Romance novels is weird

[msmcknittington]

In the current trashy book I'm reading (which is "Angel" by Johanna Lindsay -- so old it's got a Fabio clinch stepback for a cover), there's something that's just bugging me a lot. I take it for granted that the heroes in romance novels are supposed to be phenomenally handsome and virile to a fault. That's just the way it goes and probably the way it's gonna go for as long as there are books about twue wuv! between a silly girl and a powerful guy.

But this book just isn't conveying the whole hot dude thing to me. It's got that tradition of early '90s romances where the hero's hair is disreputably long, he's domineering* at first but has a change of heart when he realizes he wuvs! the heroine, he shoots people for a living . . . so it's got all the tenets of your basic Western romance novel. Bad dude meets good girl, add trouble, shake vigorously, and the end result is a cocktail of love. Except for one thing.

The gosh-darn hero is described as constantly wearing a bright yellow slicker/raincoat. Over all black clothing, natch. So every time the slicker is mentioned, instead of imagining some really handsome dude in a raincoat, I imagine this guy. Only more bumblebee-y.

Not good, Johanna Lindsay. Not good.

_{*Seriously, who finds someone who's constantly trying to control your actions, telling you you're wrong, and is insanely jealous a good life mate? Why did that cliché persist so long in romantic fiction? Drives me nuts!}

Comments

[ciorstan.livejournal.com]

Back in the mid-80s I wrote an 80,000 word murder mystery set in 1816. It was tightly plotted-- it took place in four days. One of the people in our writing group was a English professor at our local junior college, and she kept us all in line, so to speak. She has since published two or three novels, I think.

The main suspect, heir to the victim's earldom, forces the prime witness into marriage to silence her. A wife cannot testify against her husband because she is chattel. Drama ensues... it is both romance and murder mystery and hence difficult to sell. It's also in need of one final re-write.

I worked in banking at the time and gave a copy of the completed draft to one of my customers, an attorney, to read. A year later after ditching banking and the retail world for escrow, I found myself laid off due to a real estate downturn. I answered a wanted ad for a trainee legal secretary, and when I stood up to meet the attorney, the first words out of my mouth were, "Well, Lou, have you read my novel yet?"

He hired me on the spot. And that's how I got into the legal world-- but I never did attempt to publish that novel.

Every time I try to give it that extra five thousand words it needs to make it a polished, marketable prospect, it kills a hard drive. The third time it did that, I turned my attentions elsewhere to other shiny things.

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

Ah, bummer that it crashes your computer. I get a kick out of reading things by people I know, because I like being able to talk to authors about their books when not standing in line for a book signing.

It sounds like it should sell well. Most romances in the Regency subgenre has a mystery plot to them.

[ciorstan.livejournal.com]

It has a borderline non-consensual secks scene that was acceptable in the 80s and isn't so much now.

The marriage has to be consummated otherwise she can have it annulled and he's back at square one, vulnerable to her testimony. She likes him (wink wink, we're talking romance after all), but she's definitely bulldozed into it.

So I, as an author, have some mixed feelings about it, too-- because that scene is a major plot point. ::points down to the comment re: Catherine Coulter::

And Larry Niven read it, when he was making a pass at me at a con a long time ago. Pfui. "Well done. Too many adverbs."

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

*snort* I'm going to start carrying excerpts of the novel I'm working on with me when I go out. That way, when a guy comes up to me and say, "Hi. My name's Steve. Can I buy you a drink?" I can say, "Sure! But you've got to read this first."

Oh, wait. I don't go out anymore. Shoot!

The book I'm reading now is a Julie Garwood from 1988 that was republished in 2006. There are two scenes in it that is basically marital rape, which I was not expecting at all. I thought it was written more recently, so major WTF? moment.

I think you could still make a non consensual sex scene in a modern novel work, given that there is either not too much hidden pleasure on the part of the heroine (I'm terrified! Oops, orgasm!) or she was drunk. Not that date rape is acceptable or anything, but I think women today would be more willing to suspend their disbelief for a situation with impaired judgment than one that's straight-up rape.

Don't become Catherine Coulter, Ciorstan. I don't know how she sleeps at night.

[ciorstan.livejournal.com]

It worked. It was harder than hell to write because it was very complex seduction rather than... not. And there was brandy involved, funny you should mention that.

I wouldn't mind Catherine Coulter's pay, but you're right, I think Laurell K. Hamilton should sleep better at night. She might have jumped the shark at Obsidian Butterfly and all her books are now thinly disguised shark-humping, but you know that when you're going in. I stopped reading LKH the book after OB, because...eww.

Jayne Ann Krentz/Amanda Quick earns about $2M a year, last time I heard, about ten years ago. I'm sure it's more now. She typically writes two books a year.