Hitting the Books

Thanks to Bonnie for this succinct visual representation of how I often feel when sitting at my computer.

*To be perfectly honest though, I did not grok Stranger in a Strange Land. In fact, it’s one of the few books I put down in disgust and never picked up again. The Grapes of Wrath is another. Heck, I even plowed through War and Peace, but those two just hit my snooze button one time too many.

Please pardon my own over-use of euphemisms in this post–the filter on our system was going nuts, so to keep it happy, I had to take out some of the words it didn’t like.

I don’t like explicit “love” scenes, for a number of reasons.

IMHO, there really doesn’t seem to be a way to write such a scene without sounding clinical, crude, or just downright ridiculous (I’m sure I’ll get plenty of people telling me how wrong I am). The clinical and the crude turn me off enough that often I’ll stop reading the book. It has to be an extra-enthralling story for me to merely skip that scene and continue reading. (Though when I read John Jakes’ North and South trilogy way back in the eighth grade, I remember pointing out the worst scenes to my friends and we’d ick and ugh over how disgusting they were. Remember, most eighth-grade boys still had cooties, so the thought of such actions was doubly icky. )

And I can’t read the overly-euphemistic type with out laughing (the now infamous “manroot”), which not only ruins the mood of the scene, but also pulls me out of the characters, so that I can’t take the rest of the book seriously (if I even bother to finish it). For the best examples of this sort of book, visit Snarkling Clean. Robyn and Missie are especially good at picking out such over-the-top euphemisms. Their partial list here is an absolute hoot (and for good measure, go read their comments on romance novel covers. My husband and I ’bout died laughing).

Explicit scenes also make me feel like a Peeping Jane, especially if I’ve gotten attached to the characters. I feel like I should give them some privacy for their little tea party. Somebody once called such fully-described, down-and-dirty scenes “female porn.” I think that’s an extremely harsh statement, and one that’ll bring a load of angry nastygrams my way. I’m not saying I agree with the statement (remember that before you email me all up in arms and indignant), but it sometimes pops into my head when I come across such “love” scenes.

Which leads to yet another thing that bothers me–the phrase “making love.” Sex does not equal love. Many times it’s merely lust, plain and simple. They are in it only for the physical, not because they care about each other. So don’t call it a love scene merely because there are tea and crumpets involved. I think a love scene can have absolutely no sex, no kissing, not even touching. I read one story where the hero knew his new wife was terrified of intimacy because of a near-ravishing. He wanted her, but he was willing to hold in his own desires, to wait and allow her to go at her own pace, because he loved her. No sex, no kissing, yet I would call such a scene a true love scene.

Whew. Okay, I think I’ve done enough damage for one week {Nessili climbs slowly and gingerly off her soapbox and looks around nervously for flying tomatoes}. Next time I’ll try to post on a topic a wee bit less controversial.

The rant continues… (ironic that I usually struggle to post one article a week. But get me on a soapbox and watch the posts come rolling out)

Along with having an inexperienced hero, I also committed the faux pas of having the hero and heroine wait until their wedding night (omigosh! Say it ain’t so!). Call me religious (I am) and call me old-fashioned (I am), but I firmly believe that that’s the only (and best) time for tea and crumpets. That’s one reason I prefer Regency romances–nine times out of ten, the heroine wears white before she wears nothing. Patricia Veryan is one of my favorite authors (she writes Georgian and Regency), and that’s the way her characters finally get together (at least, it is in all the books I own.) I think there was one time the hero and heroine couldn’t wait (he would likely be captured/killed before they could find a minister), but even then they said the wedding vows to each other before they hit the bed.

I understand that historical heroes were rarely inexperienced. The mores of the day expected men to sow their wild oats, to keep a bit of muslin, to visit the soiled doves. Fine, dandy. But the mores of the day also expected the women to stay innocent until called upon to do their wifely duty. It would be highly unlikely that the hero and heroine would be doing it anywhere and everywhere (as seems to be the case in some books). Mainly because if anyone found out:

1. If the heroine has a protective father/brothers/guardian, the hero would likely find himself at the altar posthaste with a pistol aimed at his back.
Or
2. The heroine would likely find herself turned out of her home, or married off to the nearest rich, almost-dead nobleman the parents could find, or pregnant

True, I was the one ranting that most romances are unrealistic (that’s one reason we read them), so I shouldn’t hold other writers to a historically acurate standard. And I’ll admit that some of my other heroes are experienced men, while not all the heroines are pure and maidenly. But once my hero and heroine get together, they don’t hit the sack until they commit before God and man to stay together. From a writer’s standpoint, waiting until marriage is one way to show that this relationship is different from all the previous relationships, that this is The One, the Happily Ever After. From a reader’s standpoint, not waiting isn’t only wrong, it ruins the romance and the story.

