Lay Off Stephanie

Okay, I just read my first review of One For the Money, the first movie version of one of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels. Granted this particular review is more concerned with dragging Katherine Heigl over the coals than actually talking about the movie, but here’s the thing: The reviewer has obviously not read the book and even more obviously has no idea who Stephanie Plum is.

This is another example of what I think of as the romance-novels-don’t-exist phenomenon. Evanovich’s Plum novels have been bestsellers for years. Most of us in the romance community (and probably in the cozy mystery community as well) know them. I’ve read most of them, although I began to lose my enthusiasm for them when it became obvious that Evanovich wasn’t going to resolve the Stephanie/Morelli/Ranger triangle anytime soon (plus the characterization of Lula skates close enough to racist to make me uncomfortable). Evanovich may not be anywhere close to Nora in terms of sales, but she’s definitely up there.

Which makes it all the more annoying that this reviewer not only has never heard of the books but has no interest in them. The “terrible” dialogue he quotes sounds very much like Evanovich to me, and it also doesn’t sound all that awful. That’s the way Stephanie and Joe talk to each other, and I’d venture to guess it’s popular with Evanovich’s legions of fans. Stephanie and Joe’s interactions are typical examples of the banter you find in a lot of comic romances. I don’t contest the reviewer’s right to dislike it. But his tone of amused contempt bugs me.

Somehow I have a feeling that if this movie had been based on, say, a long-running series of thrillers by James Patterson or Michael Connelly, the reviewer would have acknowledged the books in the review. But Evanovich’s books don’t even get a nod.

I’m sorry to see that the studio didn’t show this movie to critics. That’s usually a sign that a movie is a stinker. It’s always seemed to me that Stephanie Plum was tailor-made for movies, or maybe even a television series (hey, it worked for Charlaine Harris). Now it looks like this may be the first and last Stephanie Plum movie.

But the fact that the movie may be lousy doesn’t release the reviewer from the responsibility to know that it grows out of a wildly popular series of novels. Yeah, it’s a comic mystery with a heavy romantic subplot. Deal with it.

The Paula Problem

A while ago I wrote a blog post defending Paula Deen against attacks made by Anthony Bourdain on her cooking and her attitude toward food. It seemed to me then and now that these attacks had more than a slight whiff of sexism and elitism since Bourdain had a real problem with female Food Network stars who hadn’t attended culinary school. Now Paula Deen has revealed she has Type 2 Diabetes and has known about her diagnosis for over three years. And I’m suddenly wondering how I feel about Paula these days.

I should make it clear going into this discussion that I realize diet does not cause diabetes. According to Paul Campos’s helpful review of the literature, diabetes is a genetic disease. If diabetics are frequently overweight, that’s an indication of the nature of diabetes rather than proof that fat people inevitably become diabetic. So implying that Deen caused her own diabetes by advocating unsafe food is simply untrue. On the other hand, it’s undoubtedly true that diabetics need to follow a careful diet in order to maintain their health. Thus it’s somewhat more accurate to say that the foods Paula Deen particularly likes are not necessarily the foods that diabetics should be eating on a regular basis.

But it isn’t so much Deen’s diet that bothers me in this whole imbroglio. It’s the fact that she kept her diagnosis secret for over three years while she continued to promote food that wasn’t necessarily the kind of food she and her fellow diabetics should be eating. When asked why she delayed making her story public, Deen said that she wanted to “bring something to the table” when she finally let everybody know about her illness. Which is all well and good, but what she’s apparently bringing to the table is a deal with drug manufacturer Novo Nordisk. That makes her decision sound rather like an attempt to find some kind of revenue stream before telling the world about her health problems.

I don’t begrudge celebrity chefs their product placement. If Rachael Ray wants to sell me a garbage bowl or Ina Garten a cake mix, that’s okay with me. I’m a big girl, and I make my own decisions about what I use in the kitchen. But there’s something vaguely…sleazy about Paula Deen hawking diabetes medicine. It’s as if she knew her health problems would be big news and found a way to capitalize on them.

So I wish Paula luck. I hope she can deal with her health problems and go on enjoying her life in Savannah. And I sure as hell don’t feel like signing on with Anthony Bourdain, who still strikes me as a snobbish jerk. But I really wish I didn’t get the feeling that Paula was trying to monetize diabetes. Because that really would be something to snarl about.

The Stalker Hero

So I’m reading a recently reissued Jayne Anne Krentz from 1985, The Waiting Game. It has a typical Krentz hero—a solitary alpha, brooding, craggy, withdrawn, who immediately falls hard for the heroine. He recognizes right away that they’re Meant For Each Other and knows he needs to do something to claim her as his. Granted he’s been primed to believe this by the heroine’s equally alpha uncle, but he falls hard and never lets go.

