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

*crickets*

Wow. Just… wow. So many reactions I’m almost paralyzed.

Candy is going to crap a brick sideways, is my first thought.

Second, wow.

Third, can we discuss how ever almighty tired I am of the assumption that romance readers are stupid, mouth-breathing morons who like their romance dull and flaccid, instead of spattered, smothered, covered, and chunked with, oh, good writing and clever insights to characters and history and culture? I know that I am not dumb (hence the name of the site) and while I’m somewhat used to people looking down on my choice of reading material for the happy ending, which as we discussed is somehow the hallmark of lower-classed reading, I’m rather shocked at being dismissed by this person I’ve never heard of for being too stupid and dense to absorb a complex story.

More shock comes from the idea that a writer would put down other readers for reading - in an age with so much other distraction for the buying public, from video games to television “events,” most writers I’ve spoken with indicate a thankful attitude that people still read books and want more books to read, period, no matter whose books they are reading. So to alienate
a large bookbuying group, one that likes its stories on paper, not on screen, thank you, is a dumbass thing to do.

What pisses me off more than anything about Ms. Bickmore’s attitude, aside from the fact that she’s talking out of her ass, is that no matter what kind of fiction she’s writing, chances are there’s a formula. More than likely, she owes some part of the structure of her craft to prior books and patterns. Mystery: there’s a formula. Romance: check. Fiction in general? - well, books do usually end without some satisfactory resolution of one or more plotlines. So to assume that one is more complex than another is more than a heaping spoonful of utter crap. How does she define complex? Is she rewriting James Joyce over there? Or does she introduce sixty-three characters in four pages and expect me to keep track of them all? Or maybe there’s a lot of, I don’t know, trees or something. My feeble mind struggles to figure out what’s so complex that the average romance reader wouldn’t be able to clear the mental hurdle.

And the connection between the American market, romance readers, and the relative stupidity thereof - now that’s some breathtaking evidence of research right there. If she’s thinking that all Americans read romance, she’s sadly misinformed about the American bookbuying public, which might be the real reason her books don’t sell.

Either that, or, should this excerpt be an indication of a self-important, ill-informed writing style in general, perhaps it’s merely a question of quality.