Romancelandia Pet Peeves
A few weeks ago, I selected a book to review that admitted it was a novella, but pretended it was a stand-alone. When I opened it up, the book was fifty seven pages and was about the farthest thing from a stand-alone I could think of. Instead, I think it’s a few chapters the author cut from another book and just… embellished. There was no time to invest in the characters, and instead I was expected to believe they were obsessed enough with each other to go from dreaming of having sex with one another to marriage – in fifty seven pages.
My pet peeve radar went off.
I loathe this. First of all, fifty seven pages is not a novella. It isn’t even a short story. It’s a plot bunny that needs further unpacking. 13,000 words may sound like a lot, and writing that much is arduous, do not get me wrong, […]
Are indie erotic romances and erotica no longer welcome in the Barnes & Noble Nook store? Are some of them okay? Apparently, it depends on what day of the week it is.
The cold shower is the romance novel male equivalent of the internal hymen: you see it in books so frequently that you probably don’t notice it anymore, but when you stop to think about it, something’s off. In fact, everything is off. The cold shower, it seems, is just as grounded in reality as the mythical internal hymen.
I was at an absurdly hip underground pop-up dinner (eleven tiny courses based around the 1968 Volkswagen bus) and seated across from a couple both of whom were cancer researchers. In the midst of a discussion about Americans’ (mis)perception of what modern medicine can cure, the man stopped to ask me what I did. I said, among other things, I was a publisher at a website that reviewed and discussed romance novels. It was as if I’d said I made hats for leprechauns, he stared at me with such disbelief. I continued to smile. He asked why I’d do such a thing. The conversation became strained –I tried to remain well-mannered as he talked about 50 Shades and the vapidity of the genre–and he finally started an argument with his wife over his choice not to eat the itty bitty handcrafted creamsicle we were given […]