A Book to Read

I was watching Sesame Street with my daughter and we came across this classic segment wherein Bert sings about the pleasures of reading as Ernie bugs him to come out and play. Fun stuff.

Lots of ink has been spilled about the joy of reading but I think this short video says it all. Have a look

Don't Know Much About Historicals...

So Julia Quinn killed the Regency. Click here for this opinion and the reasons why some readers don't like regencies anymore -not this reader but more on that later. I have heard this opinion making the rounds lately. Lots of people complaining that historicals aren't historical enough, that Regencies have gotten too generic/too fluffy/too lacking in uniqueness, etc., And I suppose, if I were a critic and analyzer of the genre and needed something to write about, I might be tempted to say these things too, just to have something to say. After all, I do have not one, but TWO advanced degrees. One a MA in English, one an MLS and if I know nothing in this world, I do know how to critically analyze literature. But I choose not to.

Why? I have too much fun reading romance. And I am a bit mystified as to why certain bloggers and reviewers have the idea historical romances need to be every bit as accurate as a history text book. They give high marks to books that contain alot of what they feel are very necessary historical detail and look frowningly upon books they deem too "wall-papery". Who are these people who want to learn history from a romance book? Why in the world would you want that? I am genuinely mystified and trying to not be snarky at all. I tried to read a very highly rated historical romance from a well known author the other day and had to put it down. I found the details too distracting. I wanted more attention paid to the relationships between the hero/heroine and less about the food and setting. Because this is what I read romance for. Also, while the author had done considerable research on the time period, she had not bothered to research human nature and the female character was more than a little over the top and ridiculous.

So here's how I read romance. For enjoyment. And I will be honest, I am a lazy reader. I want to be swept away. I want to not have to think. If you are writing about a war -I don't really want the war to be too real. Because real war kinda sucks, ya know? I don't ever want to feel as if the historical conflict will overwhelm the potential for happily ever after. And I sure as hell don't want to be constantly reading details about the war and the rifles and how far they marched and the battle tactics and the shininess or dullness of the brass buttons. Boring.

Maybe this is the reason I don't like Ante-Bellum romances anymore though they've kind of gone the way of the dinosaur and good riddance, as far as I am concerned. I know too much about the real historical details of slavery in the Deep South to ever be able to put on my rose-colored glasses and pretend to not see. When I was oh, about thirteen or so, I read a book wherein the heroine's best friend was a female African slave and the hero (I shit you not) was a ship owner and one of his ships was in the slave trade. I think the hero (such a Prince) even sold the female African slave or put her aboard the slaver and stood stoically by while the heroine cried. And, if I am remembering correctly, he did this after he had promised her he would never get into the slave trade. His action I think, was to prove his Alpha credentials or some such nonsense. As young and stupid as I was, I DID NOT BUY IT. Not because it was unrealistic because it was very realistic for the time period, but because it proved the hero was a complete jerk with no real regard for human life and not worthy of the heroine's love or a HEA. In other words, I did not want the hero to be a real cash strapped man, living in Pre-Civil War South. I wanted him to look the part and talk the part but behave like a twentieth century post Civil Rights era white man with all the correct sensibilities.

This is why reading real history is such a bummer. You just wouldn't want to live at anytime but 2010, once you know even a little about less enlightened times. You wanna know the number one cause of death for women before the twentieth century? Childbirth. The number two cause of death was fire. Seems that all those wonderful long skirts women had to wear back then were just perfect for catching any stray spark emanating from an open fire in the kitchen. Nothing sexy or romantic about this at all.

So why in the world do the critics and the analyzers lament the lack of accurate detail in their Regencies and Historicals? Too much real detail and quite honestly romance land becomes a place I wouldn't want to visit, let alone live in for three or four hours. Gah -the less detail sometimes, the better!

I read romance because I want ROMANCE. I want a sexy Alpha male (with big muscles and a big, you know) and a heroine who needs him and is strong, yet vulnerable in her own right. I want them to psychologically real and to talk to each in a way I can imagine real people talking. I want the conflicts to be real, yet solvable. And I want the setting and the history only if it contributes to the romance. If it doesn't, I couldn't care less. AND I want the hot sexxoring.

I can forgive just about anything in a romance, but the lack of romance. Which is why Julia Quinn has not ruined the Regency. As long as she gets the romance part of it right (and I think she does), she's fine by me.

So what about you? Do you like your historicals with as much detail as possible? Does lack of accuarate detail bother you? How much knowledge is too much?

