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

Speaking of, here’s a rare bit of story from my world. Last weekend I went to a dinner party celebrating my cousin’s marriage to a nice bloke from England, and as part of the party favor, my aunt placed “Brit-speak” cards at every place setting. My card? You guessed it: “Bollocks.” I was SO pleased.

Bonus: see the making-of behind the scenes video as well, for additional blokes and giggles:

Sarah: There were some gawdawful covers last year. I can think of a few that turned my stomach to an even deeper yogic twist than some of these, but I have to say, as a slate of terrible, this slate is pretty good. Not great - there were plenty that were much, much worse - but on the whole, not bad for badness. I didn’t upload every single one, since some of them weren’t really poor enough to be among the worst. So here’s our slate.

Candy: I’ve seen worse, to be honest, and I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand: it really does seem like publishers are finally learning and moving away from the fug. Some of the Worst Cover nominees from 2006 and 2005, for example, I actually liked--but then I dig the comic book look and don’t find comics embarrassing the way some of the commentators apparently do. On the other hand: I derive a certain measure of delicious masochistic pain from the terrible covers, and lots of belly laughs from the ensuing commentary in the contest. Less fug = less fun. The genre wins, but my selfish side wants the cheap laugh, goddammit.

That said: There are still quite a few gems from this particular batch.

Also: when you’re done looking at the snark, head over to Cover Cafe and cast your vote.

Candy: So THIS is what it looks like when Cousin Itt gets a trim and tries to fuck a tribble! Hawt!

Sarah: Nothing says “oh yeah” like necking in the fiery depths of the earth’s core while feeling your skin slowly melt from your body. Hawt indeed!

Candy: Great. You know Cinemax is starting to run low on ideas when they start resorting to “When PR Interns Go Wild” for the late night softcore offerings.

Sarah: The car! The car is tilting at a not-even-closer-to-horizontal dizzying angle and they’re about to roll off the cliff into a fiery oblivion! Wait, apparently they’ve identified the problem and are going out with a bang. You’d think they’d hurry up and get themselves horizontal already.

Candy: Holy shit! My first thought: Post-op tranny love. And goddamn, that sister wasn’t shy about specifying exactly how big she wanted her bazooms to be.

Sarah: We’re moments away from knowing all there is to know about The Crying Game, with bonus DVD features, like this instructional shot that demonstrates how to grab one’s falsie like Wilson Phillips and hold on.

Candy: We’ve snarked this cover in the past, and I want to reiterate: Come on, Kensington. FOR SHAME. If you advertise big, spankable asses, we want big, spankable asses. We want thunderclap-worthy asses. (Warning: video mildly not-work-safe.) That ass? Not even worthy of a static shock.

Sarah: Not big. Not spankable. Not even close. And if the problem is with the title and not so much the cover image, then I expect “Baby of Shame” to make next year’s slate. 

Candy: Oh my God. Between the contrast of the unnaturally perky, clean-cut blonde chick being groped by Gomez Addams’ creepy younger brother (I get the impression he sells used Kias for a living) and the looming house in the background, it’s like Amityville Horror meets the Osmonds.

Make the screaming in my head stop, mommy. Please?

Sarah: Apparently, after the wedding, someone went on a meth bender while operating Photoshop without a license, and this was the result. A bonafide disaster.

Candy: You know, other than the fact that that’s way more skin than I want on the front cover of my book, there’s nothing too horribly wrong with this cover. It’s soft-focus softcore cheesy, and I can practically hear the smooth jazz playing in the background and breathy moans as I look at this, but compared to the other covers, my sensibilities haven’t been ripped out, ripped into shreds, danced upon with three-inch stiletto heels and set on fire.

Sarah: Nothing says, “This book has sex in it” like two people on the cover having sex. Thank you to this book for making it that much more difficult for me to defend accusations that romance = porn.

Especially with the jizztastic explosion of water going on behind her, there. If he orgasms that forcefully in real life, well, no wonder he has to hold onto her by the longhairs. She probably doesn’t have any short ones.

Candy: Touch of Madness? Well, yes, I believe necrophilia is typically a sign of SOME sort of pathology--especially when you start going for the ones who are starting to rot.

