Rejecting Reality

Zazzle 

So much truth can be found on a T-shirt. Zazzle-link above- is one of my favorite suppliers of truth. This little gem here is one of my favorites as well. I Reject Your Reality And Substitute My Own. Never could the life of a writer of romance be summed up better.

Going through some of my old novels to study technique brought this thought to mind. We all know that emotion seldom runs that high, and we also know that the same couple a few years down the road will look quite different. We know this because of statistics.

Yeah, I know. Where's the truth in statistics? Sometimes I agree with that assessment. However, in this instance, the divorce rate suggests that romance leaves out some truth somewhere. The question is which truth is left behind. I think we substitute the reality we wish we had sometimes. The  same thing is done so often with autism and other diseases. We romanticize an autistic character in a movie because the truth of the statistic is too hard to bear and unpleasant to look at. Your average kid with autism is not charmingly doing math problems to entertain his friends at school where he's popular despite his social awkwardness. Most of these families live life in a different reality from that. The same is true of romance novels.

What's real romance in the reality in which we all actually live? It would be sad if it's not getting divorced. Then again, isn't that where the rubber hits the road? I mean loving someone when it's easy is a piece of cake, but when that girl you married is nursing a three-week-old, the varnish will come off. She showers haphazardly. She gets grumpy, sore, and tense. Isn't sleeping. Isn't eating. The last thing anyone would call her is the romantic ideal, but she is the perfect mother, putting everything into her child until it all settles down and she can wear make-up again. As a culture, we don't seem to revere that anymore.

Then I did some googling. Procrastinating really, but it gleaned information and an article. Breast augmentation leads to better self-esteem. Well, all right then! Isn't that just more varnish? Romance writers are moving somewhat away from this romanticized view of women. Heroines are putting on a few and getting sassy, but women in Western cultures still seem to feel they must be perfect, love must be perfect. It made me wonder. Have we always been this way? Or did we just reject reality and substitute our own?

Hate to See You Go

Robert Parker dies at age 77.

Mystery loses an icon. Robert B. Parker authored the Spenser and Jesse Stone novels. Spenser For Hire starring Robert Ulrich was based on his novels.

The Writer or The Story?

Cover of Born of Ice (A League Novel)

Kenyon Minions everywhere may hate me for what I am about to say, but . . . What can I do? I just finished two new books from her League series.  I want my darkhunters back, and that made me wonder about my loyalty to an author. I'm a very loyal reader. Karen Moning, I love Fae! Gena Showalter, Oh, Reyes, Masterpiece! Kresley Cole, you're the woman!

In this case, it was clearly loyalty only to a story. Sherrylin Kenyon's darkhunters, those men just rev my engine, and her plots read like a good action flick. In the darkhunter books, she made all the same quirky little writing errors found in her Born books, and it only bothered me in a very minor way. Because her story was good, and I wanted to hear it, I suppose. Born of Ice and Born of Fire didn't have that kind of story.

Frankly, it was a depressing world where almost everyone deserved to be shot. Each and every romance followed a pattern of Attraction, Betrayal, Forgiveness that leads to happily ever after. I'm not knocking it, but how happy can anyone be in a world where brutal torture is commonplace, justice is blind and hospitals expel patients on life support for lack of funds? I wanted to kill the characters and put them out of my misery.

There were high points, of course. In Born of Ice, the hero's mother has some great lines and the ending is everything anyone in a screwed up world could hope for; the bad guy buys it in a hail of blaster fire. Problem solved! Sometimes, violence is the answer apparently, but even that didn't seem to fit in the series like it would in a darkhunter universe. Because there were other answers! You have a justice system and diplomats popping up everywhere, so that the solution seems wrong somehow, too easy. Her universe may have been too much like reality in some ways.

Then there were the little things that kept adding up. Words in common phrases misplaced. References straight from the forties and fifties, like the mecha, Vik, doing a "danger-will-robinson" move, that just didn't fit the tone or story at all. Grammar was an issue, Ms. Kenyon! While, in the past, I've spotted the dark side of Ms. Kenyon's writing style, I dismissed it, or it wasn't this dark. The story was too good to pass up, perhaps. The Born Books left me feeling all hollow inside and wanting to edit like mad.

So, how much can any author count on reader loyalty? I don't think they can. Maybe sometimes we really ring the bell and our work takes on a life of it's own, then maybe, sometimes we realize we have to polish our craft because sometimes the story isn't enough on it's own. I'm going to pay much more attention to craft because of reading this series, so good came of it at least.  However, I'll probably pass on more League books, since I can't really edit them and I can't really read them without Prosac.

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