My Wrting Time

So I call my friend. I call my husband. I blog. Check my email for the one hundred and fiftieth time. No, no acceptance letters yet from major publishers with my million dollar advance. I read my blogs. Comment when I have something to say. I want them to comment on mine -so I gotta comment on there's -only fair, right? Read all the news sites because as a writer I have to stay informed. Stare out the window. Get a cup of coffee. Get a doughnut to go with my coffee. Any business I have to take care of? My daughter's pre-school aceptance letter. Yes! It's something that has to be done. Right now. Can't wait! I call. Darn Can't make the appointment to pre-register -no one's there! Any bills to pay? No...I paid them all on Friday. Any paperwork I have to do? No....and I did the food shopping yesterday. Laundry! Okay! Hubby has no underwear. Hubby doesn't like to free ball it! So I have to do the laundry -can't have hubby upset. Very bad for the marriage. This will take about oh, fifteen minutes. Get back to computer. Ready to write. Realize I am editing to day. Grrr......Hubby left for work, otherwise I'd be tempted to have sex today. That's good for about an hour. Shoot, it's our anniversary. Nuts. Does phone sex count? Call hubby again. Can't have phone sex -his supervisor is in the office. Funny -he seems irate that I have called him twice in five minutes. It is our anniversary after all! Sigh. Chew my nails some more.

I open the file. Stare at the comments. Press a key. Now I am ready to write.

The Forgotten Ones -Please Watch

what you didnt see! from stacie huckeba on Vimeo.

I'll be honest, the flooding in Nashville has been off my radar screen. The almost 100% lack of media coverage has not helped. Watch this video. I had no idea it was this bad. The first and last time I heard about the flood was in the RWA emails stating that the national conference had been moved. RWA nicely donated money to a Nashville literacy group and then changed the venue. Then I didn't think about it anymore.

Please watch this video and help in any way you can.

Romance Books You Didn't Know Were Romance Books

Last year, I was fortunate to be on a committee which judged romance books (among other genres) in order to come up with the "best" one of the year. This was my pick for "Best Romance": Chemistry For Beginners by Anthony Strong. You'd never know it was a romance book by the title or by the marketing. It's a trade paperback -and if you find it in the bookstore at all, its going to be in the literary section. Shame that. The market for this book is romance readers not the literary types at all. And it's telling none of the big romance sites (AAR, Smart Bitches, Dear Author) have picked up on it. It's really too bad. This book is the best contemporary romance I have ever read and, as I have detailed before, I do not like contemporary romances for a plethora of reasons. And when I tell you about this book, you are going to grimace and role your eyes because it sounds like a bunch of pretentious literary crapola. But its not. Oh no, its not. And I totally mean that as a compliment.

I wish I could link to a great, well thought out review done by an independent blogger, as reviews are not my forte and I like it better when someone else does all the work. The best I can do is point you the Amazon page and invite you to read the first review. It actually is quite a succinct summary of the book and gives you a fairly good idea of what it is all about. But don't let the reviewer's snarky attitude toward romance turn you off! The reviewer doesn't understand romance books, or readers and thus cannot comment intelligently on this book as a romance. He is to be pitied. I am a romance reader who has read the book, and I am telling you it has all the traditional elements of a romance and an amazing HEA. The reviewer sees these things as detriments and he is annoyed that true love conquers all. But because we are all romance readers here, we like this kind of stuff. I blame the marketing of this book. If you pick it up and expect it to be "literary" you are going to be puzzled. But if it was marketed properly as a romance, you would have the expectations of a romance book and wouldn't expect the litery stuff.

A little about the book...yes, the book is in the form of a scientific paper. There are footnotes. It is about scientists. It is about academia. It is about female Viagara. It is about a Cary Grant type handsome nerd who falls in love with his research subject. It is also about sex. And fun. And what happens when you try to study sex in a scientific way. It is also about bonobos. They have a lot of sex, don't ya know.

This book was nominated by a woman who confessed to me she had never bought a romance book in her life. Just doesn't care for the genre. But she couldn't put this book down. So when she told me about it, I had my doubts. And I was deeply sceptical. And I thought, how good could a romance be, if its reccomended by someone who doesn't like romance. Boy howdy, I was wrong!

So try it. Trust me. You will like it.

And then let's storm his publisher and demand they put this book in the hands of romance readers everywhere and market the hell out of this book to the romance blogs, etc., Its that good. And romance readers deserve to know about it.

