Unholy Confusion

I just got a review copy of Stacia Kane’s Unholy Ghosts and started to check it out, and then said, Huh? Haven’t I already read this? Turns out I had. A couple of months ago, I read an advance reader’s copy (ARC). I liked the story. I’m interested in reading a sequel. It’s a paranormal, of course. Tough gal, tough world, tough personal situation, and a couple of tough men in her life who are rather appealing to an unreformed romantic like me. Unholy Ghosts came out in mass market (rack size) paperback in the last few weeks, with a typical paranormal cover. As you can see, the heroine is not wearing much up top, so her tattoos are visible. There’s enough darkness on the cover to suggest the futuristic dystopia in which many paranormals take place, but enough color to show that same futuristic city. and rope in any science fiction or fantasy fans. Meanwhile, over in England, there’s a different cover, but with much of the same color choices and setup. No tattoos visible, but she’s wearing a serious kind of jacket, and there’s a sword, too. (Nice look.) The standard lonely-female-in-the-dark-place vibe is happening with this cover, just as with the U.S. cover. The surprise is this British trade paperback (snooty, more upscale version) that is also out now and costs three pounds more, which looks just like the British erotica-tinged covers for Charlaine Harris’ vampire series (an example of which you can see by checking out my earlier post entitled An Embarrassment of Men). It’s the same mood and the same color scheme. Totally unlike the cartoonish U.S. hardcover book covers. Is your head spinning yet? Mine is. Most people in publishing believe that book buyers are stratified, and on the whole I agree. Some only buy hardcover books. There are others, like myself, who never buy hardcover books. I don’t care if it’s by my favorite author, I’ll read it in hardcover from the public library (I know, anathema to many writers, but the library is the writer’s best friend). If I absolutely adore a book I have read in hardcover, I might buy a copy in paper when it is released, but only if I like the cover—a lot. That’s my taste. But what about the rest of the book buying world? In this example, the mass market covers are more colorful than the trade covers. But the hardcover cover is more colorful still. What does this say about book buyers? Honestly, I don’t know. If we have $25 to spend on a book, we’d like some quirky art and color on the cover? If we only want to spend $12, we’d prefer something monotone with a splash of sexy red? And if we pony up a mere $8, then please give us plenty of color and accurate representational art? Of course, I could avoid being confused if I just “rented” a copy of this book via some digital download (you know, buying it and only owning it until my reading device or my computer crashes for good). Then the colors, the art, the size of the typeface, even the font wouldn’t really matter, would they? Just the words.

Can You Write 50,000 Words in a Month?

That's right, fifty thousand words of a novel, all to be written in the month of June. The Kiwi Writers, a New Zealand writing group, runs the Southern Cross Novel Challenge, SoCNoC, starting tomorrow (that's today already for some of you) and ending June 30th. This Internet challenge is open to all, across the globe. Unlike the National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, the November writing challenge sponsored by a California-based nonprofit that attracts thousands of participants, you can't get lost in the crowd with SoCNoC. The Kiwi Writers is a small group. But determined to write 50k in June. You can join the fun and feel part of a cozy, yet worldwide group. As you progress, you post your daily word count and check out how everyone else is doing. There's a tiny bit of competitiveness involved since you can see where you rank against others. There is no single winner; everyone who participates and writes 50,000 words wins. The Southern Cross Novel Challenge runs strictly on the honor system, and you don't have to verify your word count. You don't need to. The prize is your deep personal satisfaction in having written anything at all. Of course the idea of a writing challenge like SoCNoC is to push yourself to write every day, with a goal of getting most or all of a novel completed in first draft in a very short amount of time. Are you up for it? Go sign up and sharpen your fingertips. Haul out that story you've been meaning to set down, and have a go at it.

Is It Love?

