Classism and consumption in romance novels

I used to read a lot of romance novels, probably because I was single for a long time. Over time, I kept seeing tropes pop up that rubbed me the wrong way:

  • Vast differences in social class between male and female protagonists. Titles like “The Millionaire’s Pregnant Secretary” and “The Sheikh’s Prize* make male wealth and female beauty the main selling point in the book. Edwardian romance paints the man as a duke or an earl and the woman as a genteel clergyman’s daughter or an orphan or a nanny. And don’t get me started with JD Robb’s romantic police procedurals — she’s a cop and he owns half the planet. The exchange of her beauty for his money is classic, but perhaps outdated in a society with much more egalitarianism.
  • Large amounts of money in the happily ever after — research shows that, although money changes everything, it does not necessarily change it for the better. Lottery winners are no more happy than us normal people, and maybe even less happy. People tend to throw their fortunes away, and given the bounty the male protagonist drops on his true love, romantic males are no exception.
  • Speaking of money, conspicuous consumption. When the male protagonist spends money, we get detailed descriptions about his wardrobe, his car, the dress, the dinner, the yacht, the trousseau, the … you get it. We witness how the protagonists spend their wealth, because if they didn’t spend it, nobody, including us, would know how rich they were. That’s the meaning of conspicuous consumption.
  • Overdone sex and male prowess. Don’t get me wrong, I like sex.** But these invariable rules make me skip ahead to the next scene: If the female is a virgin, she’s overwhelmed by the size of the male’s penis. If she’s not a virgin, he supplies better orgasms than anyone else. No matter how badly the two protagonists fight, they still have better sex than any of their readers. They always have sex before falling in love, and they spend the rest of the book dithering about why they can’t marry the other person, and it’s invariably that they don’t want to subject the other person to embarrassment or ridicule or a life of servitude. We, the readers, don’t only vicariously consume the couple’s wealth, but their out-in-the-open sex life. 
I admit I’m not the typical reader. Wish fulfillment to me would be living in Canada as a published author, retired, and a cat***.  I like my couples to have more equal footing, and the woman to supply more than just her pretty face to the union. I like strong females and males with depth, not just “strong and silent”.
I have to admit that I still read a few romance authors. Robin D. Owens I read for her world building and her focus on emotional baggage rather than “He/she wouldn’t possibly want to marry me”. Also, her sex scenes are reasonably anchored in reality. I read Barbara Michaels, although her books may not be considered romance, because she has very real protagonists who seldom have the immense social class disparities. I read a few others — Mary Balogh among others. And I still read JD Robb, but I skip over the sexual acrobatics.
* These may actually be real titles for all I know.
** Oops. TMI.
*** I would not be the first published cat. That honor goes to Lil’ Bub, the pint-sized alien cat. 

The Developmental Edit

I’ve just gone through a developmental edit on Prodigies.

Developmental edits are not like copy edits, where someone proofreads and questions word choices. It’s a lot more thorough, and looks at things like pacing, distracting techniques, etc. A second pair of skilled eyes to look over my work and find the problems.

It’s not cheap, but if you’re serious about getting published and you like having more work to do on your pet project, it’s highly advisable.

My editor, Chelsea Harper, is a skilled developmental editor. She not only picked out all the things that nagged in the back of my mind (and couldn’t put words to), but she found some issues I hadn’t picked up, like too many scene breaks. And she told me something important that I hadn’t guessed:

I should be submitting my work to agents in literary fiction (or edit it extensively for fewer big words, which I don’t think I can do.)

Yes, I was told that my words are too big before (hi, Sheri!) but I didn’t think my writing had what it took for literary fiction. I thought that was the sole province of English professors about High Concepts. Maybe I’m writing crossover fiction — same difference; I may just be querying the wrong agents.

I don’t know where that’s going to get me, but it’s something.

Deep breath. I’ve gotten five rejections from Mythos. It might be a good reason to eventually give that to a developmental editor as well. I think we need a developmental edit money pool. Or a Mega Millions win.

