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

Just a gentle, friendly reminder to let your downthere have her day. You have until Monday, Feb. 19, to enter the new Smart Bitch Contest: Parting the Beef Curtain - The Very Verbal Vaggys. Your dramatic hoohah deserves a monologue of her own - just email to Sarah and Candy by midnight Monday, Feb. 19 (PST). 

Hey, remember about a year and a half ago, when I decided to try and write a serial novel for a lark? And then Crazy Shit happened, and I pretty much abandoned it because I was insanely busy and distracted? Well, last night, I was feeling restless, so I pulled up the file on my computer, and as I re-read what I’d written in the past, realized I knew exactly what needed to happen next. And I started writing again.

No promises as to when the next installment is going to be, but hope you enjoy this one.

And to refresh your memory of the story so far, take a look at chapter one here, then chapter two, part one here, and lookit: chapter two, part two, woo.

The usual disclaimers about the lack of editing and research applies.

These here words copyright Candy Tan.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Also, a word of warning: This particular bit is gruesome. Those who are squeamish or weak of stomach: I really recommend that you skip it.

Bitchery Reader Marie forwarded me a link to a very intriguing series of synopses of Racheline Maltese’s favorite romantic pairings in Sci Fi/Fantasy. As Marie says, “It’s all the more interesting to read because Racheline includes a variety of non-hetero-normative relationships, including one that can only really happen in speculative fiction.  If Romancelandia gets in a furor over the possibility of two guys getting it on, what would they make of Pie’oh’Pah?.”

Good point. The possibilities of Sci Fi and fantasy pairings certainly bends the romance genre’s somewhat heterocentric expectations (though I hold my breath that this is slowly changing for the better as so many readers embrace gay and lesbian romance).

Racheline’s list has got me thinking, and I’m sure Candy will rise up and trump any of my thoughts on this one, because my ability to remember anything exactly correctly is known to be absolutely crap. What are your favorite romance hero and heroine pairs? It doesn’t have to be thep protagonists, certainly. But who’s your fave?

In addition to the gift of Manties, I’d like to wish the Bitchery a very happy V-Day as expressed by the always Awesome Natalie Dee:

nataliedee.com

Have fun, kids, and remember: mop up those lube spills as quick as you can, because not only is that shit slippery as hell when you step on it, it gets all crusty if you let it dry and then you have to scrub scrub scrub like hell.

In Valentine’s Days past, we’ve offered wishes for you to treat yourselves nicely, and a collection of sensual and romantic poetry.

This year? We Bitches offer the Valentine’s Gift Guide, for all your shopping needs. Yes, it’s late because buying day-of means a belated gift. But these are tokens of affection that just keep giving.

Well, not “tokens” so much as “token.” Big token. Huge token - of our affection for you. This gift is SO great, it trumps all other Valentine’s offerings, from flowers to chocolate to those hearts that say, “Lick me, Conrad.” If we could, we’d buy one for every single one of you, because this gift is THAT GOOD.

What could it be? Wait no longer for I shall reveal all. The perfect gift to go with all your noble mantittes? Manties. For when your man wants “to be and feel a little special, naughty, and very sexy,” bring out some hot satin lace trimmed man panties. Rwor. Come on, ladies. You know you’re tired of the elephant g-string with squeaker.

Happy Valentine’s Day, with much love and asskicking from the Smart Bitches. And please, if you’ve received a gift that’s better than Manties, and we doubt it’s possible, by all means, share.

Poor Lord Mantitte: he’s a buxom Lord, AND a pirate. But since he comes equipped with his own personal flotation devices, he is never lost at sea.

Sarah: Eyepatch? Check. Shirtless in the balmy moonlight? Check. But what’s in his hand? I see the cutlass is grasped in his left hand but if you look below the “P” and the “i” in “Pirate,” you see something long and flesh-colored in his right hand extending all the way down to his knee.

Whoa.

His yardarm? Apparently not an arm.

Candy: WHOA. That cleavage is out of control. Perhaps this is petty jealousy on my part, but I really don’t want to fantasize about anyone who has juicier cleavage than I do.

I do love how the points of the T are covering his nipples. Froofy-ass hair blowing in the wind? Check. Sassy McSash that’s all red and flowy and shit? Check. Giant overcompensatory cutlass? Check. Armband? Check. Nipples showing? NO, THAT WOULD BE TOO GAY.