Well, the chances of marketing my little story seem slimmer and slimmer–an unrealistic hero who waits for marriage to have tea and crumpets, and then once I get the hero and heroine up into the bedroom and all tender and tense, I shut the bedroom door and let the reader fill in the rest. I’ll talk about my view on explicit tea and crumpets in the next installment of this not-so-little rant.

I was over at Romancing the Blog, reading today’s article Not So Wild Thing, and frankly, I got torqued. So I ranted a bit there, and since I was off-topic, decided to continue my rant here on my own blog. The main issue was cliches in romance. Fine. But this quote got my attention:

“I’ve been bouncing around the idea, that in its own strange way, the romance genre is a bit shy about women who claim their sexual natures with both hands, no shame, no excuses. …It’s the little things: the heroine doesn’t have good sex before the hero, the wild woman is really a virgin, the town slut really only slept with one guy. Where are the women who have had more than two partners – and are willing to look the hero in the eye and admit it proudly?”

Why, why, why? Why does a sexually secure heroine have to be one who has had more than one partner? Or any partner for that matter? Wouldn’t a heroine who was sure of herself say, “I don’t need to prove my sexuality to anyone. I’m big enough, I’m strong enough, I can wait.” Oh yeah, I forgot. Marriage is no longer the main goal for Happily Ever Afters.

And the poor hero! Does he have to act like a crazed animal to be considered “unashamed” of his sexual nature, to be considered a “real man”? Is self-control such a bad thing?

True, in the past men were expected to “gain experience” before marriage. That’s because men are uncontrolled beasts who have to release their wild passions on the local whore rather than the sweet, innocent, insipid maidens who they marry. So instead, the guy goes off, get laid, get infected with STDs (they were rampant then, and still are), and brings that lovely gift home to his darling wife. Okay, surely some smart guy put two and two together and realized that waiting until he had a clean maidenly wife would mean a much safer sex life? If there are men now who wait for The One Woman, doesn’t it stand to reason that there were such men in the past?

Or do manly-men have to proved their studhood before being allowed to be a hero? I would ask, to change her quote a bit, ” Where are the men who have had no partners – and are willing to look the heroine in the eye and admit it proudly?”

Now the virgin heroine is still an accepted (if somewhat passe) character. But a virgin hero? I can think of one off the top of my head. Jamie Fraser, from the Outlander series. The author has him wait until his wedding night, but afterwards Gabaldon seems to go overboard trying to make up for that fact (I’m sorry, but even in fantasy no one, not even a hot Highlander, is probably capable of that level of sex all the time. Rather ruins the believability of the story, IMHO.)

This subject is rather important for me, because the hero of An Uncivilized Yankee is a virgin.

• It’s not because he can’t get a girl (he’s the most sought-after boy in the county).

<li>It's not because he's a saint (by no stretch of the imagination is he a saint).</li>

<li>It's not because he has "other" interests (No.  No.  And NO.)  </li></ul>

It’s because:

1. He has nothing to prove to anyone–he’s secure in his manhood and doesn’t need sex to prove that himself.
2. He made the decision a while back (back before the hormones got terribly wild) And he’s so stubborn that the teasing he gets from his brother and other friends only makes him more determined to stick it out until #3.
3. He really hasn’t found the girl he wants enough to marry (remember, in the old days, guys who went too far with “good” girls often found themselves married to them at the point of a sword or barrel of a gun) and the corollary:
4. He’s smart enough to know that going to the other type of girl usually ends up with all sorts of not nice things (And the farm country of Pennsylvania wasn’t exactly the red-light district anyway.)
5. He has other important things to occupy his time (like fighting a war. Yes, I know. That’s the time most men turn their thoughts to sex–one final fling before facing death. But there’s # 4, which is doubly so for camp followers, and #3 hasn’t changed either)

So is Travis a wuss? A wimp? A shero (to use a phrase from the previous RTB article, A Girl in a Man Suit)?