Life without writing

About querying time, I wonder what it would be like to quit writing and quit pursuing representation and publication. Querying is brutal — you prepare excerpts of your prized manuscripts to people who will go by their first impressions, and nobody will tell why they rejected you except “It’s not you, it’s me” or “I’m very picky about who I represent”. I would love some real feedback like: “Could you rewrite your query letter and tell me more about x”.

What would my life be like without writing? I think it would feel like having a lobotomy — I would know something important was missing, but have no idea what. It would be like waking up and finding out a loved one was gone — not dead, just gone. In other words, there would be a hole and I can’t imagine filling it up. No other hobbies I’ve had have been this fulfilling, and for my gardening to be close to this fulfilling I would need a working greenhouse with enough room to actually handle my plants. (We do not have the space or money for that.) My moulage (casualty simulation) might become more fulfilling if I could go professional with it, but the outfits that need moulage for training purposes can’t afford a professional.

As for giving up dreams of being published, that’s a little more complex. There are certain things built into my psyche for better or worse. I love to accomplish new things, and everything else in my life lately has been things I’ve done for the last N years, where N is probably around 30. I’ve hit a stagnation point in my job with 8 years until retirement (I’ve tried hard, coworkers, but I’m chronically burnt out and in need of a break). I need challenge, and I need recognition. I need people liking my work, and to do so they have to see it. Esteem and accomplishment are nothing to be afraid of.

What would it feel like to give up trying to get published? I’d be exactly where I am now, except that the challenge would be gone and I would feel like I had given up on an adventure to stay in my stagnation. I don’t know if I can find another opportunity to break the stagnation.

So I do the same thing I’ve been doing every four months for the past two years, wondering if I will ever make escape velocity.

If anyone has ideas of challenges I could try (I’ve already lost 70 lbs, I have some health problems that keep me from running, I don’t want to run for public office, and I have profound hand-eye coordination problems), let me know.

Dragonfly

The first time I realized the world begged me to pay attention was through a dragonfly.

At the time, I was in my early 20’s and had just broken up with my boyfriend for the second time.I didn’t deal with breakups well (on the other hand, I dealt with them the way any twenty-something would have: I whined like the world was going to end.) My friend Les (who I had met through the ex-boyfriend) told me that what I needed to do was go outside and pay attention to my surroundings.

What I noticed on my walk was dragonflies. I was surprised at how I would walk down the street, blocks away from the nearest water source, and a dragonfly would cross my path.

I asked Les what I should do about the dragonflies, and he said, “Stalk one.”

So I would go out on walks stalking dragonflies. You can imagine how this worked — I would go out walking, paying attention to everything around me, telling the people I ran into that I was chasing dragonflies — most people dealt with that surprisingly well.

I finally got to the point where I tracked a dragonfly — the type that looks like desert camo  — to a flower, where I watched him flex his abdomen. I saw him, really saw him, a fierce jewel.

From that moment, I understood why I needed to look at dragonflies — because they were trying to tell me something.

What?

Pay attention. 

In other words, Les gave me a nice psychological exercise that turned into something more. But he knew it would, because he was the sort of person who believed in nonstandard reality, as I like to call it. Spirits and the like.

But from that point forward, if I see dragonflies hover around me, I pay attention. Not just to the dragonfly, but what’s going on in my life. I start anticipating good things will happen even if the day is dark.

Yesterday, a dragonfly smacked me upside the head, a graceful creature with neon blue on its wings. He smacked me upside the head with a bzzzzzzz as if I needed a nudge.

Pay attention. No, for real.

And so I wait for the revelation.

I’m getting back into meditation again.

For a long time, I couldn’t meditate — I would instead fall asleep, which is something that very quickly shuts off  your meditation session. Then suddenly, I knew how to do it again, and I could go on that long walk to my inner self who knows more than I do.

That’s the guided meditation a long-ago therapist taught me, and it works well, because it cuts off all the “what ifs” and (for someone who sometimes goes hypomanic) the mildly grandiose thoughts:

I am walking along the edges of a steam, where one side is woodland and the other side is clearing, with meadow on the other aide of a road. I can see the forest plants on one side, and on the other, the meadow plants (which this time of year are mostly yellow). I hear the stream burble and the occasional call of a bird in the trees.