Sarah: I can hear the book trailer now: He’s creepy and he’s cooked -EEE!. She’s zombified and ookey. This sure don’t look like nookie. Clamp and Adams, scaring me.

On one hand, it’s difficult to ask the right question. Would the presence of an interracial couple stop someone from buying a romance? (Would it stop me? Nope.) Is interracial romance solely the domain - and by domain I mean “located in the bookshop section” - of Black romance, because the minute one half of a protagonist pair is Black, the book moves toward Black Romance as a subgenre marker? Speaking solely for myself, I’m curious why interracial romance appears to be mostly found in epubs, small presses, erotica, or within Black romance publishing lines. Brenda Jackson has written several for Silhouette Desire, but those seem to be an exception among the backlist of series romance - and yet another reason how the dismissed-as-staid category romances can sometimes not just push but shred the envelope of boundaries every now and again like nothing else.

I’m also curious whether it’s a target people shop for, a type of storyline that some really enjoy the same way I am a total and complete sucker for a certain plotlines, including one that is too embarrassing to mention. If people shop deliberately for interracial romances, then why aren’t there more of them in mainstream romance (unless they’re there and my Google-fu has failed me)? Is there a difficult barrier towards publication of a romance that takes place across cultural and racial lines?  And what counts as interracial, anyway? Does a Black woman and a Middle Eastern man count as interracial? (This reader thinks so.) Or is “interracial” code for solely white/black combinations? Hell, depending on what anti-Semite you ask, my marriage would be interracial.

Mostly I’m wondering simply why there aren’t more interracial couples in romance. There’s more than a few powerhouse examples in mainstream romance across several genres, so I am curious why there’s not more of it. For example, Ward’s Brotherhood plays with race, and the question’s been asked of her point blank whether the Brothers are Black (her answer was that they are not an identifiable human race so it’s impossible to say). Kleypas’ Mine Till Midnight also crossed a racial line in the historical sense, in that her hero was Rom and the heroine was white - a combination that caused me to question the endurance of their happy ending, given the social prejudice working against them. And someone will hunt me down and kick me in the knees if I don’t mention the multi-book subplot of Brockmann’s Sam & Alyssa. All three examples were holy crapping damn successful. Perhaps the problem is that what I perceive of as “few” needs to be adjusted. Someone else might think that’s plenty.

I’m not so much asking for a list of interracial romances, though feel free to suggest some that you’ve enjoyed, but more of a “Interracial romance: what’s up with that? How come there’s not more of it?” type of random musing. So? Your thought? Ha. I crack me up. I know you have more than one.

Some of the people sniping at Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series as being equivalent to Harry Potter for angsty teenyboppers except not particularly well-written made me stop and go: “Wait, Harry Potter was well-written?” (This is clearly because I am such a superior reader with superior tastes in all my literature, and anyone who thinks Harry Potter is awesome is wrong. And stupid. And racist. And a killer of puppies. Just so we’re clear about where I come from when I make statements of aesthetic judgment.) My pointless and incredibly silly snobbery when it comes to children’s and YA fiction aside, what struck me about some of the comments in Pharyngula that dealt with Twilight was the offhand dismissal of the series, not merely because they weren’t especially well-written (I myself couldn’t finish Twilight, and in that regard I’m totally in agreement that it’s the Harry Potter of vampire teenyboppers), but because they were obviously written for a teenage female audience in mind. There’s much casual contempt for literature that deals with the emotional and the female, and I see it as a logical extension from a culture that devalues female experiences in general; that teenage female romantic experiences in particular are singled out as being especially frivolous and assumed to be Not Worthy of Serious Thought isn’t anything new, but it still chafes at me when I see it pop up.