Now normally I’d see this as a sort of standard eighties trope—the hero who knows that the heroine is The One and goes about claiming her. But it so happened that I picked up The Waiting Game just after I’d finished the new Norah Roberts, The Next Always, which features a villain who’s stalking the heroine. This particular villain is certain that the heroine is The One, and he spends a part of the book trying to claim her. The hero ends up pummeling him into a pulp.

Which leads to a basic question for romance writers: How much is too much? When does a devoted hero turn into a nut job?

A lot of romance heroes fall fast and hard for their heroines. In fact, few romances feature a hero who doesn’t find the heroine attractive at all (unless, of course, she’s soon to undergo a radical makeover). I think this trope stems from a fairly straightforward principle: unrequited love is no fun. We want the hero to want the heroine. But we also want the hero to understand limits. There’s something a little creepy about a lot of eighties romance heroes. In their alpha haze, they’re frequently convinced that they know what’s best for the heroine. That they’ll take care of her despite her own silly desires for him to do something else. Sometimes these plots show that the heroine really doesn’t need to be hovered over in the way that the hero wants to hover, but frequently it turns out that Daddy Knows Best. The hero demonstrates to the heroine that it’s best if she just relaxes and lets him take care of everything.

Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s close to stalker behavior. And it’s a little hard to justify in contemporary romance.

In contrast, heroes in historicals can actually get by with a version of this. After all, historical heroes exist in cultures in which men are supposed to be protective of women, as long as they’re of the right class and type (let’s get real here). But these days even historical heroes have to back off a little. Kasey Michaels’ terrific Midsummer Night’s Sin features a hero who’s trying to break up white slaver ring. The heroine has a very personal interest in said ring since they’ve kidnapped her cousin. The hero tries to keep her out of the pursuit, but when she insists, he doesn’t lock her up. Much against his own desires, he takes her with him and allows her to play a part in the rescue.

I guess the point is this: we’ve come a fair distance since the eighties. The idea of the fixated hero is no longer quite as attractive as it once was. And as authors, we’re still trying to find the right balance between protective and psycho.

You’ll Be Sorry

A couple of weeks ago, I did some ruminating on the Secret Baby plot and why it sort of freaks me out. I think one of the reasons that this particular plot is so popular with some romance readers is that it works on the “You’ll be sorry” principle. And the “You’ll be sorry” principle is a driving force in a lot of romances.

We all know what the “You’ll be sorry” principle is, of course. It’s the impulse you have when somebody does something that hurts you or someone you love, and you find yourself hoping that sometime in the future they’ll suffer for having done it. Simplicity in itself. Of course, this rarely happens, or anyway it rarely happens in the way you hoped it would. Because the corollary of the “You’ll be sorry” principle is the “And I’ll know how you’ve suffered” codicil. It’s not enough that the offending person should suffer some comeuppance for having done you wrong—you want to know that they’ve suffered too. In fact, ideally, these people should not only suffer, they should also come to you and express remorse. Or if not that, you should at least be fully aware of their suffering so that you can, well, revel in it.

So some secret baby stories, like Elizabeth Lowell’s This Time Love, work by bringing the wandering impregnator back to suffer for having treated the heroine’s love so casually. See? the heroine seems to say. I’ve raised this perfect little girl without you after going through hell. And now you’re on the outside looking in. Nyah, nyah, nyah. Well, okay, I added that last bit, but it fits. The hero then suffers quite openly for the heroine’s enjoyment.

Some authors even pull off the ultimate “You’ll Be Sorry” fantasy—the “you’ll-miss-me-when-I’m-dead” variation. Take Julia Quinn’s The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever, for example. The heroine, the aforementioned Miranda Cheever, spends a great deal of time trying to please her husband, the book’s hero. He, however, has been badly hurt by his previous wife’s infidelity and shows little or no interest in his exemplary spouse. Until she’s dying, that is. Miranda comes down with some conveniently almost fatal illness, and her husband realizes, only as she’s about to slip this mortal coil, that she’s absolutely perfect for him. His misery over his former behavior is, of course, abject. And Miranda gets to recover in time to revel in it.

What this all boils down to is pretty straightforward, I think. Most of us feel unappreciated at least some of the time, and those feelings of neglect can be painful. In the “You’ll be sorry” plot, we get to watch somebody else get validated. The people who have treated them badly get suitably ass-kicked. And the hero/heroine gets to gloat. That none of this is particularly sterling behavior doesn’t really matter. We’re talking fantasy here, folks, and we in the romance business know all about wish fulfillment. Nyah, nyah, nyah!