Just as the forest subsides, the road starts going uphill. I step across rocks in the stream and take the road, it climbs upward on a moderate slope, and then winds around the side of the hill, I go partway up and see a cave entrance. I have to slide down the slope just inside the entrance of the cave, and then I am in this cozy vault. There is a fire burning, and I put a log on the fire.

My wiser self shows up, many years later, with my face much older. She gives me a hug and then we sit down.

“Tell me what you’ve come to ask about,” she says.

I ask her questions about things I’m unclear about, and she answers with things I know to be true.

Making it hard to hope

I just got a rejection less than twenty minutes after I handed it in. It didn’t “make her passionate”. She only took on “select clients”. Hopefully someone else would “take me on”. This is where the brutality of sending queries comes in, when the agent sends back something that sounds condescending. I could just cry.

Hope Part 2

My mantra:

“You may find a sweeter outcome than you’ve imagined.”

I don’t know what I think about this mantra that has popped into my head. On one hand, I fully expect another round of rejections like the one I got yesterday, less than 24 hours after I sent it. On the other hand, I have a pretty vivid imagination. I imagine a multi-book deal and a book-signing tour for which I would have to get book-signing clothes, and friends who want to read this book.

Realistically, I don’t think that’s going to happen. As a friend of mine said, publishing is a punishing business. It’s true. I need the hope to get through another round of queries, hoping that an agent will bite. Which is the first step to getting published, because there’s no guarantee that a agent will take you on after they’ve asked for more material.

The other piece that gives me hope is that I’m already an artist, already a writer. I don’t have to get published to be one. I write, I get feedback, I improve my work, I try to get it published. I am serious about what I do. I am a writer, and all the publication route does is make my work available to other people, and gives it some sort of seal of approval so others take it seriously.

I have a friend (as much as one can be when the entire friendship is me commenting on his Instagram posts) who has been busting his butt to get recognition for what he does, and he finally says he’s broken a goal. He hasn’t announced it yet, but I’m sure it’s good because he was almost speechless in his Instagram post.

I’m proud of him.

I hope I will be able to make that kind of announcement someday.

Dreamblogging

I wish I could blog in my sleep. Right now, I’m sleepy enough that I can’t build up a brilliant topic to write, and I don’t want to leave this space blank. If I could sleep and blog, I could blog my dreams while they were happening, without the internal censor of my waking self trying to make sense of them. I might look something like this:

Richard and I are moving out of an apartment which apparently isn’t ours. We’ve been putting this off because we don’t know whether we’re taking the train or driving home, We are all actually in a house where the family is leaving to go on vacation, leaving it to us (who are leaving) and a half-dozen teens who were hanging at the house without making any attempts of cleaning up after themselves. I am standing in the hallway on the cell phone with a friend (let’s call him Kermit) advising him on how to deal with another friend (let’s call him Arnold), who has a rather unique and quirky personality. I go back in and find Richard’s gone, and I can’t get a hold of him on the phone. I search a nearby college union (University of Illinois Illini Union) to no avail. I’m all weepy all over the place for the next day, stumbling through conferences at the Union because whatever. I finally hear from Richard, who acts like nothing happened. He tells me where he is (notice we are not fully packed for the trip to one of two places, either by train or by car, and all of a sudden I’m on roller skates in an upscale shopping mall, trying to find where Richard is. I discover the only way down to another level in the brick hallway along a mirrored wall is a wide, stalled escalator. I wheel onto the escalator, and instead of skidding down the stairs, I hover down them, all the way down, until I lightly touch the ground.

Think about how I would have written that if I was awake. I would have interpreted it: “The moving out of the apartment mirrors our current situation with evicting renters … ” and I would have tried to make sense of it, smoothing out some of the discontinuities and pointing out that, in real life, I neither skate nor hover.

