R16. A Romnov by M.R. - Final Thoughts

Well, it's the last day of NaNoWriMo. This year represents my fourth win!

Every word of the romnov I tried to write felt like squeezing blood from a stone. Certain cliches were sort of fun to play with, yes, but I discovered that it's even more difficult for me to write a romance novel, than it is to read one, and it's exponentially less enjoyable, too. Like whoa.

Basically what ended up happening was that I abandoned the enterprise. I went into "kamikaze mode" and filled in my outline in the most cursory and disinterested of ways, and then focussed on the frame that I'd set up at the beginning of the month for a little bit of relief. The month has been a lot more enjoyable since, and I'm glad that I did what I did.

Although I mentioned that I was considering taking this manuscript beyond November, and possibly trying to find a home for it with Harlequin, that's definitely not my plan anymore. For one thing, the publisher wants writers to be fans of the genre, and I'm just not dishonest enough to be able to pretend that I am. This would be kind of nasty, anyway, and I've been trying to prove that I'm not nasty for the past four months. In other words, in order to prove that I'm not all talk, I'll have to publish some other kind of novel. Wish me luck, hahaha. For another thing, my time is precious. While this was a learning experience, it was much too painful to continue or repeat. There are vast numbers of things that I'd rather be doing.

So, is it really as easy to write a category romance novel as I thought? Did I learn anything else?

Unfortunately, my response to the first question is "yes and no," which is always such a cop-out. Yes, it's easy to write a romnov, but only if you like them and want to write one of your own. Pairings are easy to come up with. Characters can be sketched broadly. The basic plot is built into the genre. The book can practically write itself, except that it can't: you have to sit down and write it, and, like I said, that's an epic struggle if it's not something that you want to do.

This ties in to something more general that I learned, or realized, or whatever you want to call it, which is that although these books may be trashy, they're lovingly produced. And that's something that I'll definitely be keeping in mind if/when I get back to the romnov side of the "Two Hectobooks Project."

Current Distractions, November 2010 Edition

Seriously people, I just spent the entire month blogging about NaNoWriMo.

What do you think was distracting me?

R16. A Romnov by M.R. - Happily Ever After

My apologies if this post is totally incoherent, and for the presence of several monster paragraphs. I ended up having to put it together on my lunch break at work. I'm about 16 000 words away from being finished my NaNovel, and there'll be one more post on the topic this month (on the 30th), and then it'll be back to our normal schedule. Woo! -M.R.

I think this is probably obvious from the reviews I've done so far, but the Happily Ever After thing is easily my least favourite aspect of the romnovs*. To my knowledge, and someone please correct me if I'm wrong, it is literally a rule that every single category romance novel must have a happy ending. Most of the time, or at least as far as I've read so far, this happy ending takes the form of the two leads getting married and deciding that they need to have a baby, immediately. I'm prepared to say that just about everybody wants romantic love of some kind, but I can't believe how romantic love is defined here as marriage and children, or bust.

To me, this is totally unsatisfying for three reasons, leaving out the most obvious one, which is that I'm pretty sure I'd never agree to marry someone less than a month after meeting them.

1. I guess least importantly because this one's mainly based on my personal preferences, I like my romance to be more on the realistic side. This could be my youth talking, or maybe my lack of a long term relationship, but things just don't always work out. I'm partial to bittersweetness, and I'm a huge fan of fleeting beauty. Sometimes the lost thing can be more beautiful than the lasting thing. Think of a sunset versus a mountain, for example, and seeing one or the other with someone that you care about. The mountain will be there later to look at with someone else, but the sunset will never be exactly the same again, and maybe you'll never see another one that magnificent for the rest of your life. And no, I'm absolutely not trying to set up a brief teenage romance of mine against my grandparents' 50+ years of marriage or anything like that, I'm just saying that both have a lot of value. And, in the context of a short romance novel, where there isn't enough space to develop the characters and their relationship with each other in a realistic way, a pretty but finite story would actually be more diverting.

2. It's just too predictable. Knowing that the two main characters will absolutely, inevitably be together at the end of the book takes all the tension out of the romance. There's no suspense or anticipation about whether the leads will get together, because of course they'll get together. This spills over into the plot, as well. The situation that has shaken up the lives of our main characters and brought them together will inevitably be resolved in the best possible way so that it won't interfere with their HEA. Predictability plagues a lot of genres (in fact I just read an essay last month about how genre fantasy is essentially just a bunch of variations on The Lord of the Rings, which is one of the reasons that I don't read as much fantasy as I used to), but I really think that category romance is the worst offender.