I am also fascinated--FASCINATED--that Harlequin has become shorthand for romance, all romance, the way it has, since books published under the Harlequin/Silhouette imprint cover only a very specific niche of romance. It’d be as if, in attempting to define ice-cream, somebody didn’t address the ingredients, or the characteristics that make ice-cream, well, icy and creamy, but instead chose to refer to it solely by a rather slapdash association of flavor and brand name, sometimes resulting in rather jarring juxtapositions if you know ice-cream well. “My mom’s a huge fan of Breyer’s Phish Food, but I just don’t get it--the thought of eating bits of unbaked chocolate chip cookie dough in ice-cream makes me want to hurl,” sez somebody, and it’s all I can do to not leap up like an obnoxious bastard and say “DUDE, Phish Food is Ben and Jerry’s, and for the love of God, it doesn’t have chocolate chip cookie dough anywhere in it, and really, YOU OBVIOUSLY DON’T EAT ICE-CREAM AND THEREFORE ARE UNQUALIFIED TO COMMENT ON WHAT WE’RE EATING, AND I’M GOING TO JUMP ON YOUR HEAD BECAUSE YOUR NEXT COMMENT IS OBVIOUSLY GOING TO BE HOW EVERYONE WHO EATS ICE-CREAM IS A FAT WHORE. SEE HOW I’M JUMPING ON YOUR HEAD? JUMP. JUMMMMMP.”

Right. Now that I’m thoroughly craving Phish Food (AND have successfully squelched my desire to act like an obnoxious bastard on somebody else’s comment board--at least this time): PZ’s question at the end intrigues me. Where DID this surge come from?Because people attributing the surge to Twilight are wrong. Twilight hit just as vampires and paranormal romance were huge and getting even bigger. JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood had hit the scene like a hundred-khilitohn bhomb the September previous to Twilight‘s publication. I’m not necessarily interested in tracing the whole trajectory to its source, because I think the current paranormal romance scene is not a direct reaction to, say, the disturbing eroticism of Dracula--I think Anne Rice’s novels are a better candidate for that.

Personally, I think the current paranormal romance boom is the direct descendant of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, which is more urban fantasy than a creature driven by older, more Victorian mythologies and sensibilities.

Regardless of what the Anita Blake series has become, and regardless what people may think, the popularity of the books and its unholy progeny is due to more than the thrill of reading taboo-busting inter-species nookie; somebody in the comments quoted a Powell’s Books employee defining the genre as “women committing every imaginable act of lust and perversion with vampires, werewolves, demons, Lovecraftian tentacled rape gods, basically anything you can imagine as long as it’s not a normal human man"--which made me go HAAAA, but also made me go “Oh, come ON, judging all of paranormal romance just because you were forced to page through the Merry Gentry series is hardly fair. I mean, taboo-busting inter-species nookie is pretty hot and definitely a factor in the popularity--and really, God bless our prurient motivations, because so much brilliant art would have gone (and continue to go) unexpressed if it weren’t for horny artists sublimating their unspeakable urges in beautiful ways, and I really don’t see any inherent wrongness in reading something to get your rocks off (but oh God that’s another topic for another time). But slapping the “It’s the Sex, Stupid” label on the phenomenon is too simple, and falls into the old “Psh, it’s porn, that’s why they like it” dismissal that covers everything and explains very little.

My theory is: it’s also about women, and putting women in control, and how we’re still not comfortable enough to put it in real-life/realistic fiction terms yet.

The surge of demand for women in a dominant role--as pursuers and protectors and warriors--has been a long time coming, and I think it says something interesting about us and our level of comfort with and/or inability to suspend disbelief about women owning a certain sort of cultural power that most of the asskicking happens in Not Quite Earth, and that many of the heroines are Not Quite Human. The current crop of paranormal romances owe a lot to Anita Blake, but they owe much to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too.

And now I’ve pretty much reached the extent of my over-thinking about this particular bit of romance, it’s your turn: feel free to overthink paranormal romances in the comments. Or, you know, don’t. Do you read it mostly--even solely--for the hot sex and because you have a hard-on for angsty immortals? Sing it loud, and sing it proud.