Breaking News: In the continuing comments from the RTB article, someone was told that a man who refrained from sex was unrealistic.

Who’s to decide unrealistic? Is it any more unrealistic than a guy who tosses every woman he meets in the hay? Or who’s able to go for hours and days without a rest? That seems to be norm for many of the heroes of romance novels.

And here I was under the illusion that romance was, well, a form of fiction. Aren’t time-travellers, vampires, spunky young widows who pretend to be housemaids in order to spy on rich lords who end up marrying them, etc. aren’t these all fairly unrealistic? If I want realism, I’ll read a biography.

Tho’ I’m fast finding out I’m in the minority in a lot of my thoughts on this subject. For example, I don’t like reading full-blown sex scenes–they take me out of the story, make me laugh, even the well-written ones (i.e. those that avoid the use of phrases such as “manroot”). Give me a hero and heroine about to snap from the sexual tension, close the door, and let my imagination fill in the rest.

More on this later…

*Thanks to Robyn and Missie for this priceless euphemism. Maybe it originated elsewhere, but I first read it, and loved it, on Snarkling Clean, so that is where I shall send you.

I’m forever seeking a more efficient way to keep my stories organized. I have this multigenerational family I’ve created, with somewhere upward of a 100 people, and I have stories for most of them already. Needless to say, keeping that many people organized is a pain. Keeping that many stories organized is almost as bad, especially when I’m actually writing.

WriteWay claimed to do just what I needed–organize my characters, keep my plots straight, and generally make my writing easier. I was a bit skeptical, so I downloaded the free 30-day trial, and played around with it.

Let’s just say I was underimpressed.

• First off, I found WriteWay a clutzy program to use. I spent half my time looking for functions and tabs.
• Another big complaint is the set-up for characters. The program didn’t allow my to work on my story when a character notecard was open, so I was continually clicking between the two functions. And the templates were annoying to work with.
• The book outline available to the left of the notecards was nothing amazing either. Sure, it divided up the story into acts, chapters, and scenes. I can do the same thing using the Document Map in Microsoft Word.
• The “notecards” are WriteWay’s big thing. There are notecards for Plot, Conflict, Characters (different from the Character database), Scene Sketch, Setting, Dialogue, Romance, Suspense, Subplot, and Revision. These are supposed to help guide the writer and keep all the information in one place. I found them repetitive, and it was quite annoying to click through all the tabs trying to remember where I put that one piece of information–was it on the Setting card, or the Scene sketch? Or perhaps I jotted it down in my Revision notes?
• Even the vaunted Storyboard, where a writer can move scenes around to help the flow of the story, wasn’t particularly useful to me.

Most of the things WriteWay claims to simplify work just as well with Word and good old-fashioned printouts.
• Using Excel, I can set up a database of characters, then merge them into a Word template and print them out. That way I can keep my character sheets right there within reach and not worry about opening and closing programs.
• Cutting and pasting and using the Document Map as a guide works just fine for me–no fancy storyboard needed.
• If I really needed a storyboard, PowerPoint slides have the same capability. I can even import my outline from Word directly into PowerPoint, then move the slides around, just like with WriteWay.
• If I need maps or articles I can put them in (omigosh!) a file in a filing cabinet, and not muck around with scanning (or worse, typing) them into a computer. I do scan character and setting pictures, then plug them directly into my story so I see them every time I go to write, but I didn’t see any way to do the same thing in WriteWay.

In the end, I was so bored/fed-up with the program that I didn’t even bother to finish out the demo period before uninstalling it.

Perhaps there is a different program out there that does all the things I want it to do, but after looking through the options at download.com, I’m not very hopeful. They all sound the same. Sigh. I guess I’ll just stick to my tried-and-true methods for now, until the next Big Thing comes along.

Though if anyone knows of a program to help organize a whole world, I’d love to hear about it–keeping a fantasy world nicely organized is a real trick (I’ll have to post sometime on the perils of creating your own little world, how easy it is to disappear into the creation and forget about the writing)