3. Even if I grant that a romnov is itself a kind of fantasy and that it would disrupt the fantasy if the main characters didn't end up falling in love, why does HEA have to mean marriage and babies? And, more than that, what are the ethics of marketing HEA as marriage and babies? That's just not my experience at all, and I'm actually a bit nervous about the size of the industry that's built on that definition, and selling that definition to women all over the world. Maybe it's just my youth talking again, but why don't our heroes ever decide to go on a world trip or something? Take his riches and build themselves a castle on a mountain peak somewhere, get him a vasectomy, and live out the rest of their days screwing like bunnies, child-free? Donate all of their money to charity and go teach in a refugee camp somewhere? Nope, they're just going to get married and have kids. This all goes back to that primeval notion that success is measured in babies. This was all well and good when we were still getting trampled by woolly mammoths and devoured by sabre-tooth tigers, but now we're red-lining on the babies front and that metric for success is changing, and I seriously hope that the genre will change to reflect that. You can easily have a happy ending without pairing off all of your characters for eternity (then again, try explaining this to Shakespeare).

But anyway, that's about all I have to say about that. Maybe my main reason for disliking the romnov depiction of HEA is that for me "future" tends to be an undefined variable, and that that's more interesting to me than anything else (even though it can also be really stressful). And while I get that other people might want more certainty, I still don't see how an inevitable happy ending would be satisfying all the time.

So here's a question: Do you know what your HEA is? Do you have one?


* Once again, I can't really pick on just romnovs. Romcoms do this to an egregious extent as well (the only one that I can think of where the two main characters don't end up together is SPOILER ALERT The Break-Up, which I have to admit had a pretty great ending by my standards, but I guess ymmv). The more serious romantic films seem to be split between happy endings and tragedies.

R16. A Romnov by M.R. - Sexy Times!

This was supposed to go up yesterday, but I'm a giant slacker and I slept in until 2 p.m. and then kinda forgot about it. So, without further ado... -M.R.

I have, in the past, likened romnovs to a sort of politely packaged erotica. The truth is that there appears to be a sliding scale of sexiness (someone please draw a picture of this for me) depending on the category, but I'm not yet sufficiently familiar with the genre to make sweeping generalizations about what falls where.

That's not going to stop me making some other generalizations, though! That is, once again we're going to be talking about the contemporary-type romance novels.

Sex in the romance novels I've read so far (excepting the extremely fabulous In the Flesh) has been, well, very strange.

In my personal life I'm torn between trying to be sex positive while also being a pretty private person. I do have a pretty clearly defined idea of what makes good sex, though, which is to say that it's about both (all?!) partners having a good time. Romnov sex, however, is concentrated primarily on the female, and it's never very realistic. The female partner never really has to do anything except have an explosive orgasm, whereas the male partner concentrates all of his attention on her, and yet it's still the best sex he's ever had. I think I've mentioned this before, but they almost always come at the same time.

For once, though, I'm not going to pick on romnovs. Sex is weirdly portrayed just about everywhere you look. I have eight thousand half-formed ideas about this, such as whether or not it really needs to be depicted at all in some cases, how realistic those depictions should be, and so on ad nauseam.

We're not, by the way, going to talk about my extreme discomfort writing sex scenes. I feel like a huge creeper about it and also I think they're repetitive and awful and are going to need a depressing amount of revision.

I think the toughest thing about the place where sex and art intersect is that reading or looking at something is never going to give you the exact sensations of the act itself. I'm speaking in the most basic sense, here, ignoring things you, erm, might do in order to bridge the gap. Sex in the real world isn't perfect, but the times that you elbow your partner in the head, or one of you gets a leg cramp, don't usually overshadow the experience because mostly everything else still feels good. What I'm clumsily trying to say here is that while I'm fairly certain that it (always) looks ridiculous, it seldom feels that way. And it seems like that translates into these incredibly inaccurate representations, in an effort to capture the spirit of the thing rather than the reality.

I think this post is going to make it seem like sex in the media is the only thing I ever think about, but that's not really the case. It only really enters my thoughts after I've awkwardly watched a sex scene with a bunch of my friends.

Also, am I the only person who thinks that "making love" is the most horrible euphemism of all?

R16. A Romnov by M.R. - Characters

I worry that I'm taking these books way too seriously. On the other hand, I would absolutely love to read some honest to God critical analysis of these things by people with PhDs. Please point me in the right direction. -M.R.

It's hard to believe, but NaNoWriMo is half done. I'm writing this a little in advance, on my lunch break at work, so I have no idea whether or not my word count is on track, or how much more of my outline I've managed to plow through.