Sarah: Dude. She’s dead. You killed her with your stanky swamp breath. And you have a fever, so you’re next. Nothing like some in-the-throes-of-death clinch covers.

Candy: Look, all I’m saying is, smearing yourself in Crisco because you ran out of sunblock is a bad idea.

Sarah: If Abercrombie & Fitch did romance covers, I imagine they’d be modeled like this. These two look utterly disinterested.

My question is, what precisely is holding up his pants? Is he sucking in his gut to impress the lady? Because it looks like there’s a good three to four inches between his waistline and his hairless belly.

Nice outie belly button, by the way. Does his outie need an eyepatch??

Candy: You know, if they had black turtlenecks on instead of pirate regalia, I’d expect them to ask me if I wanted to touch their monkey.

Sarah: No eyepatch, no shirt half-undone yet tucked in.... How am I supposed to know he’s a pirate? By his manly pirate mullet? I bet SHE’s the pirate. Her shirt’s half undone.

Candy: By his manly cutlass, of course, Sarah. Also, his gold satin sash.

Oddly enough, this is also one of the answers to “What do pirates and drag queens have in common?”

Ron at Galleycat has some marvellous linkage on the various reactions by chick lit authors. Go ye forth and click; marvel and chuckle with evil glee. Me? I’m behind on my writing and blog-hopping. So apologies for the stale air of this piece; I just managed to steal a few free moments to compose my thoughts and my bile.

So while reading Maureen Dowd’s incredibly silly piece on how OMG THE SHELVES THEY ARE PINK WITH CHICK LIT PLAGUE, I couldn’t help but compose this little mental letter to her:

Dear Maureen:

George Eliot called from beyond the grave, and she’d like her schtick back.

Love and lipstick-free kisses (I read the pink books, but I don’t wear make-up, which I hope is at least a point in my favor),

Candy

Though the comparison is quite unfair to Eliot, since a) she actually had a coherent point about technique and skill being important to storytelling, instead of just slagging off in a singularly sloppy fashion an entire genre of books, and b) Eliot actually knew what she was talking about, whereas Dowd’s attempt to assert her feminism by displaying a rather potent mixture of ignorance and misogyny was, to quote Sarah, shooting herself in the foot with her vagina. (Hey, new idea for a play: Reservoir Vaginae! No, wait, sorry, didn’t mean to offend: Reservoir Hoo-Hoos.)

My eyes did widen just the littlest bit when I read this part of her article:

Even Will Shakespeare is buffeted by rampaging 30-year-old heroines, each one frantically trying to get their guy or figure out if he’s the right guy, or if he meant what he said, or if he should be with them instead of their BFF or cousin, or if he’ll come back, or if she’ll end up stuck home alone eating Häagen-Dazs and watching “CSI” and “Sex and the City” reruns.

You know, she may have a point there. It’s not as if The Bard himself has ever written a story (or three) featuring cross-dressing protagonists and reams of comic miscommunication, or plays driven by romantic misunderstandings, or stories about tangled-up couples who wibble endlessly about their love and obsessively analyze what their lovers say and do. No no no. Not Shakespeare. It’s not as if he’d ever stoop to making dirty jokes and puns in his plays. Because dammit all, he’s litrachure.

Why? Being dead, white and formerly endowed with a penis helps, but most importantly, you have to remember that back when his plays were published, none of the covers were sullied by so much as a smidgen of pink ink. Or stiletto heels. Shakespeare’s heroines were always the most sober paragons of womanhood, and not horny, flighty teenagers.

I even found Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” with chick-lit pretty-in-pink lettering. (...) Trying to keep up with soap-opera modernity, “Romeo and Juliet” has been reissued with a perky pink cover.

Oh, the horrah, the horrah! What a sign of these degraded times! Publishers putting lurid covers on classics to catch the public’s eye?* Quelle idée! I have seen the horsemen of the cultural apocalypse, and they’re wearing Jimmy Choos.

This passage also amused me:

In the 19th century in America, people often linked the reading of novels with women. Women were creatures of sensibility, and men were creatures of action. But now, Leon suggested, American fiction seems to be undergoing a certain re-feminization.