When I write from a dream, I try to capture that wild discontinuity, the more fanciful elements. But I admit I smooth them out, because it’s only human to either want things to make sense or blame the vivid weirdness of a dream on pizza before bed or a bad acid trip. But think about if the above was a less prosaic dream — and it is rather prosaic in topic. How about a dream about finding a commune in the desert populated by immortals who were trying to hide their identities, and then finding out you were the child of one of those immortals and a human? What kind of identity crisis would she have? And what if she were being pursued for the secret she holds, bringing danger to the commune?

That was a dream I had 30 years ago while sick with a kidney infection, where the dream stretched over two days. I’m writing that book now — it’s called Whose Hearts are Mountains, and I hope to get it done someday.

Hope

What do I write about when I feel I’ve written to you about everything?

How about hope?

Hope, depsite what most people think, is not a wish that someone makes that something will happen. It is not a belief that something specific will happen. But it is a belief that something positive will happen.

There is a big difference between those items. A wish is a petition to an external grantor — God, the wee folk, Fate, the Goddess of one’s choice. The wisher washes their hands of agency and often blames the external grantor if the wish is not fulfilled. For example, “I wish I would get published” gives the responsibility for my getting published to The Powers That Be, who so far have failed me. Bribery — “I’ve been good, God, where’s my cookie?” — is also a danger to wishes (and very specific prayers) and ends in disappointment.

Believing that something specific will happen takes the onus off a god figure, but provides only one narrow possibility for fulfillment. This time the fulfillment is in the hands of a worldly grantor: “I wish Tor/Forge would publish my book.” There’s only one way for this to be fulfilled, and how good my book is doesn’t enter into it, nor does whether it’s something that fits their imprint. Worse, if I receive this, I will never believe my worth if it happens. (Ok, maybe I would.)

For the final part, I’d like to share an old joke with you:

Sven prays every Sunday in church that he will win the big lottery. Week after week he prays, and week after week he fails to win. One day, he prays: “Lord God, I have prayed in church every week to win the big lotto, and I don’t win. Have you forsaken me?”

A big booming voice rocks the whole church building: “Sven, buy a lottery ticket.”

This joke has a lot to do with hope as it really exists. Hope is, first and foremost, a sense of positivity around the situation. It doesn’t provide a script for what should happen, but opens our eyes to what could happen.

For example, if I hope for the way to open (Old Quaker speak) toward getting published, then that can be fulfilled in many ways — through finding beta-readers after a year of searching, finding a developmental editor in my Camp NaNo cabin, finding my way through a knotty plot problem, getting an aha about a query letter, getting an agent, etc. I might not have seen any of these developments as progress if I saw hope as granting a wish or demanding the universe deliver.

Hope is thinking, “This could happen” every time I send a batch of query letters, hooking up with a developmental editor despite my fears that she’ll feel my manuscript is crap, looking at the latest message from one of my betas and thinking about how to improve something.

If you’ve been reading this, you know that sometimes I feel hopeless (and sometimes I am hopeless). But then I rise again, and hug hope to my chest for another round.

Acknowledgements and dedications

When I am about to embark on another querying round, sending agents a bundle of my work that generally sells my book as a product, I need something positive to anchor me, because it’s a brutal process with lots of rejections and (so far) no acceptances.

To keep myself positive, I compose acknowledgement and dedication sections.

For example, Prodigies is being developmentally edited right now. In the acknowledgements, I will need to include Chelsea Harper (the editor); Marcel Borowiec (who supplied translation help on one short section); my beta-readers (I’m hoping Sheri Roush and Martha Stewart agree to another round of reading); and last but nowhere near least, my husband Richard Leach-Steffens for letting me bounce story ideas off him and keeping me plied with coffee.

Meanwhile, Voyageurs is about to go into the query cycle after a revision. I would acknowledge some of the people above, particularly Sheri and Martha and Richard, so I’m thinking of dedications.
The trick to dedications is that you want it to be sincere, interesting, and in fitting with your image.

Oh, God, what is my image?

I would call my image ageless with a dry and quirky sense of humor. (As opposed to real-life me, which is a little more goofy). So let me write the dedication: To my husband Richard, for his unfailing support and endless pot of coffee.