And the Winnah Is…

Congrats to Emily Tardy for winning the copy of Don’t Forget Me. Happy holidays, everybody!

Don’t Forget Me–Please!

The Book

So it’s finally here: the release date for my sixth Konigsburg book, Don’t Forget Me. The story of Nando Avrogado and Kit Maldonado.

The first four Konigsburg books were pretty straightforward: I had four brothers, so I needed four books. After that, I wasn’t sure whether I’d stay in Konigsburg or go somewhere else. But it turned out that once I’d created the town, I didn’t want to leave it. I knew the place and the people. And I knew they had a lot more stories to tell.

Book five, Brand New Me, introduced a lot of new characters, although some of the Toleffsons wandered through just to show they were still in town. It was sort of fun to have characters who didn’t have a common backstory. I got to let my mind wander through the Faro tavern, sketching in new people like Clem Rodrguez and Chico Burnside.

And now I’m back again, but the characters this time around are a mixture of new and old. If you’ve read the other Konigsburg books, you may remember Nando and Kit. Kit showed up first as a teenager in the very first book, Venus In Blue Jeans. Nando arrested a drunken Otto Friedrich in Wedding Bell Blues. Both of them played supporting roles in Long Time Gone, then Kit went back to San Antonio and Nando became Tom’s best friend in Brand New Me. They’re surrounded by characters you may have met before: Allie Maldonado and her fiancé Wonder Dentist, Tom Ames and Deirdre Brandenburg, and Erik Toleffson, among others—and there’s a very familiar villain. But there’s also a new guy in town: Joe LeBlanc, head chef of the Rose restaurant where Kit is the manager, and Joe brings along more people to meet and wonder about.

All of these people surround Kit and Nando in their attempts to overcome the past and get back together again. Some of them are cheering and some are throwing up roadblocks. Reunited lovers always have lots of bumps in the road, and these two are no exception. But needless to say, their problems are resolved in the end.

I’m already thinking ahead to future books, assuming Samhain continues to put up with me and Konigsburg. Joe LeBlanc obviously deserves his own story, and there’s a new cop in town who has lots of possibilities, although he’s a little wet behind the ears. Some readers have said they want to know more about Chico and Marilyn. I like Chico a lot, but I don’t think Marilyn’s good enough for him. On the other hand, I have a few ideas for someone who might work. I’m open to suggestions, though. Is there anybody you’d like to see more of?

Anyway, here we are, back in Konigsburg again. And I can’t tell you how glad I am to be here!

The Contest

There is, of course, a contest to go along with release day here. I’m giving away a copy of Don’t Forget Me to one of the commenters on this blog. Just leave a comment and I’ll enter your name in a drawing next week.

The Blurb

Once they said goodbye forever. Now they want to walk it back.
Konigsburg, Texas, Book 6
Eighteen months ago, Kit Maldonado was so over Nando Avrogado, she left Konigsburg without a backward glance. With the family restaurant in San Antonio sold out from under her, though, she’s back to manage The Rose, an exclusive resort eatery outside town.
Dealing with a stingy boss, an amorous head chef, an understaffed dining room and planning her aunt’s wedding should have kept her hands full. But she realizes she might not be as over Nando as she thought.
As the town’s new assistant chief of police, Nando’s got enough trouble without sexy Kit fanning embers he thought had long ago turned to ashes. Every time he turns around, she’s there—and it doesn’t help that everyone in town wants to see them back together.
One incendiary kiss, and there’s no denying the force of their attraction. But there’s a mysterious and oddly familiar burglar who’s been lurking around Konigsburg, someone who isn’t above a little mayhem—maybe even violence—to cover his tracks.

Product Warnings

Contains hot makeup sex, wedding madness, a hot chef, vengeful burglars, and unlawful abuse of a wedding cake.

The Excerpt

Nando Avrogado was hiding. Granted, the Dew Drop Inn didn’t provide much in the way of cover, although it was dark enough to make identifying anyone pretty challenging unless you were less than six inches away. Granted, Nando himself, at six three and a hundred eighty-eight pounds, was somewhat difficult to hide, even when he wasn’t in uniform (as he wasn’t at the moment). Nonetheless, he was hiding. From Francine Richter, five three and a hundred five.

It was embarrassing. It was nothing a mature adult male of twenty-eight should be doing.

He should just get over it. He knew that. He should just head down the street to the Faro tavern, where he usually hung out, and take his punishment, whatever that punishment turned out to be—tears, curses, possibly violence. It wasn’t exactly his fault that Francine hadn’t understood the meaning of their goodbye date the way she was supposed to. It sure wasn’t his fault that she’d been leaving messages on his voice mail for the past two days.

Except that it was his fault. Sort of. He’d tried to make it clear throughout their handful of dates that nothing more serious was on the horizon for them. That they weren’t going to hook up for the long term. That they were just having some temporary good times.

And in reality, the times hadn’t even been all that good after the first couple of dates. He had to admit that, for the most part, he’d just been going through the motions. Francine was okay. She didn’t natter too much. She looked good. She was…a decent kisser. Not bad exactly, but not good either.

Nando sighed, taking a sip of his lukewarm beer. If he were honest, it wasn’t Francine who’d been the real disappointment. He was the one who wasn’t measuring up to expectations, Francine’s for sure, but his own too. Given his lack of enthusiasm, maybe it was just as well that they’d never progressed beyond a few hot make-out sessions on Francine’s couch.

Of course, if he were honest he wouldn’t be sitting in this dive, drinking beer that tasted like dishwater. He’d be down the street with his friends at the Faro, drinking some honest brew and dealing with Francine when and if she showed up.

He rubbed his eyes and fought back the impulse to groan in frustration. God, he was tired. And it wasn’t just the hours from his job as a Konigsburg cop. During the last few months he’d seemed to fall into a rut that just got deeper and deeper. Same people, same problems, same everything. When had this feeling started anyway? And why? He’d gotten all the things he’d once thought he wanted in his life—full-time appointment to the Konigsburg police force, a decent place to live away from his parents (sharing an apartment with his brother Esteban, but doing that wasn’t such a bad deal), an active social life without being tied down to anybody.

Yeah, right. It was that “active” social life that was the problem. Maybe he should try deliberate celibacy rather than the unintentional kind for a while. See what it felt like to not hit the clubs on his night off. The whole excitement-of-the-chase thing was getting very old. And truth be told, the chase hadn’t been that exciting for a long time. Eighteen months, in fact.

Don’t go there. It’s over. No matter how much you wish it weren’t.

“Geez, where’d you hide the body? You look like a man at a wake.” His brother Esteban slid onto the stool next to him, waving a hand toward Ingstrom, the bartender. “What are you doing here anyway? I thought you did your drinking at the Faro these days.”

“I could say the same thing about you.” Nando took a disgruntled pull on his beer. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in this dive before.”

Esteban cleared his throat. Ingstrom, who owned the Dew Drop Inn as well as being its bartender, was standing across from them behind the bar. He scowled at Nando before turning to his brother. “You want beer or wine?”

“Lonestar,” Esteban said hastily. He was the assistant wine master at Cedar Creek Winery, which meant he routinely avoided the wine-in-a-jug served by the Dew Drop Inn. “You still haven’t explained why you’re here,” he continued as Ingstrom headed back down the bar. “I haven’t seen you in the Dew Drop for a couple of months. Why aren’t you at the Faro watching Deirdre Brandenburg serve beers like every other red-blooded man in town?”

Nando shrugged. “Deirdre’s attached to Tom Ames. If I start ogling Deirdre, he’s likely to put Ipecac in my beer. Besides, the Dew Drop’s closer to home. I didn’t feel like walking.”

Esteban smirked. “Yeah, those three blocks will really do you in. Especially with the temperature hovering in the high seventies.”

“Get stuffed,” Nando muttered, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Esteban turned, resting his elbows on the bar behind him as he surveyed the room. “You trying to avoid your latest fling? I’d say that’s a heavy price to pay for romance gone wrong.”

Nando studied his younger brother with hooded eyes. Esteban looked like a linebacker, which he’d been in high school, or like someone who bench-pressed wine barrels, which he also did frequently. He wore his hair almost as short as Nando’s, even though the management at Cedar Creek wasn’t as stiff about hair length as Chief Toleffson was at the cop shop. But he made up for the hair with the luxuriant moustache that curved around his mouth. His skin was darkened from working in the vineyards—just like their father.

“What would you know about romance gone wrong?” Nando grabbed a handful of peanuts. “I haven’t noticed you tearing up the town with anybody since you broke up with Dawn Benavidez. And that’s been over three months, bro.”

Esteban shook his head. “Nice try, but we’re not switching the subject of this conversation to me. Are you or are you not trying to avoid Francine Richter?”

Nando blew out a breath. “Maybe.”

“Right.” Esteban shook his head. “You don’t think that’s a little pathetic? Hiding out in a joint like the Dew Drop just to avoid a woman you dated for a couple of weeks?”

Nando ran his glass through the circle of condensation on the bar. “I can drink where I want, bro. Who knows? Maybe I’ll check out the talent around here this evening.” There had to be some. Even at the Dew Drop.

Ingstrom set Esteban’s draft on the bar with a clink. “Stay away from my barmaids, Avrogado, they got work to do.” He stomped back to the other end of the bar.

Nando took a quick survey of the Dew Drop’s barmaids, the most prominent one anyway. Ruby looked more like a biker chick than usual. Tonight she had on a leather vest that was zipped partway up her sizeable chest and blue jeans that showed a roll of white flesh at the waist. Her magenta hair was caught in a banana clip that looked perilously close to slipping out. Every man in the bar was trying not to look down her cleavage, knowing the instant retribution that followed. As if she sensed she was being watched, Ruby caught Nando’s eye. Her lip twisted in a world-class sneer.

“Now going after that really would be pathetic,” he muttered.

Esteban nodded. “True that. So why can’t you just tell Francine it’s over? Fun while it lasted, time to move on and so forth.”

Nando grimaced. “Because I’d rather not get into one of those discussions where you end up either making somebody cry or making somebody mad enough to bean you with her purse. If I stay out of her way long enough, she’ll get the message.”

“And that way you just come off as a jerk instead of a sleaze.”

Nando gritted his teeth. “You could put it that way.”

“You know, bro, sooner or later all this bad karma you’re building up with women is going to come back and bite you on the ass.” Esteban took a long swallow of Lonestar.

“What are you, some kind of wine-making Buddhist now?” Nando shook his head. “This doesn’t qualify as bad karma. So I don’t like talking about ‘relationships’ with women. Name me one man who does.”

Esteban shrugged. “I’m just saying if all the women you’ve screwed around with over the past few months ever got together, you’d be a dead man.”

Nando rubbed his eyes again. The vision of all his recent exes getting together, possibly with automatic weapons, was not altogether comfortable. “Yeah, well, I’m thinking of cutting back. Maybe putting the brakes on the relationships for a while. Take a breather from women.”

“You?” The corners of Esteban’s mouth curved up. “You’re giving up women? Maybe I should spread the word. I could sell tickets.”

A slight prickle of unease slid down Nando’s spine. He wasn’t that much of a womanizer, was he? He never used to think of himself that way. Of course, that was before the major fuck-up of his love life. “Do not spread the word.” He gritted his teeth again. “This was just between the two of us. And I haven’t decided for sure what I’m going to do. Just thinking about it.”

Esteban nodded, still grinning. “Right.”

Nando drained the rest of his beer. Screw it. “I’m going down to the Faro, see what’s going on. You want to come?”

“Maybe later.” His brother peered toward the far corner of the bar where Britney Collins was seated with a couple of her girlfriends.

Nando rolled his eyes. Clearly, he wasn’t the only Avrogado who had females on the brain. “Good luck with that.”

He dropped a handful of bills on the bar, then pushed back, dodging around a couple of protruding rear ends to get to the door. Among other things, the Dew Drop was short on open space, particularly since Ingstrom had added some extra tables in the middle of the room. Nando ran through the bar’s very own obstacle course, then opened the door to the street.

It took a minute for his eyes to adjust to the early evening light. People still strolled down Main, ducking into the few open stores. Mid-March wasn’t a great tourist time in Konigsburg, but they got some families who filled up the motels and bed and breakfasts for Spring Break. He settled his Stetson on his forehead and started up the street toward the Faro.

Ahead of him the crowd parted for a moment and he saw a swing of long dark hair reaching down below a woman’s shoulders. Nice. For a moment, he concentrated on her as she walked up the street in front of him, wondering what she’d look like when she turned around. You could never predict exactly how attractive someone’s face would be based on her back side.

Nando grimaced. He really needed to stop ogling women. Particularly if he wanted to take the whole celibacy thing seriously. Besides, if anyone ever heard him talking about faces and back sides like that, he’d be banned from the female sex for life. Which you would richly deserve, and which might not be such a bad thing.

A couple walking in front of him turned in to one of the candy stores and he got a better look at the woman up ahead. Silken dark hair, slender waist, long, long legs that showed off well in her white Capri pants. Nando finally gave in and checked her behind. More than respectable. The whole package was superlative, in fact. Always assuming the face matched.

What the hell are you doing? You’re supposed to be giving this up. You know it won’t go anywhere.

Nando shook his head. Going cold turkey was going to be a lot harder than he’d thought. On the other hand, he couldn’t go on indefinitely moving from woman to woman like some deranged honey bee, could he? Time to start being selective. Time to learn how to pace himself.

Time to grow up. More than time, if he were honest. He grimaced. That one hurt, largely because it was true.

Ahead of him, the woman slowed alongside Docia Toleffson’s bookstore. Slowed and then stopped, staring in the window. After a moment, she waved at someone inside. Nando let his own pace slow down so that he wouldn’t pass her just yet. He really wanted to see her face.

The door to the bookstore flew open, and Docia Toleffson herself stepped out, all six feet of her—maybe seven feet if you counted that pile of red hair on top of her head. She grinned at the stranger and then extended her arms to give her a hug. As she did, Nando got his first look at the woman’s face.

His heart stuttered and then promptly dropped to his shoes. Oh god, of course. I really had this coming.

“Kit,” Docia was saying. “Kit Maldonado. Where have you been keeping yourself? Allie said you were coming back this week. Oh, it’s so good to see you!”

Kit said something back, but Nando didn’t hear it. He was too busy stepping backward into the doorway of another shop where he’d have some cover. The last thing he wanted right then was a conversation with Kit. Hell, he didn’t even want her to see him just yet. Not until he figured out what exactly he was going to say to her. And how he was going to say it. And what it would mean.

Kit Maldonado. Here. Back in Konigsburg.

For a moment he swore he could almost hear Esteban laughing. The force of karma had just sunk its teeth firmly into his ass.

Secret Babies and Doody-Heads

When we Nine Naughty Novelists wrote our first serial parody, The Zillionaire Vampire Cowboy’s Secret Werewolf Babies, we knew we wanted to include the classic “secret baby” plot twist. In fact, we wanted to up the ante by making those secret babies twins (the mother was a werewolf, so multiple births weren’t exactly unheard of). But lately I’ve been thinking about the whole “secret baby” idea. Why do so many readers find it appealing? Because the thing is—it’s actually sort of icky. No, really.

First of all, what credible reason can you come up with for a woman to keep a pregnancy secret from her partner? I suppose if the partner were a horrible person, you might want to do that, but I’ve seldom run into that particular plot twist. Loretta Chase does something like this in Not Quite a Lady, where the impregnator is a rotter and the heroine must protect her reputation, so informing him is never an option. However, most of the unknowing baby daddies in romance are the heroes of the books—good guys, in other words. Or guys who could become good with the proper motivation.

I suppose the heroine could have no idea what had become of the hero and thus be unable to notify him. Nora Roberts does this in Honest Illusions, where the hero disappears without a trace because of a complex plot twist. But it’s hard to pull off unless the hero is declared dead or taken prisoner and kept incommunicado. I suppose there’s always amnesia, but that particular plot device usually stretches credulity to the breaking point. So it’s hard to create a situation where the heroine couldn’t let the hero know somehow.

Which means the heroine has chosen not to let the hero know because she’s, well, pissed. This seems to be the most common plot device. Hero and heroine have a major fight, break up, heroine discovers she’s pregnant but refuses to tell hero because he’s such a doody-head. Right. Now think about that for a moment. Heroine actually chooses to become a single mom, one of the toughest jobs around, because she’s mad. What kind of woman does this? Probably a doody-head. This particular plot twist requires you to admire a woman who’s behaving very badly indeed, and who’s taking the chance of hurting an innocent child because she’s too immature to get over it.

So now we come to the hero. He’s required to discover that a) he’s a daddy and b) he actually loves his baby mama. And he’s supposed to be really blown away by the baby and to want desperately to be her/his parent. Again, in real life the chances of this happening are somewhere around nil. Look at the number of baby daddies who demand paternity tests rather than becoming all dewy-eyed at the thought of having a little bundle of joy (I’m lookin’ at you, Eddie Murphy). But this is romance, and fairy tales are pretty standard in our business.

So why do readers love secret babies? Maybe because it’s the way we wish things could be. Women strong enough to raise great kids on their own (and the kids are always great, you notice). Men responsible enough to love both their children and the women who produced them.

And, of course, HEA. I just wish the whole idea didn’t make me feel slightly queasy.

Food Books: A Thursday Thirteen

As I’ve mentioned before, I love to cook. I also love to read about cooking, and with Thanksgiving coming up food is definitely on my mind. So here are thirteen books that are fun to read—some of them include recipes, but not all. Most, however, include a lot of enthusiasm about food.

1. Ruth Reichl, Garlic and Sapphires. I’m a late addition to Reichl’s fan club, but I’m here to tell you the woman knows how to write about taste. This book is her account of her years as a restaurant critic at the New York Times and it’s both hilarious and touching (it tells you something about Reichl that she can actually be touching when she talks about food).

2. Jacques Pepin, The Apprentice, My Life In the Kitchen. Pepin’s account of his career as a chef—it’s unpretentious, funny, and endearing. Plus if you’ve ever wondered about the origin of the famous SNL sketch where Julia Child bleeds to death while pleading with us to “save the liver,” Pepin can tell you about it.

3. Jessica Harper, The Crabby Cook. Harper is one of those irritating people who’s had several successful careers—actress, children’s songwriter and singer, and now cookbook writer. Her account of cooking for her husband and two insanely picky children is hilarious, even if it does include dinners with Richard Gere.

4. Peg Bracken, The I Hate To Cook Book. A classic, recently reissued. Bracken doesn’t really hate to cook, but she has limited time to do it and she assumes you do too. If some of the recipes are a little dated, they’re still fun to read.

5. Jason Sheehan, Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen. If you’ve ever wondered how your food gets cooked and served in a restaurant, Sheehan will tell you—more, in fact, than you ever wanted to know.

6. Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential. I have a love-hate relationship with Bourdain, and frankly, it’s mostly hate (his disdain for home cooks as opposed to chefs rubs me the wrong way). But his accounts of how chefs work are fascinating, and in truth he’s almost (but not quite) as tough on himself as he is on Paula Deen.

7. Alton Brown, I’m Just Here For the Food. I’ve also got a love-hate relationship with Alton Brown, but here it’s mostly love. I enjoy Brown’s quirky approach to food science, but frankly I like reading about what he does more than using his recipes.

8. Lynn Rosetto Kasper and Sally Swift, How To Eat Supper. I love Kasper’s NPR show The Splendid Table, and this book has the same kind of well-informed but good-humored approach.

9. Christopher Kimball. The Kitchen Detective. You either enjoy Kimball (editor of both Cooks Illustrated and Cooks Country and host of America’s Test Kitchen on PBS) or you find him insufferable. Most of the time I enjoy him, and The Kitchen Detective has all the kind of obsessive-compulsive approach to cooking that you get in his magazines.

10. David Zinczenko, Eat This, Not That 2012. Okay, I know, what’s this doing in a list with Jacques Pepin and Ruth Reichl? Zinczenko, like a lot of diet gurus, doesn’t seem to have much appreciation for the pleasures of food (although he’s very clear on the dangers). Still, I get a kick out of reading just how screwed up many fast food restaurants are, turning something as healthy as a chicken sandwich into a nightmare.

11. Julia Child, My Life In France. A wonderful portrait of Europe during the fifties and of Child’s coming of age as a chef while learning to cook. Generous, funny, and beautifully written, it’s a must for anybody who wants to see where the Julia sections of the movie Julie and Julia came from.

12. Bill Buford, Heat. If you’re an enthusiastic home cook, like me, and you’ve ever thought about apprenticing in a restaurant to improve your techniques, Buford’s book will cure you.

13. David Kamp, The United States of Arugula. I can’t imagine sitting down and reading this book straight through (the print is insanely small for one thing), but if you’re interested in the origins of the current mania for good food and good cooking, Kamp can tell you all about it—and he does.

 

So who did I miss? What food books are your favorites?

 

Accents, Apostrophes, and Elisions Oh My

So the hero in my current WIP is from Louisiana. I can hear his voice in my head when I write his dialogue, which is always handy (the voice is sort of based on some Louisianans I’ve known, although the character isn’t). But when it comes to writing that dialogue out, I have some problems. The voice I hear drops a lot of g sounds at the ends of words. But when I write the dialogue, those g’s just won’t disappear.

Dialects are a pain in the butt, y’all. Basically, if you decide to use them when you write, you can’t go halfway. If the character says gonna and gotta in one place, you’re pretty much stuck with having him say it in all the other places too (unless the first one is clearly meant to be a joke). I mean, can you have a character who says gonna at one point and going to at another? I think not.

But this, in turn, means you’re going to have to pay attention to how you want to spell this stuff and you’re going to have to be very careful when you write the dialogue. If you decide to have a character refer to them as em, you know it’s going to have to be spelled ’em EVERY EFFING TIME. Then there’s the whole spellcheck problem. I get a start every time I look at the page and see all those little red underlines (Word hates dialects).

I find that instead of using dialect, I sort of rely on my readers to do it for me. With any luck a couple of darlin’s will be enough to give a reader the clue that this particular character talks kinda slow (kinda is, of course, another butt pain word).

My other problem with dialects comes as a reader, though. I purely hate any dialogue I have to read out loud in order to get the gist. I just read a couple of classic British mysteries where the author had secondary characters speaking in unfamiliar British regional idioms. I had to repeat each speech carefully in order to figure out what the hell the characters were saying. And then I got to experience the true joy of realizing the speeches themselves weren’t that important. The author had apparently thrown them in for “local color.” Do I have to tell you I wasn’t pleased?

More skillful writers convey the sound of the character’s voice through the arrangement of words rather than weird spellings and apostrophes. Sarah Smith deals with a lot of different social classes and nationalities in  her Vanished Child series, and she does most of it with the words people use and the way they arrange them. Apostrophes do not necessarily dot her pages.

There are a few books where the dialects used are crucial. Huck Finn leaps immediately to mind, for example. I wouldn’t have Huck speak any other way. But I’d argue that those examples are rare. Any time you see a lot of apostrophes coming up, you’re probably in  for a tough time. And as a writer, after a couple of pages of advanced punctuation, you may decide to take that good ol’ boy from South Louisiana and make him an insurance salesman from Dubuque.

 

Chefs Vs. Cooks

So Anthony Bourdain is at it again. The author of Kitchen Confidential and the host of No Reservations has a bone to pick with the Food Network. Mainly, he hates a lot of their chefs, or rather he hates a lot of their cooks.

In the professional food world, chef and cook have particular meanings. Chefs usually have degrees from culinary schools and are the heads of kitchens. Cooks have no degrees and learn by doing. In a restaurant they’re the ones who cook the meals the chef creates.

Bourdain considers most of the Food Network’s female stars, who lack the requisite degrees from culinary school, to be the equivalent of second-rate restaurant cooks. He gives Rachael Ray a pat on the head because she’s cute and nice, but he dismisses her food as “mediocre” and sometimes plain awful. Sandra Lee is “as stupid and untalented as Britney Spears” (on another occasion she was “pure evil”).

But his vituperation of Paul Deen is the most extreme: Deen is “the worst, most dangerous person to America” because she knowingly creates terrible recipes that will increase the already dangerous level of obesity in the US.

Now it’s worth pointing out that Bourdain himself got his start in French cooking, which is hardly a model of healthy food, given its abiding love of butter and heavy cream. But there’s more going on here than simple hypocrisy, I think (or simple self promotion—every time Bourdain takes another swipe at the Food Network, he gets national coverage). Bourdain and his buddies are doing what chefs have done for generations. He wants to put those uppity women back in their place.

You see, there’s a larger meaning for cook than just the one used in the restaurant trade. Cooks are also the people, most frequently women, who get the meals on the table across the country, hell, across the world. They’re the ones who try to figure out what to serve a bunch of hungry people every night, usually people who are related to them either by genes or affection. There’s a long tradition of learning from these people since they’ve spent a lot of years in front of a stove, frequently developing and maintaining the recipes of a family or a culture. There’s also an equally long tradition of holding them in contempt, at least from the point of view of the professional chef, particularly the male professional chef.

But my question is this: why are restaurant chefs necessarily the ones we should learn from? It’s true that restaurant chefs get meals out the door every day and night, and their volume is a lot higher than home cooks. But home cooks like me don’t have a lot of the things they take for granted. My stove can’t get super hot, for example, and neither can my oven. Prime cuts are out of the question even if I could afford them since they almost never show up in grocery stores. In fact, grocery stores don’t carry a lot of the items that restaurant chefs can’t live without, including exotic herbs and fresh seafood (most of the fish in my area is frozen). So I may get a kick out of watching Mario Batali work, but I know damn well I’ll never be able to duplicate what he does in my home kitchen. No, if I want to see something I actually have a chance of cooking at home, I’ll turn to someone like Sunny Anderson or Ina Garten.

And why shouldn’t ordinary cooks have a voice too? If I wanted to know certain things—how to fry chicken or fix collard greens, for instance—I’d sure as hell take Paula Deen’s word over Anthony Bourdain. The woman may not know how to make beurre blanc, but she’s done a country-fried steak or two, and she did them on a standard kitchen range.

So I’ll go on enjoying restaurant food when I’m in a restaurant and I’ll go on enjoying Batali and John Besh, but I have no problem watching a woman in a home kitchen show me how to cook meatloaf. At least I’ll have a fighting chance of being able to do it myself.