Is it love if the guy doesn't say he loves you? When writing that sentence, I began to realize that I had used the word "guy" because I don't think of a "man" as afraid to say he loves me. But a "guy" might try to weasel out of such an admission. In the personal advice columns that are still syndicated in the remaining newspapers in this country, but are also in online magazines such as Salon, women often do complain that they are living with men and are thinking they want to get married, but somehow, the man avoids the topic. Well, duh. "Why buy the cow if the milk is free?" We've all heard that cliché expression, yet many of us try to live as if modern men never feel that way. Some men want to marry, and others, not so much. Still, they're happy to have someone to have regular sex with, happy to have a companion to social events that might otherwise be a little intimidating, and happy to have a domestic goddess at home who probably cares more than they do about making sure there's food in the house, clean laundry, and a sanitary bathroom. Which is not to claim that every female has higher standards of domesticity than every male-merely to strongly imply it. In this situation, unless a man wants children or is worried that the woman will leave him, why would he want to marry her? Some guys do get married, because it feels comfortable to them. Others, not so much. Meanwhile, women already living with these guys are asking other people for advice, because despite their intimacy, they cannot measure the character of their man. John Shore's article in Open Salon, "Six Tests to Determine If He's Mr. Right" is typical of the confusion that modern women face. Middle-class twentysomethings probably living in urban apartments are not the only people who seem indecisive about marrying these days. I just read a novel about some miserable people in West Virginia strip mining territory (Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake). Frankly, so far, I have never read any novels or true tales of West Virginia that were not miserable. The state's coal resources have meant the ruination of many, many people here. Anyway, in this novel, one of the narrators is the first person in her family to feel the itch to leave the hollow where she was raised, and she goes all the way to Morgantown (gasp! the big city!) for college. She immediately realizes that she wants to go home. So what does she do? She hooks up with some guy and gets pregnant by him, which pretty much self-sabotages any college plans. But she doesn't marry her boyfriend, not until several years later. After she's living back home again, she gets pregnant by him again. By then she has learned how to forage for wild plants to sell, and he has a job and makes a serious proposal. So they marry. As the story develops, the love they once might have felt for each other-or maybe it was just lust-is soon gone, destroyed by the terrible calamity of the strip mine destroying their home and way of life and the local economy turning completely sour. As I read that book, I kept wondering, well, do they at least love each other? Does anybody in this story love anybody else? There's lots of family sticking together, and people helping each other and working together, and so on. But they don't talk about love. Talk of love perhaps is not done by country people, but talk of love seemingly is not done by city people anymore, either. Shacking up, however, is becoming universal. Under these circumstances, which are more and more commonplace all over our country, it's a wonder that anyone dreams of romance, or can even read a romance with a straight face. Yet we do. Romances are about idealized characters who behave better than we do in real life. The heroine of a romance is more discriminating about her personal behavior than many real women. She won't have sex with guys just to have sex. She has high standards in men, too. She's not interested in indifferent men, in loser men, in men who need a mommy. (Maybe she's already been burned by her prior involvements with triflers.) The heroes of romance, true to their basic male nature, tend to be more instinctive and taciturn, but they, too, behave with more grace than most real men. Romance heroes are not the men who say "I'll call you" and then don't. These are not the men who "just aren't that into you." These are the men who really, really care. They might be slow to declare their love, but by the end of the story they are saying it out loud. Repeatedly. Do these men exist? Can writing about them and reading about them and idealizing what men can be make such men exist? If men know that women want them to be heroes, will men aspire to be heroic? Or are they already heroes, the ones who can see past the fulfillment of selfish desires to the golden prospect of building a life with someone? A life in which "I love you" is not a rare turn of phrase? I believe they do, which is why I keep reading romances.

Blushing Brides Writing Contest

A Salute to Blushing Brides, Screaming Bridezillas and Happily Ever After Couples! Submit your TRUE stories of courtship, weddings and marriage to our BLUSHING BRIDES writing contest to win fabulous romantic prizes. Our editors will select and rank the top four stories from all qualifying submissions. Readers will select the Reader's Favorite with their votes. The contest and voting begins April 1, 2010 and ends July 31, 2010. Winners will be announced on August 16, 2010. For more information and a complete list of prizes visit the contest pages.