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

Flattery will get you far, but correct answers to our Guess that Lonely Heart will win you a Smart Bitch Title™!
The answer to this week’s contest was indeed Karen Lawrence from Jude Deveraux’s Just Curious inside the A Gift of Love anthology.

Kneel, Sara, and arise with your new title.

Give me the author name, the title, and the character name, and guess what you’ll get! No, really, guess!

Business-savvy widow, hiding out in the typing pool, seeks hot studly bo-jillionaire to lie to me and whisk me off to stand in a wedding. All that nuptial romance should lead to a little hot naked snake action, which in turn brings declarations of lifelong commitment, without either party coming clean about our true intentions. Now if that’s not the foundation of a trusting loving relationship, I don’t know what is. 

How do people meet each other nowadays? Am I the only one thinking that the internet will become a major dating arena?

I know no fewer than six couples who met online and are blissfully happy. From match.com to jdate to eHarmony - take the stress of personal interaction out of the equation, and people seem to be more honest, clearing away the pretenses prior to having a face-to-face meeting. Even the amazing woman who boards my dog, who is as down to earth and genuine as they come (the woman, not my dog), met her new husband on eHarmony. And she is the first person who would tell you that meeting someone online sounded like a complete pipedream (no pun intended).

If you live in Romance Novel Land, your hero could come galloping up to your castle astride a mammoth horse named “Thor” or “Pixie-squeak,” or perhaps he raids your father’s company, buying it out in a hostile takeover. Or maybe you get sucked back in time and he almost runs you through with his manly lance. Or you run a bed and breakfast and he stays as a guest, writing his book. Or you both work as magicians and he saws you in half with his manly saw.

In real life: perhaps you work together? You shop at the same store and check each other out? Or you both work as role players in fake towns built for military training?

Me, I met Hubby in high school. Then we worked at a summer camp and ended up permanently together. Not really the stuff of romance – although, I will say, as far as a plotting method to keep the hero and heroine together all the time, working at a summer sleepaway camp guarantees the protagonists will be seeing each other ALL the TIME. And there will be plenty of opportunity to sneak off and do some scrumpin’—if you know what I mean.

Would I look for a spouse or partner online if I didn’t already have one? Absolutely. Many of my closest friends (*koff koff* Candy *koff koff*) are people I’ve met via writing online.

But does that make for good romance? Is one of the fantasies of romance novels becoming the face-to-face chance meeting that didn’t originate on a website profile?

And, how did you meet your spouse/partner?

If you’re curious about the various paranormal schticks that are popular right now in Romancelandia, Hot Spell offers a taste of some of the sub-genres. You have your SF/steampunk (Emma Holly’s “The Countess’s Pleasure"), your squicky uh-I-think-that-might-verge-on-bestiality human/animal chimera ("The Breed Next Door” by Lora Leigh), angels and demons ("Falling for Anthony” by Meljean Brook) and vampires and werewolves ("The Blood Kiss” by Shiloh Walker). Lots and lots of rampant inter-species lovin’, yo. *suppresses urge to make joke that invokes Barnyard Sluts Vol. IX* Unfortunately, the two decently entertaining stories in this anthology can’t make up for the one gawdawful story, or the other one which is pretty much just a snooze.

Sarah: He looks like he feels a little guilty. Here he is, trying to impress you, sharpening his wee little blade, wearing his finest feather headdress, and ...whoops!  A little poot slips from beneath his buckskins. And he hopes you won’t notice but it’s visible, a green, sulfur cloud that wafts behind him. Ooops. No wonder he feels guilty. He killed the Laird of the Wind with his green Savage Thunder.

Candy: His buddies HATE going hunting with him, not only because of the thunderous savagery emanating from his behiney, but because the stench scares away the animals for miles around. Also, he doesn’t look savage so much as he does kind of tweaked-out and worried. He looks like he’s just snorted a huge line of coke and trying really, really hard to stifle a real ripper, but not quite succeeding.

Also: Egad. What are the odds that there’d be not one, but two books entitled Savage Thunder? Gotta love the romance novel industry.

Sarah: Oh, Holy God, SHE’S A MAN, BABY. A MAAAAAN.

Candy: Wow. Props to the art department for finding a person who has bigger titties than DeSalvo. But Sarah has a point. I’m now wondering: Where else is she more generously endowed than our erstwhile hero? Is that the shadow of...other things...I see? Does her cinnabar cave hide a lusty dragon?

Sarah: Sometimes happiness means a musclebound man with a mullet whose hair, although egregious, is still better than his partner’s, as she sports one of the seven lesbian haircuts.

And sometimes happiness means faking, *le sigh*, yet another orgasm for the cover of a romance novel.

And sometimes, happiness means getting to look at a cover like this to say mean things about it, and having so many horrible thoughts pop into my mind that I just giggle like a mental patient who got her hands on the contents of one too many helium balloons.

Candy: Do you ever have moments when so many quips flood forth that they basically jam your brain, kind of like all the Three Stooges trying to ram their way through a doorway at once?

Yeah. Am having one of those moments now. The word “beard” seems to be one of the few coherent words that has escaped the logjam. (Huh huh, “logjam.") All I can say is, bitch doesn’t need to wait for the rainbow. The rainbow’s motherfucking THERE already--see? All sparkly-like, right on the bumper of his car.