Anyway, today we'll talk about characters, specifically the male and female leads, because, according to Harlequin, "I :( secondary characters." (Whereas I <3 things like conflict and dialogue.) The secondary characters exist purely to move the plot forward, or to get in its way, and no time should be wasted on them that could be spent on developing the romance between the two main characters. This is a shame, because some of my favourite characters are secondary ones (love you forever, Billy!). I have about four secondary characters in my novel, one of whom hasn't had any dialogue yet, and probably won't until the very end.

But what about the main characters? Well, they also don't need to be developed all that well, because the main thing that they need to do is fall in love, and since they're inevitably sexually compatible, they only really need to have a few shared characteristics, and then you're set. The main characters also need to work out some kind of issue together, usually, which is the issue that generates the circumstances for their meeting.

The female lead is, at the beginning of the novel, an independent single woman. If she has a sexual history (apparently virgins in romance are going out of style), it's lacklustre. She may have had One True Love in the past, who died tragically, but she will soon realize that the male lead makes her happier. She usually has a career, but it's something that can easily be dropped or pushed into the background, even if, in reality, it would be the kind of job that would destroy all of her free time (i.e. any job). She may be in her twenties or thirties. She is good-looking and her body is built within one standard deviation of the current female ideal. Basically, she isn't really exceptional, but she is hardworking and superficially ambitious.

The male lead is also independent and single. He usually has a storied past and is a sexual virtuoso. His career is well-established and he is more than financially secure enough to take on a dependant/wife. The reason for his success is that he is special in some way, either particularly talented or driven. If he's ever loved before, the object of his affection is dead now, and can't compare to the female lead. He is very manly and powerful, always handsome and muscular, confident about absolutely everything other than the female lead's feelings for him.

So the two of them are thrown together. Their desires align instantly, and they're both more than willing to make a sacrifice or two. As I mentioned before, they're also perfectly sexually compatible (and we'll get into this a bit more in the next post). Probably the weirdest thing of all, though, is that almost 100% of the time, once they realize that they're in love, both characters want to get married and have a baby right now (and we'll go over this more in another post, too).

But yeah, that's basically the deal with the romnov characters. It's almost as if they can't be well-developed characters because they need to be malleable enough to make their happy ending a lasting one.

(PS I'm aware that my generalisations above don't cover all romance novels. But this stuff seems to be true of many of the ones with contemporary settings.)

R16. A Romnov by M.R. - Planning/The Plot

Sorry guys, I know this post is trash. I didn't even get into how all these books take place in a span of about two weeks, and then everybody gets married. The next one will be better. -M.R.

We are, yes, already at the one third mark for NaNoWriMo—the goal word count for today is, depending on how you calculate it, 16667 or 16670, and I may or may not be on track. Still, in order to create enough content for blog posts this month, we need to step back a little to the planning stage.

Probably the most important point to note is that I'm not usually a planner when it comes to NaNoWriMo. I like to just let my mind run wild all month and see what it turns up. And it's usually more coherent than you'd expect. I mean, sure, I've only edited one of my NaNovels so far, and I only managed to salvage about 3% of it, but that's not the point.

The point is that on NaNoWriMo Eve (aka Halloween), I cobbled together a quick outline based on a few notes I'd scrawled in my day planner and the notepad beside my bed, and then just forged ahead. I didn't bother figuring out settings or writing character sketches (I haven't done one of these since my early or mid teens, I think, but maybe I'll try to find one and share the Mary-Sueishness with you). Romance novels are a lot more plot driven than you would expect.

Although I mentioned that I was choosing the Harlequin Romance category, I've actually changed my mind and put three sex scenes in my novel, thus switching over to the Harlequin Presents category. Similarly, I've already found a gaping plot hole built into my outline. I guess I probably could've spent a bit more time on it.

I can fix all of these problems later, in the editing stage (which I'll probably be posting about at the end of this month, far in advance of the actual editing stage). The plot is basically just for the sake of having something to hang the romance on, a series of roadblocks on the way to the happy ending, or "Happily Ever After (HEA)" as it's known in the biz.

R16. A Romnov by M.R. - Choosing a Category

One of the questionable joys of writing a category romance novel is choosing which category to write for.

Of course I put off choosing until NaNoWriMo was only three hours away.

Harlequin has a literal figurative ton of different potential categories to write for, and I'm not going to go into all of them. But you guys, there's a fucking Harlequin NASCAR.

For me, it came down to Harlequin Presents and Harlequin Romance.