Oh God forbid that girl cooties reappear in literature. We like our books to be potent and masculine, redolent of pipe smoke and Hemingway’s unwashed underwear. We’ve forgotten that the masculine experience, that prototypical manly isolato striking out to wrestle (in a non-homoerotic, not at all naked-and-rubbed-all-over-with-oil way) with fish or bulls or stallions or giant sperm whales called Dick, should be held as the ideal and the eternal; stories about women’s struggles with family, the cult of beauty, their careers and their lovers are fluff. Harlequins, as she called ‘em. Yes. Got it.

This choice tidbit from Leon ”I flap like an outraged matron when confronted with fictional hypotheticals distasteful to my delicate sensibilities” Wieseltier was also very amusing to me:

“These books do not seem particularly demanding in the manner of real novels,” Leon said. “And when we’re at war and the country is under threat, they seem a little insular. America’s reading women could do a lot worse than to put down ‘Will Francine Get Her Guy?’ and pick up ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’”

Dear heart, I don’t know how to break this to you, but...I’ve read The Red Badge of Courage three times. The first time was when I was twelve years old. I’ve read plenty of books about Man’s Inhumanity to Man In a Time of War; for a slightly more contemporary take, I highly recommend Pat Barker’s WWI trilogy, though some may want to approach that with caution because not only is it written by a woman, it contains *drops voice to a whisper* the gay. The thing is, it’s not a zero sum game. There are those of us who like our pink books and who are very, very well-versed in the Western literary canon. This may be difficult for you to wrap your mind around, Leon (can I call you Leon?), but do try. You’ll find it amazingly liberating.

* Yes, am quite aware that the slideshow on the Slate.com article showcases newly-designed pulp covers. Can’t find any links to the original pulp covers to, say, The Sheltering Sky. Dammit.

It’s that time - Candy and Sarah have been inspired by all your downthere creativity to create A Smart Bitch Contest: Parting the Beef Curtain - The Very Verbal Vaggys.

We think it’s time your heroine’s overwrought vagina had a monologue of her own. What does the contemporary or historical, sci-fi or futuristic romance heroine’s hoohah have to say? Tell us in 200 words or less by Monday Feb. 19. We’ll post our dramatic performing poontangs for Bitchery Voting.

The winner shall receive an gift certificate for $25.00 US to Babeland, which shall enable you to treat your woo-woo to a very special, frisky prize.

Email your entry to SarahATsmartbitchestrashybooksDOTcom, AND to Candy@smartbitchestrashybooksDOTcom, and wow us with your woowoo’s whining, your downthere’s dementia, your clam’s crackups. You get the gist. I’ll stop now.

Maureen Dowd’s column this weekend focused on the issue of “Chick Lit” being shelved among the classical works of fiction under that general heading.

Before I get to my actual point, anyone else notice that in her column she mentions that she bought a bunch of ChickLit to sample that which she found so egregiously shelved next to her more erudite reading choices? Wonder if a purchase for the purposes of writing is expensable? I do think it is. Nice of the Times to possibly foot the bill for what might be her secret reading enjoyment. Methinks she might protest just a bit too much.

Her question of shelving has been in my brain since I read her column, because it is a good question: where do you put the ChickLit? How do you shelve fiction that’s not quite one genre, but not quite another? Looking specifically at ChickLit, is it that oh-so-slightly-snidely-termed “Women’s Fiction?” Is it fiction? Is it romance? Is it popular fiction? Where do you put it?

We romance readers have been spoiled a bit - if we go hunting in a store for our bodice-ripping man-titty extravaganzas, we look for the sign that says “Romance” and head that way. But lately that heading has been crowded, and there’s a lot to be said even within the romance community of where books are shelved, and where they should be shelved. Seems the question of shelving is a very, very big question among authors of various subgenres of fiction, particularly among minority writers.

This is a measure of how out-of-it I’ve been lately: I completely forgot that I never actually posted MaryKate’s title after she won the last Personal Ad Contest. I had it made and ready to go, and my brain had somehow convinced itself that I’d posted it, but I hadn’t. Egad.

So all apologies for the lateness, MaryKate, but I hope you like the title, because we Smart Bitches dub thee:

The Bitchery is ever good about sending us the funny and the WTF links, which of course we pass along to you.

