Romance is as compositional as cool, apparently.
I am so not the target audience for this.
That's just false modesty on your part.
Huh, can't access the Times at the moment. What's the rough class demographic of the Harlequin audience? About the same as Nascar? I would guess so, but I don't know.
It's strange to be reminded of how well those books sell. Even in the large chain bookstore where I used to work, we'd chuck the many cases of Harlequin Romance paperbacks we received every month straight into the trash--the floor space they took up wasn't worth the infrequent sales (thank you, standardized inventory plan). This was not a typical area of the country, I guess.
I'd have to guess bored middleclass white housewives, but honestly, I have no idea.
Will they match up 34 year olds with 22 year olds?
It wasn't gentle, it wasn't passive, it was a kiss that instantly proved the two of them were like high-octane fuel, their flesh sparking off each other in such a way that Lance felt the purely caveman urge to pick her up and carry her to bed.
M'mkay. I'm not the target either, but this is my subject, and I do go back to the dirt-track era.
Harlequin is the lowest common denominator of romance novels, as I understand it. And if you think that SF fans get defensive about their genre, try dissing romance novels to one of their fans. Then cover your eyes and genitals and run away in a zigzag pattern.
I guess you wouldnt get slapped by suggesting that you wanted to go dirt-tracking.
A friend's mother used to crank out Harlequin novels for extra cash. She knew the formula, knew the standard levers and pulleys and would go from blank page to finished manuscript in a couple of days. NaNoWriMo ain't got nothin' on bodice-rippers.
Then cover your eyes and genitals and run away in a zigzag pattern.
This is simply the funniest thing I have ever read.
13: Usage makes sense; I've never been to that track, actually.
There's some company that computer-generates skeletal novels and then contracts them out to writers. The characters and plot outline will be given in basic detail, and the writer fills in the rest.
I heard that the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and Star Trek novels were mostly composed in the same way. If it works, I guess...
becks, I heart you for the Thrill Kill Kult title.
15: I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
their flesh sparking off each other
Someone needs moisturizer.
would go from blank page to finished manuscript in a couple of days
Relatedly, these books have the month and year they were published printed on the cover. They generally put out one book per month in a particular series (of which there are many).
Someone needs moisturizer.
Or Astroglide.
Are there any authors whose works are appreciated both by the Harlequin audience and the Serious Fiction audience? I was thinking maybe of Maeve Binchey.
22: Do you smoke after sex?
The boyfriend pointed these out to me at the bookstore a week or two ago and the sight of them had me gawping wordlessly at the shelf for a full minute. I got pics in anticipation of a blog post, but I still.. there are no words.
Also, their promotional website.
23.--Jane Austen. (I'm not kidding.)
high-cut panties
Is there a less erotic phrase?
25: hahahaahaha
Dan Brown as serious fiction? He writes like a soft core porn writer. I'll take his paycheck any day of the week, of course.
Is there a less erotic phrase?
oatmeal-like discharge?
musty attic odor?
the opposite of 'love' isn't 'hate,' apo.
It's still less sexy than high-cut panties.
we've moved on from panties to oatmeal, though.
... and back to panties again. We've come full-circle.
28: UNCHIMPEACHED CHIMPEROR
44: Wait, what?
43: Bujold went throuh a big romance dry spell. Plus she's too funny and slapstick for most romance novels.
I associate Harlequin and the like with 8th grade b/c that's when I read them. Whereby them I mean 1) a Harlequin 3-in-one historical Christmas set that included a tale wherein a younger sister losing a bet is forced by her brother to choose a husband 2) This thing which feeled me with a burning hatred of Orientalism.
The third grocery-store style romance novel I read tricked me about a year ago. It had a plain blue cover, was called something like "Murder Off the List," . . .and the back said absolutely nothing about a boy. I thought it would be a fun murder-mystery romp. Nope! There was about two chapters of detection in the beginning, three at the end, four in the middle, and all between a huge chunk of time when the heroine is stuck in her apartment because the murderer is out to get her, so she's being guarded by a hottie cop. What the hell?
Man, that's embarrassing. I started righting "made me feel," switched to "filled me" and got feeled me, whichmakes it sound like I was molested by a paperback.
"She'd never done anything this wild in her life," she thinks. "Oh, it felt good."
Who is the thinker of the quoted thoughts in this passage? And what is "it" referring to in the second thought -- it seems like it should refer to "never [having] done anything this wild."
15: "There's some company that computer-generates skeletal novels and then contracts them out to writers. The characters and plot outline will be given in basic detail, and the writer fills in the rest."
17: "I heard that the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and Star Trek novels were mostly composed in the same way. If it works, I guess..."
Speaking as someone who has many friends who have written Trek novels for Pocket Books, and having known many of the editors, and who knows the process, as well as having had a good friend who wrote a bunch of the Tom Swift, Jr. and Hardy Boys books during the Eighties and Nineties, I can assure you that this is complete crap. Sorry, John. (The Swift and Hardy Boys did share common structures, broadly speaking, but that's hardly remarkable -- and not even that is at all true of Trek books, which have featured a fairly wide range of approaches, actually; I wouldn't tend to defend many as literature, but they're certainly not particularly formulaic, let alone written to fixed outlines, let alone computer-generated, for which I have to start with the major eye-rolling....)
