Friday, November 03, 2006
Just taking a little break here
I should be working, but lately, I've been so tired at night I haven't had the energy to blog, so I figured I better now while I'm not falling asleep at the keyboard. Let's see, Halloween was fun. My son had a great time, and I got to answer the door and give out candy, which I never get to do. Work's been crazy. My smushed car cannot be fixed which is a financial blow since I was within months of paying it off and I intended to drive it as long as its little spark plugs held out. Darn.
For school I turned in the first three chapters of Scandal (nee The Rake, for anyone who's keeping track) since for reasons I will kind of explain later, it was not practical to turn in more of Possession. Now, I know that romance has a rep, blah blah blah it's always people who've never read it who say the worst things blah blah blah, but I was really pretty surprised. So, this version of Scandal is still a bit rough around the edges. I knew going in that I did not yet have enough setting, etc. So, I expected my classmates would pick up on that. I was as prepared with the Shell of the Turtle as is possible. So, here's the thing: with one or two exceptions, everyone prefaced their remarks with variations on this:
I never read this genre, so I don't know if [Insert some flaw] is how this is done for these kinds of books. WTF?? Do you see the problem? I started getting steamed because they all assumed that such books are badly written. The problem wasn't the writing, the problem was that such books, which they said they never read (so how would they know?) have such flaws.
I turned in 31 pages, 11 pages over the maximum anybody has to read. And here's the thing: everyone finished. Everyone was engaged with the story. Nobody was bored or confused (except as noted) The main problem was that my opening 2 pages were not as clear as they should have been as to who the characters were. too many names bumping around. They loved my heroine and my hero, too (even though I need to make it clear that he has been madly in love with her since long before the story starts, he was attributed some stereotypical characteristics that I did not intend.) So, yes, I got exactly the feedback I was looking for. I'm not complaining about that. I'm irritated that the flaws of my as yet unfinished chapters were attributed to the nature of the genre. Sorry, but that's my fault, not the fault of historical romance.
The other thing is that the class has seen first three and a half chapters of Possession, and apparently they have failed to identify it as romance. But that's what it is. It's paranormal ROMANCE. None of the issues people had with those chapters were attributed to its genre. And yet, they did so with the historical romance.
I've become convinced that anyone who wants to learn deft storytelling and kick-ass plotting would be well advised to read a lot of genre fiction. Mysteries, Thrillers, Romance, Horror, Suspense. Lots of it. A steady diet of
lit-traw-chure may well leave you tension impaired and bigoted, too. Read both. It's better for you that way.
Lastly, I expect to have some deadlines soon, and that's all I can say right now.