For your Valentine’s shopping needs (though not work safe, beware ye who click here), Tania forwarded me a link to Em & Lo’s “Sex Toy” promotion video. If only QVC had a naughty late-night toy hour. I’d totally tune in.

And in other, more disturbing news, Theresa notifies me that a theatre in Florida has had to rename their performance of The Vagina Monologues after a woman complained that she “was ‘offended’ when her niece asked her what a vagina was”. The performance will now be known there as “The Hoo-Haa Monologues.” This particular performance is being staged by a group of law school students raising money for charity, though the BBC article doesn’t mention what charity.

Sadly, the Bitchery surely could have helped this woman with many a suggestion for a different euphemism, or perhaps a heaping slice of “clue cake” might have been better for this person who fears the word “vagina.”

I’m awaiting a performance of “The Glistening Orifice Monologues” at my local theatre, to be sure. 

LovelySalome was kind enough to forward me a rather scathing attack on the omnipresence of ChickLit courtesy of Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.

Trouble is, all her columns are for Times Select readers, and as I am not one, I don’t have linkage abilities. And personally, I try not to circumvent subscription-only services by copying and pasting the content here for free, since, well, the Times? Kind of cranky about things like that.

Dowd is of the opinion that women who enjoy ChickLit are stupid fools who are blissfully and blithely ignorant of that’s wrong in the world as they indulge in pink-covered lipstick chronicles of fluffy nonsense. She found the ChickLit shelved with literature fiction and cries horror at the stupidification of women readers who pick up their Kinsella books shelved next to Kipling.

So what else is new? It’s a retread of every other accusation leveled at women-authored and women-marketed literature. I’m not personally a fan of chick lit, as I cannot suspend reality long enough to believe there are that many British women working in advertising and publishing who find husbands in the bottom of a cocktail glass.  But the article seemed so familiar in its condescension.

LovelySalome wrote in her email: “I would agree with her on certain points, if my knee-jerk antagonism toward her snootiness didn’t stifle genuine debate. I mean, we’re fostering the war on terror by indulging in chick lit? Do they even know that chick lit authors can’t sell their MSS because the genre is dying?”

One quote that I will excerpt, until the Times rattles a saber at me, is as follows:

Please do not confuse these books with the love-and-marriage of Jane Austen. These are more like multicultural Harlequin romances. They’re Cinderella bodice rippers, Manolo trippers, girls with long legs, long shiny hair and sparkling eyes stumbling through life, eating potato skins loaded with bacon bits and melted swiss, drinking cocktails, looking for the right man and dispensing nuggets of hard-won wisdom, like, “Any guy who can watch you hurl Cheez Doodles is a keeper,” and, “You can’t puke in wicker. It leaks.”

I wonder what Dowd would have to say about a survey of historical romance? Good thing our books are housed in their own special shelves. 

Looks like Noah Brand listened to us when we clamored for him to write about zombies vs. vampires. He posted a little snippet up on his blog today. Go read.

The size of my glee, it is massive and cannot be contained.

You can send your honey a valentine’s e-card from Danielle Steel’s perfume website.

Lookee here - I made one for y’all.

Problem is, there wasn’t enough room for the “y” in Bitchery.

Other problem is, it’s lame. 

As usual I’m sure I’m behind on the news on this one, but Iron Lesbian #2 was kind enough to send me a link to the 2006 results of the Bulwer Lytton contest.

The winner for the romance division is especially funky:

“Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.”

Dennis Barry
Dothan, AL

There are few things more romantic than giant red-assed monkeys drinking espresso. At last I have found a Valentine’s Day gift for Hubby!

Now, I’ve never really been bothered by the opening line of a romance novel, but I am perpetually tormented by Rebecca Brandewyne’s idea of a man “bursting like a ripe melon”, and, from a romance I read so long ago I can’t even recall the author or title, the heroine feeling a “spurt of something warm and urgent between her thighs.”

A romance novel, for the record, should not make me think of pantyliners. Or Depends.

We’ve dished on describing the Big (m)OMent, and on the worst purple prose there is, but has there been a line in a romance so howlingly awful that it stuck in your brain, torturing you at odd moments, causing your face to pucker with horror, or the uncontrollable urge to laugh? And does anyone else remember the source of that described warm, urgent spurt that still haunts me?