Another behind-the-scenes funny: Beverly Jenkins is part of the Today segment (I hope) reading part of her novel, Jewel. Seems the producers wanted a sound bite or two of an actual romance novel, so Jenkins sat on a chair and read aloud the opening scene from the novel when the hero and heroine agree to pretend to be married for an hour. The posse of bloggers who were at the Borders with us, we were all entranced. It was like Story Time of Excellent with Beverly Jenkins. Then the reporter asked her to read a more “Romantic” scene, which meant, “one with the sex in it please.” So she obliged, and right about the part where Things Get Interesting (and Jenkins writes some fine, fine sex scenes) the reporter said, “OOOk, then that’s plenty!” And the camera men both spluttered, “No, wait! Keep going! It was just getting interesting!”

We now break for the Nora Roberts Shoe Report. Nora’s shoes yesterday were hot screaming red with awesome heels and strappy tops, which she paired with hot pink nail polish. Today was a mix of brown leather sandals with woven medallions, and lace-up flats worn with jeans. Nora’s Shoe Report will continue as long as she continues to change footwear and cause Sarah to ponder that perhaps the rumors are true, and Nora doesn’t have actual nerve endings in her feet.

The Marriott is amazing. Power outage or no power outage, this hotel is rocking my socks off, and I only have one pair with me so they better knock it off. Every single staff member is friendly to the point that I wonder what’s in the staff luncheon, and if it comes with a side order of happy pills and stock options. Seriously. Friendly people like damn and whoa. Plus, every time there is a major event, like a luncheon or the literacy signing, there’s hotel personnel every 10 or 20 feet helping direct traffic and answer questions. It’s amazing. I’m seriously deeply impressed with the staff here. They rock.

Tonight Jane, Candy, Kassia, Wendy the Super Librarian and I had dinner with the Harlequin Digital Team, where there was seafood and bodacious conversation. They wanted to know more about how we viewed ebooks and digital media (No more DRM plskthxbye) and along for the ride was a British film maker who is developing a documentary on romance readers- the real ones. She started by interviewing folks in the UK as part of the Mills&Boon Centennial, and she realized that if she wanted to appreciate the scope of the readership of romance, she needed to hop across the pond (Then across the rest of the US) to investigate American romance readership. The manner in which she discussed her project seemed to indicate that she’s after a respectful and thorough documentary about us romance fans – which makes me ineffably happy.

Alas, my jet lag is getting in the way of more bits o’ recap, so tune in tomorrow for Tweeting and blogging and general merriment.

Tomorrow there may be Olympic events on the schedule, but there’s definitely a Bitching Happy Hour on the docket: 330 pm Local time at the Thirsty Bear, 661 Howard Street, which is about two blocks away from the hotel. I hope we see you there. 

Trouble is, when Tor launched their new site, there weren’t ebooks for sale. Some are available for the Kindle, but not all. The free books Tor had offered were often the first of a series, and there were a few vocal readers who were upset because they’d had a gulp of the sexy, sultry beverage that is ebooks, and they wanted to read the rest of the series in digital form. Tor doesn’t have much in the way of ebook offerings for those series, and folks are much disgruntled. Meadows’ gripe with Tor rests partially on frustration with Tor’s decision to pimp the ebooks without having the follow up novels ready in digital form, and partially on his personal frustration with Tor’s response to the online complaints.

It looks like Tor generated a heaping pile of interest in its ebooks, and at present isn’t able to fulfill the demand of that interest. Tor gave away ebooks to generate interest in their site and while plenty of the comments at that thread are thankful and giddy over the new books and new authors and new reading material oh glee, plenty more are not as into the idea of a new site as they are into the idea of the next book in the series in digital form… which isn’t necessarily available. So customers who sampled the series and are content with paper are happy. Customers who sampled the series and are curious about the publisher’s blog-format website are happy. But customers who sampled a series as an ebook and want to continue reading digitally are not happy. Commence comment flaming, general use of exclamation points and italics, requests that folks get thicker skin, and rogue flouncing.

Kerfuffle aside, I’m curious as to whether it’s a relatively small phenomenon, this cracktastic element to the ebook. Have you made the switch? Do you want all publishers to issue ebooks (oh, behold the wisdom of the Harlequin. Tor, seriously, take a look at the Harlequin. Take a goooood loooooong digital look. All books digital = MAJOR YUM of AWESOME SAUCE. Srsly.) and are they your preferred media for reading material?