Harlequin Presents looks like this. These ones are of the fantastic variety, tales of the super-rich and beautiful, set in exotic locales. I was drawn to it because my characters are all really rich and they're on a cruise ship. However, I was reluctant because these books involve more sexiness and I wasn't sure how comfortable I would be writing that.

Harlequin Romance obviously sounds very generic, but here's what it looks like. Truth is, it is pretty generic. This category involves more realistic settings, with more average people. However, there's some room for other stuff, as long as the focus is on the capital-R Romance more than the sex (but there's still a bit of bangin' I think).

Anyway, for now I've decided on the Harlequin Romance category, although if I end up writing a bunch of smutty filler, I might reconsider.

The Clothes Make The Woman

Alright ladies (and guys, too), please react to the following statement: "If she didn't want me to look, she wouldn't be wearing x." where x = (some article of clothing).

I've been trying to decide how I feel about this statement for a really long time. As a young female engineer, I'm much more closely scrutinized than my male counterparts. While "business casual" for them means any collared shirt at all, plus pants that aren't jeans, I have to think a lot more carefully about what is sufficiently business while at once being sufficiently casual. Skirt? No. Nice-looking t-shirt? Maybe, as long as the pants make up for it and there's another layer on top. This is exhausting, especially when it comes to shopping for work clothes. Also, the men that I deal with (I realized a couple of weeks ago that the only time I talk to women on the phone is when I have to go through a receptionist to reach the dude I happen to be calling) make a lot of assumptions about me, and how they can deal with me. They get "familiar" with me a lot more quickly, or so I assume, not in an inappropriate way, but in a slightly-less-than-professional way. The point is that I try to be very careful about how I portray myself, because what I ultimately want to convey is competence. Right now I feel like that's the most important thing.

So, back to the original statement. "If she didn't want me to look, she wouldn't be wearing x."

On its face, this seems like it might be comparable to the deservedly infamous "She was asking for it, just look what she was wearing." But I don't think that's quite the case. Obviously no one is asking to be raped, but I think that people, women especially, are frequently asking to be checked out. Just look at what 99% of girls wear when they go out to the bar.

The major problem here is, I think, with women. For some reason they seem to expect that they can go out in a short skirt and a top with a plunging neckline, and only the men that they think are attractive will be looking at them. Anyone else gets classified as a creep. But this is completely ridiculous. As long as someone is respecting my boundaries and not, like, photographing me without my knowledge and stuff, I don't think I really have a right to take issue with them finding me attractive. This is one of those cases where you simply can't have your cake and eat it, too. If you don't want anyone to look at you, you can walk around in a burka.

But here's what I really trip over: a) how do you reconcile the statement in a professional context, and b) how do you help these kinds of things if you are particularly well-endowed?

Let's start with a). As I mentioned before, "business casual" is a much trickier definition for me to navigate than it is for my male colleagues. Our office dress code specifies "no cleavage" and also "no bellybuttons" and even, for a while "no bare legs or feet" (thereby barring capris), all of which are pointed at the women who work here. And even if we're all dressing perfectly professionally, women's clothes are generally more form-fitting. So is it still okay for the men I work with to check me out?

Well, I tend to think that they at least shouldn't be making it obvious. The fact remains, however, that we're all, constantly, checking each other out, and that's, again, okay as long as it respects personal boundaries and doesn't get criminal. Also, even though there are more and more women in the industry all the time, every single female that steps onto a construction site will inevitably be a curiosity, and that's something that us "pioneers" just need to deal with.

And now b), which is the most problematic of all. Some ladies are just more voluptuous than others. Whereas I'm about as alluring in a bathing suit as I am in a snowsuit (i.e. sort of flat-chested either way), I've joked on at least one occassion that my sister would have cleavage even if she was wearing a turtleneck. My dad has actually expressed concern to me about the way she dresses, and all I've been able to tell him is that she can't help it. And yes, I realize that there are men out there who prefer my more rectangularish shape to the curvy feminine ideal, but that's not really the point. The point is that no matter how careful she is about how she dresses, a voluptuous lady will inadvertantly send a message about wanting to be looked at.

And I think that's the only issue I can find with the above statement, and I don't know how to fix it. I also don't know how many people bother to think about it at the lengths I apparently have, and I'm not sure that I can fault someone who says this sort of thing without thinking, if no one has ever bothered to argue the point with them.

So what do all of you think about this? What have I missed? Should we all be wearing burkas, including the men, so that we can stop our roving eyes?

P.S. I realize that this has nothing to do with books, literature, etc. Bear with me. There probably won't be very many of these.