A Conflict in Need of a Good Romance

Okay, I'll be the first to admit I have a hard time with contemporaries. Nothing against all the wonderful romance writers who specialize in this genre...it's just I tend to find the conflict in modern romance to be somewhat lacking. Perhaps because I have had too much real drama in my life, I see the problems associated with straight contemporaries to be not very problematic at all. A perfectly good contemporary might revolve around rival restaurant owners and a stolen recipe. Shrug. Can't they just share? Or maybe she's an antique collector and he owns an antique she really wants and won't sell it for love or money. Yawn. Go buy something else why don't ya? And then there's the whole sex thing. A writer (who shall remain nameless) for a category line has the heroine jumping into bed with the hero in the first fifty pages. They spend the next couple hundred pages trying to figure out what it all means, and if it means anything and if it does, does it mean more to me than it did for you, and OMG you are getting too close and I have such a fear of intimacy and blah blah blah. I don't fault the writing or the character development (shoot, I should write as well as this chick) it's just the central idea and premise of most contemporaries leave me cold. And then the whole lack of sexual tension, the whole will they, won't they, and what are the consequences if they do, is missing in alot of contemporaries for the simple reason, it just doesn't much matter anymore if the characters jump into bed on the first date. So conflicts regarding sex tend to strictly of the internal kind. I end up feeling a good session on the couch with the shrink would solve most of their problems.

I guess the reason many readers enjoy contemporary romance is that it reflects their own lives, or maybe slightly idealized versions of their lives. Problems are real and relatable. And its sexy and wonderful to think a real romance can happen amid the ordinariness of most lives. That's great, but it's not for me.

Here's what I want and I wonder if there is a writer who can manage it or dares to "go there." I want real world problems but ripped from the head line kind of problems. There's lots of people in the world who have to live with very dramatic external conflict which keeps them from true love. And by "dramatic external conflict" I don't mean that her business associate won't like her much for dating the hero, or her revenue from her inn keeping will decline by ten percent if the hero's inn attracts more customers.

This is what I mean by dramatic external conflict. Ayann Hirsi Ali. Need I say more. Yes, I know she's too "real" but wow, if you could imagine how a woman like that could find love in this world, the story would practically write itself wouldn't it? She's been mutilated, a price put on her head, and is not well liked by many left wing intellectuals for her unwavering criticism of Islam. Her whole life is a conflict. Is there a man for a character like that? Does he exist and how would you write him? It helps that she is beautiful.

I see characters similar to Ali in historicals or even paranormals. Tortured by what has happened to them both externally and internally, characters who live in a world that is conflicted and yet, they find love anyway. And manage to make a happy life for themselves. Why is we can write about werewolves gang raping women, but not real Muslim women undergoing genital mutilation?

Is it wrong to think about Ali and women like her in this way? Is her conflict something most writers would rather not confront because it is too real? Can no one can imagine a happy ending for women who have undergone and continue to undergo what Ali has been through?

Discuss....Tell me what you think.

Servicemen (and Women!) are Sexy -Let's Write Them That Way!

Okay, I know when when the terms "military" and "contemporary" are used in Romance Land, we usually think of Suzanne Brockmann and Navy Seals. Not that there is anything wrong with that. For the record, I have spent many an enjoyable hour suspending disbelief and enjoying her books. But you know what Pope said about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, don't ya? Real Navy Seals have a divorce rate of 90% and that's not sexy. Was friends with a girl once whose husband was a Seal, and she had nothing good to say about being the wife of one. She longed for the day when he would get out. I've since lost touch with her so I don't know if she's part of the 90%. Sure hope not.

Military men in Romance Land are often of a "type" and romance has strong elements of fantasy and I enjoy this aspect of romance as much as the next gal. But much of America has lost touch with the military for a ton of political and cultural reasons I am not going to go into here. This lack of direct experience with real members of the military is reflected in romance books. Or maybe I am reading the wrong romance books. So if you can suggest a more "realistic" military romance, I'd appreciate it.

I look around at the people who I work with and I imagine them in uniform. This is what I mean by realistic. Real men. Real women. Your next door neighbor. Your son. Your sister. Your spouse. In uniform, serving our country. Where are the romance books about people like this? Because it is people like this who serve everyday and make the sacrifices.

So my challenge to romance writers is to imagine someone as oridinary and commonplace as a member of your family serving in the Air Force, Navy, Marines, Army or Coast Guard and to write a romance about them. It can be a woman. It can be a nineteen year old African-American female private who is serving in Iraq. Or a graduate of ROTC from the University of New York serving as a communications officer aboard a destroyer. Or an E-5 who is in language school, learning Farsi to serve on a submarine.

If you are writing about the military and everything in the above paragraph makes you go "Whaaaaat?" I would say this is a sign more research is needed. Memorial Day was yesterday. Can we please do our militray the honor of trying to understand them as real people because real servicemen -and women -are sexy.