set in Los Angeles - the real Los Angeles.  Maybe I’m a little biased, but I happen to think my city is a wonderfully romantic place.  Yes, there’s the smog and the sprawl, but there are so many wonderful, out-of-the way places, quirky, vibrant neighborhoods and great stories.

I read a lot of Karen M. Moning. Her romances usually start out in places like Ohio or Kentucky before moving to Scotland. MJ Davidson’s stuff takes place in Minneapolis (SP). I don’t read my books for the locale. It really isn’t that helpful to me.

What I like best about Christine Feehan’s books is that the early ones took place in the Carpathians Mountains in Romania. I went online and found pictures. It is beautiful there and quite romantic.

In fact, I find the continuous use of NYC and other major cities a little tiresome.

Now, I live in Albuquerque, NM. Not even remotely romantic and my romance takes place there.

Wish me luck.

I spend a lot of time looking for historical romances that are NOT set in England. Talk about searching for a needle in a haystack! I like to learn something new when I read (yes- even when reading the dreaded romance novel) and I wish I could find more historical times/locations. I remeber reading a trilogy time travel romance story that took place in ancient Egypt, Atlantis and someplace else (Crete?)… way cool.

Yeah, I had a discussion with a few people on Paperback Reader about how we’d like to see a romance set in the roaring 20’s. 

A book in America set in a new era would be as cool as a new locale.

I’m convinced romance readers are interested in being challenged.  We’ll not ALL drooling retards, although I think most publishers haven’t quite clued into that fact yet.

Chiming in to agree with Bronwyn a bit.  Not many convicts were transported for violent crimes.  The convicts in my ancestry that I can remember were a forger, a horse thief and a prostitute who stole all her customer’s clothes while he was asleep.  (I’m sure there were quite a number of murderers in the convict population, they’d just been caught on something more minor.)

Even in my teenage years where I consumed craptacular romances by the dozen I generally avoided any set in Australia writen by non-residents and any set in rural Queensland written by people who’d obviously never lived further out than the inner suburbs of Sydney.  They just made me cringe, which effectively destroyed the romance.  I’m usually happier reading about somewhere I’ve never been, because I don’t know any better and won’t be jarred out of my suspension of disbelief by something wildly inaccurate.  (’Oz’ is always jarring for me, I can’t remember anyone I know using it in a normal conversation unless ‘wizard of’ came first.)

On the other hand, I love books written about the author’s home town/state/country.  There’s so much more atmosphere and depth to the settings.

I truly love Regency England (well, I should because that’s where my stories are set, so far) but characterization is still far more important to me than setting. 

I’ll read just about any setting, and if a novel has an unusual one, I’m even more inclined to give it a try.  But as an author I have kept hearing “no one will buy that”, so maybe 19th century Lithuania will have to wait…

I do wish the SBs would try their hands at writing a funny contemp set in one of those Poconos resorts.  Would be wicked, I’m sure!

Elena Greene

The romantic spots in Canada include Niagra Falls and Montreal, though I haven’t read a single romance novel set in either of these places. They may exist, but I’ve heard that novels set in Canada are a harder sell than ones set in the US. Many Canadian novelists have had to change their settings, because Canada is considered too foreign.

:roll: