The Scam Artist

So the romance world has another outrage to deal with, but this time it’s been perpetrated on us rather than by us. A writer named John Havel decided to “expose” Amazon’s bestseller list practices by plagiarizing a novel and then manipulating it onto the list. Havel justified himself by saying that all the profits he made through his project would be donated to charity. So even though his whole enterprise was based on theft of someone else’s labor, it was okay because he was both demonstrating Amazon’s dishonesty and not keeping the profits for himself. Kat Mayo has summarized this entire saga, and you can read about it here.

This whole project was, of course, ethically suspect from the beginning. But it might have been less so had Havel chosen a book that was truly in the public domain (Moby-Dick with a sexy new cover, for example). But instead, he chose a Harlequin Sensation, Untamed Billionaire, Undressed Virgin, by Australian author Anna Cleary. Cleary, needless to say, knew nothing about this since Havel didn’t bother to ask her permission or to explain his project. She only found out that someone had taken her book, changed the names of her characters and her title, and posted it online for his own profit when other writers informed her.

All of this is sordid enough, but the real source of the outrage (beyond outrage for Cleary and her stolen royalties) is Havel’s reason for choosing her book. It was a romance. Romance, we are told, “sells big,” is easy to scam, and is an object of contempt as far as Havel is concerned. Reading Mayo, you get the impression that Havel doesn’t consider romance novels to be “real” books. Apparently those of us who write in the genre are scam artists ourselves; therefore, our books are open to plagiarism without consequence.

Romance writers confront contempt frequently. It’s never fun, but it can usually be dealt with in one of two ways. First, you can say that reading is all about personal taste and that our readers enjoy what we write. Second, if the contemptuous one seems amenable, you can list a few of the many romance authors who might confound his/her expectations and recommend a little reading.

However, we shouldn’t have to argue that our books belong to us. That they’re real, and that it took a lot of effort to write them.

Havel’s ultimate argument—as Mayo points out—is that all romance books are the same, thus their readers are so gullible that they’re asking to be scammed. As Havel sneers, “Plus, don’t you remember seeing cheesy paperbacks with Fabio on the cover at the grocery store check out? How’s this different?” But the thing is, Mr. Havel, those “cheesy paperbacks” weren’t all the same. They were written by different authors with different approaches and levels of skill and different readers, as you’d know if you’d ever bothered to read a few. The fact that you didn’t like their covers doesn’t mean the books themselves were something you could treat as a joke. And it sure as hell doesn’t give you license to steal them.

Oh and by the way, John, Fabio hasn’t appeared on a romance cover since the nineties. But compared to the other things you seem ignorant of, that’s probably a minor point.

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Finding Mr. Right Now Is On the Shelves

As a writer, I find waiting for release day tough. I want to talk about my book, shout about my book, gloat about my book. But until release day, I won’t know if other people enjoy my book as much as I enjoyed writing it. But now the wait is over, at least as far as Finding Mr. Right Now is concerned. My book is finally available at all the usual places, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Samhain Publishing, and All Romance eBooks.

So let me give you a quick taste of my book. First of all, here’s the blurb:

Reality can be hotter than fiction.

The Salt Box Trilogy, Book 1

Monica McKellar, associate producer of Finding Mr. Right, is desperate. One of the show’s bachelors has bailed one week before shooting starts. She not only needs a replacement ASAP, he has to get the temperamental bachelorette’s stamp of approval.

Fortunately there’s a hot guy right under her nose who’s a perfect fit. Unfortunately, he pushes all her hot buttons. Until the show’s over, her hands—and every other part of her body—are tied.

When Paul DeWitt signed on to write for the reality show, “Bachelor #10” wasn’t supposed to be in his job description. He fully expects to be cut early on, which will free him to focus on the real object of his attraction. Monica.

Instead, he’s a finalist, and they’re all packed in an SUV climbing the Continental Divide, headed for Salt Box, Colorado. Where stampeding horses, vindictive tabloid editors, and one capricious bachelorette’s waffling over suitors may conspire to end Paul and Monica’s romance before it even starts.

Warning: Contains hot sex on the sly, cold nights, creaking wicker couches, and a gypsy wagon that gives a whole new appreciation for the pioneers.

And here’s a quick excerpt. The production team at Fairstein Productions is in a tizzy–one of the bachelors for their Finding Mr. Right show has gone AWOL. They need someone new immediately if not sooner, and their choice turns out to be one of the show’s writers, Paul Dewitt. In this scene Paul learns his fate from the reluctant assistant producer, Monica McKellar.

Paul followed the two of them into Glenn Donovan’s office. He sank into a metal and leatherette chair at the side. “What’s going on?”

McKellar pushed her hair out of her face again. Butterscotch. Her hair was the color of butterscotch. It made her skin look like cream, very lickable. Lickable? Jesus.

She took a breath. “Okay, I told you we were missing a bachelor, right? One of them took off for Ohio yesterday.”

Paul nodded. “Right. But you said you were going to find somebody else.”

“Yes.” McKellar grimaced. “Well, Ronnie had an idea. And apparently Artie thinks it’s a good idea.”

Sid narrowed his eyes. “Artie likes something Ronnie came up with? That’s like one of the signs of the Apocalypse.”

“Be that as it may.” McKellar sounded like she was gritting her teeth. “They both think Paul here would be a good substitute for Bachelor Number Ten.”

Paul stared at her blankly. “Me? One of the bachelors? But I’m supposed to write the damn thing.”

“Right, well, we’d be down a writer for this show. They’d have to transfer somebody over from Finding Miss Right or one of the other shows. But look at the bright side—it would give you some really good insights into what the bachelors and bachelorettes go through when they’re doing the challenges. It might help you with the writing.” She gave him a very bright smile that didn’t go any further than her lips.

His stomach felt as if he’d swallowed a dozen ice cubes. “And if I say no?”

McKellar pushed her hair back again. “Look, I don’t know what would happen if you didn’t take the gig, but knowing Artie it wouldn’t be good.”

Sid nodded. “If you don’t do it, I think you could probably kiss off your chances of getting another contract with Fairstein. But look at it this way—if you do go through with it, Artie will owe you, big time. That could be a good thing.”

Paul tried to pull his tumbling thoughts back into some kind of order. “But the thing is, I don’t even like Ronnie Valero.”

One of McKellar’s butterscotch eyebrows arched up. “You don’t think the other bachelors are interested in a real, long-term relationship, do you? I mean, you’ve been with Finding Miss Right for a while.”

His jaw tightened. “No, of course not. But—”

“The bachelors and bachelorettes are all in it for something other than a great romance. A lot of them want the screen time. Some of them want the money. Some just want a paid vacation. You’d be in it to keep your job. It’s not that different—maybe even a little more honest. Everybody in the production crew would be on your side.” Those pink lips edged up into another faint smile.

Paul’s stomach twisted again. “But I…”

McKellar gave a little huff of exasperation. “Look, let’s be blunt here. You’d be Meat. That’s all. One of those people who fill out the list. After a couple of weeks, you’d probably be gone, particularly if you didn’t want to stick around. If you don’t come across as interested, Ronnie will probably reject you. Then you could go back to working on Finding Miss Right. No harm, no foul.”

Paul’s chest clenched tight. Meat. Well, at least she was up front about it, which was more than they probably were with the other guys. Still, the thought gave his ego a solid kick. “I see.”

“Right.” Sid nodded encouragingly. “Probably wouldn’t take more than a month of your time, tops. And you could get a trip to Colorado out of it, assuming you get through the L.A. challenges.”

Colorado. Paul’s gut twisted again. His folks would find out. His hyper-romantic mother would probably see the show and start planning for a wedding. Hell. “Seems like I don’t have much of a choice here.”

McKellar leaned back against the side of the desk, extending one shapely leg. “It won’t be that bad. And like Sid said, Artie will owe you. He’s pretty good about paying his debts too. You’d probably have a chance for a long-term commitment from the production company.”

Paul considered his possible options, all of them lousy. He rubbed his eyes, then sighed. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

“Bachelor Number Ten.” Sid gave him a relieved grin. “Welcome aboard.”

Finding Mr. Right Now is now available. Enjoy!

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Troublesome Virginity

All regency heroines are virgins. It’s a standard trope. The only exceptions to this are widows and the very occasional courtesan. But mostly the regency heroine is untouched as the driven snow, no matter what her age happens to be. And thus the scene in which the hero discovers that he’s making love to a virgin is a common regency convention.