My other passing comment is that I've never been a romance books reader, nor have I ever worked on one professionally, but I did work for two years inhouse at Avon Books, where romance books were the bread and butter, and our romance editors were literally respectively in the office next to mine, and just down the hall, and we all chatted constantly, as well as our romance line being a topic at every weekly editorial meeting, and much other conversation.
From this I'll note two points here: one is that the genre of romance novels is actually highly diverse, with many trends coming and going over different cycles of time, and a fairly constant amount of experimentation (not so much in writing style, to be sure, as in setting and concept and approach); and two is that turning out a saleable, let alone popular, romance novel, formulaic as you may think it (in fact there are, at the least, a whole lot of different formulas, and they change, and overly-slavish imitation tends to be noted and rejected), generally considerably harder than it looks. If I had a penny for everyone I've seen who thought they could just knock one out and sell it, if they made the effort, and hasn't yet, I'd have few money worries.
I assumed "computer generated" stuff was just exaggeration, but is the "written from a broad outline created by the publisher" also crap? Do people write their own Star Trek books unsolicited and send them in?
If I had a penny for everyone I've seen who thought they could just knock one out and sell it
Too bad you didn't think to ask for the pennies at the time. Hindsight yadda yadda.
I have never told anyone that I could toss off a romance novel. I could probably do something starting out like a romance novel called something like "The Road to Hell".
The computer-generated part is perhaps embellishment on my part, let's not waste our time dwelling on that uselessly and just making everyone mad, but I do remember reading is that writing romance novels is a two step process, with the main writer providing an outline and sketch. However, Alexander Dumas is also though to have used this method.
27: My mystery hunt team had a puzzle about romance novels that had Jane Austen as one of the authors. It really threw some of our testsolvers off.
re: 30
Steel-cut oats?
Makes me excited just thinking about it. This may be a national thing, though.
http://static.flickr.com/75/229713334_d227664784.jpg
I used to like steel-cut oats, but the compulsory shot-put in the highlands afterwards wore me out.
When I was first dating my wife, I left an answering machine message for her. The woman she worked for at the time overheard it and spent the next two days prancing about brandishing one of those porridge oats boxes at her.
Because of your accent, as heard on the answering machine?
The English humorist (well, I think he's sometimes funny) Miles Kington has satirised this by merging the romance and war-action genres to produce an imprint named "Mills and Bang". The short tales generally involve a female army officer and a male nurse, or batman.
In re Trek books, how much for just the outline?
"Do people write their own Star Trek books unsolicited and send them in?"
Of course. Though probably you're asking if anyone gets published by Pocket Books that way.
And the answer is, actually, "yes." Particularly as the years and decades have passed, the proportion of first-time sales to the Star Trek Pocket line has generally gone up to some degree, though probably not in the last couple of years with the retrenchment of the line, and Star Trek in general.
It's particularly not unusual for Pocket to go on to publish first novels by people whose first professional fiction sale was to their annual short story anthology contest, for an anthology restricted to those with little or no professional credentials, though, of course, the overwhelming majority of Pocket's Star Trek novels are written by people with previous sales -- in some cases people with plenty of experience with on-Star Trek novels (a Vonda McIntyre, or Diane Duane, say), and in some cases not so much. (And I don't mean to leave the impression that the Trek editors will buy slush very often, if at all -- it's just that it's been known to happen that unpublished writers have, at times, sent in work that demonstrates promise, and been worked with; I wouldn't say the odds are great on it happening, in all but a smattering of cases; in fact, the odds, compared to the amount of slush submitted, are quite horrible, save that the odds for any given starting writer primarily depend on the writer's skills, rather than any other factor.)
It's certainly true that Pocket has a variety of specific Star Trek lines, and they've taken to doing a lot of "mini-series," sometimes across those sub-lines (TOS-crew, TNG, Stargazer, Starfleet Engineering, on and on), in recent years, which means the editors have to co-ordinate different books' plots so they at least vaguely cohere, and this puts certain requirements, at times, on the writers who choose to write those type of books, but that's not at all the same as being handed a complete outline, and told to write it.
I don't even know why people would imagine being handed complete outlines would be the way that sub-genre material, such as the Star Trek fiction line, was produced, other than as a product of generalized contempt for such material, and a resulting presumption that it's likely (plausible, obviously!) produced in the most uncreative, disreputable, mechanical, way, and thus confirms the contempt.
But maybe it's something else; I dunno; the scenario has little connection to reality, anyway.
53: "...but I do remember reading is that writing romance novels is a two step process, with the main writer providing an outline and sketch."
I have no trouble whatever believing that there is some writer out there, or writers out there, somewhere, who do this. To say that it's in some way generally true of "writing romance novels" is, ah, not true.
63: Mike just died a few months ago, incidentally.