On the other hand, a virginal heroine in contemporary romance is, well, weird.

These days any contemporary heroine over the age of, say, twenty is presumed to have had some kind of sexual experience. Now she may not have had much, and it may not have been great, but she has to have had some or she’ll seem a little peculiar. If a writer decides for some reason that her heroine has to be a virgin, she also has to come up with a reason. The heroine is shy. She comes from a small town and was the twenty-first century version of a bluestocking. She has a really awful fashion sense.  But there’s got to be an explanation for why the heroine maintained her virginity when all about her were losing theirs.

I’m sure some people find this particular strain in contemporary romance troubling. After all, thirty or forty years ago women were still expected to maintain their virtue until the wedding night, although, of course, their hubbies were supposed to have had enough sexual experience to be able to perform without a problem.

If I were still an academic, I might consider doing some research to discover just when this particular change took place. I’m pretty sure the virginal heroine was still the norm in the romances of the seventies and early eighties. But at some point, writers apparently decided to stop kidding around. The sexual revolution had already taken place. Clearly the virgin bride had become the exception, even if the bride had lost her virginity to her  future spouse.

I’ve gotta say, as a writer of contemporary romances, I don’t find this much of a problem. In fact, the lack of the “losing her virginity” scene makes my life somewhat easier. Given that I already find sex scenes tough to write, I really don’t want to have to struggle with virginity too! And for those who are still upset about this, I recommend Inspirational romance. I’m pretty sure the virgin bride still reigns supreme there. But in other romance, as in real life, sexuality has definitely evolved. Only the regency heroine still gets to present her virginity on a platter to her thoroughly discombobulated partner.

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The Trouble With Sex

I’m a romance writer, which means I write sex scenes. It goes with the territory. It’s also the hardest part of my job.

Why? Despite the usual heavy-handed jokes (“Bet you do a lot of research, har, har, har”), trying to come up with an interesting way to describe sex between your hero and heroine is usually tough. Add to that the fact that the rules against head hopping mean that you have to stay with one POV for at least a large part of the scene—you can’t show what both of your characters are feeling, or at least you can’t do it simultaneously. And then there’s the fact that I write contemporary romance rather than erotica. That means I’m limited in the kind of sex my characters can have. No ménages, no exotic sexual accessories, no acrobatic positions. Actually, that’s not something I get wistful over. The thought of having to come up with something new and different each time my characters get busy makes me cringe.

Then there’s the whole vocabulary problem: what do you call genitals anyway? When the Nine Naughty Novelists did our first serial (The Zillionaire Vampire Cowboy’s Secret Werewolf Babies) we had a lot of fun using outrageous euphemisms for body parts, but in reality there’s a very thin line that most of us have to walk. Usually, you can’t use the more clinical words for genitalia without sounding like a sex ed textbook. On the other hand, certain euphemisms are too raunchy for regular romance, although they’re permissible in erotica. Predictably, there are more acceptable words for male genitalia than there are for female, so you have to make do with certain generalities (e.g., “opening” or “core” or “nub”). Sometimes they work, but sometime it sounds like the sex is taking place in a very dark room with a couple of people who have no idea what they’re doing. Jennifer Crusie once wrote a blog post about saying something like “his sex” to describe male genitalia and how it seemed to reduce the male character to his genitalia alone. But using a phrase like that is a mark of how desperate you can become in trying to find a word that’s both acceptable and specific.

And then there’s the actual act itself and the description thereof. The toughest part in doing this is not falling back on the same description you used in the last book or the one before that. Actually, I know one prominent and quite successful romance writer who basically writes the same sequence of moves in each of her novels. Nonetheless each of her books includes longer and longer sex scenes, largely because she concentrates on the feelings of the protagonists rather than the actual physical activities they’re engaging in.

That’s a good strategy, but again it has its down side. Unless you’re into something tantric, the average sex scene can only go on so long, particularly if it’s a sex scene in a genre other than erotica. The more time you spend talking about how neither of your characters has ever felt anything this wonderful in their whole, entire lives, the more you bog things down.

I remember once having a conversation with some other writers in which we concluded that what we’d really like to do is write something like “And then they went into the bedroom and had the absolute greatest sex they’d ever had. Afterward they slept in each other’s arms.”

Sigh. Don’t worry. I won’t do it. But don’t think I’m not tempted.

 

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