A New Book, a Contest, a Dumb Mistake and Two Funerals

It sounds like a movie with Hugh Grant in it, but it's actually a description of the month, more or less, that I've more-or-less just finished living through.

Because you may remember that at the end of February, I first posted the lovely cover of my November novel, The Edge of Impropriety, accompanied with some jittery prose to the effect that I was waiting nervously for my editor's instructions on how to revise the manuscript.

Now I'm not averse to criticism of my writing. I wouldn't say I actually enjoy it, but I do appreciate it.

I mean, computer programmers (which I was, for 25 years) don't whine and get all insulted when someone finds a bug in their code, do they? Au contraire, they're happy and grateful someone found the problem before the program went live and plunged the whole wide wired world into silent darkness.

So it's not the editorial tough love that bothers me. What makes me nuts is waiting to find out what bugs and glitches and just downright doesn't-work moments an editor has found in my manuscript. It's the waiting that gets me pacing the floor and biting my nails.

Cool it, I told myself. You have stuff to do.

Because I needed to post a new contest on my web page -- one of those read-an-excerpt-answer-a-question-enter-the-drawing-to-win-a-prize contests.

The prize would be an autographed copy of The Slightest Provocation, and I figured I'd make it a sexy contest, using the passage wherein my hero and heroine, Mary and Kit, play a sexy game wherein a pirate ravishes his captive lady.

Am I the only historical erotic author, btw, who portrays her characters sharing erotic fantasies?

I mean, don't the characters in erotic historicals already live in costume fantasyland?

Isn't it the reader who's supposed to be having the fantasies?

I'm probably not the only author who creates such scenes in her books. But I might be the only one who gets herself tied up into TheoryGirl knots by mulling over the meta of these meta-questions, instead of keeping her mind on the html as she constructs a web-based contest whose question asks, "In The Slightest Provocation, what does Mary wear for a hot, silly, rough-and-tumble game of pirate-and-lady?"

When I wasn't tying myself into knots worrying about what changes my editor would want me to apply to the manuscript of The Edge of Impropriety.

And I may be the only romance author (who are, by and large, a frighteningly competent, productive bunch) who got so distracted that she forgot to put the pirate excerpt up, leaving an entirely different excerpt, about a much younger Mary and Kit -- who were much too young to play pirate (at least the kind of pirate game I had in mind).

Or perhaps it was because I was interrupted by an aunt's sudden death and had to grab a red-eye flight to go East for the funeral.

I was glad I went, though. My family pulls together in hard times and I was glad to add my support.

When I got back home from the funeral, my editor's revision instructions had arrived. Smart ones. Thoughtful ones. Tough ones.

Oh, and could I turn it around in a little less than three weeks?

None of which left me much time to pay attention to the fact that no one who'd entered my contest seemed to know what Mary was wearing to play pirate.

I did make the changes to the manuscript, though the only time I got out of my pajamas during those weeks might have been the afternoon I delivered my talk to the Popular Culture Association -- with the help of two of the avatars who live in the mad attic of my brain, TheoryGirl and SuperegoGirl (that's TheoryGirl in the pic -- SuperegoGirl is camera-shy).

I wish, by the way, that I could have heard the other talks at the Popular Culture conference. If you're interested in romance scholarship, please check out Sarah Frantz's discussion here.

But I did made the changes to The Edge of Impropriety in the time assigned. And even had a little fun when I added a whole other sex scene (about which, more later).

And had a moment to enjoy the email from my editor saying she liked what I'd done...

...just in time to go East for yet another funeral.

But not in time to notice that there was still hardly any response to my contest question.

Until I got home from Funeral Two last week, to find a sweet, patient smart letter from a reader who was kind enough to clue me into the fact that there was nothing in the excerpt on my web page that would possibly tell anyone what my poor heroine was wearing to play sexy grownup pirate (because the excerpt that was still on my page had her as a twelve-year-old in pigtails and pinafore).

So apologies to all you contest freaks out there. Please come play -- it's fixed now -- while I take a long, red-faced nap.

As for the questions...

One of which you'll find on the contest page of my web site.

Except for those of you who like to mull, as I do, about the boxes-within-boxes paradoxes of characters in erotic romance novels who have their own erotic romance fantasies... Those of you who never met a metastructure they didn't like... I'd love to hear your thoughts too.

Writing and Repression Redux: or, Just Kill James Bond

Huh? James Bond?

Wrong genre, that.

Except that my hunch is that all genre fiction has common roots. Which lie in romance, as it happens -- originating in the fictions of second century Greece, which were highly disrespected, and which were the first extended stories (in the West, anyway) written in prose, which had to prove how disreputable and un-serious they were.

These proto-romances were always about lovers who were separated, abducted by pirates, sold into slavery, reunited at the very last moment. There was a lot of travel: the literary scholar Northrop Frye said that the chief mode of transportation in these early rudimentary romances was shipwreck.

I love this linkage of romance and travel because it also ties so neatly to those medieval quest stories, like the hunt for the Grail, which were also called romances. And because since then we've learned that if you're looking for something outside yourself you just might find it inside.

But the inside-outside quest-and-self-discovery thing is a relatively modern invention. In the Greek proto-romances, on the other hand, the lovers know they love each other from page one, so all the kidnapping, abduction, near-rape (and real rape too) are all just trials of their separation and their honor. My guess is that it isn't until Richardson's Clarissa that we get that hero writhing in his discovery of his own passion.

I've already written about how critical that moment of declaration is both to Pride and Prejudice and a generation of bodice-rippers. And my further guess is that it's that moment of discovery and disclosure that ties together any number of popular fiction genres and makes them cousins of romance.

Including BDSM, btw. I don't know if I've ever mentioned here that the Marquis de Sade was a huge fan of Samuel Richardson's, and thought he was rewriting Clarissa when he was writing Justine. Interesting, no? You can, and should, read more about that in Angela Carter's The Sadean Woman. Not to speak of my own Safe Word (w/a Molly Weatherfield). That I-have-you-in-my-power moment is so much fun to write exactly because as you write it you can feel the ground shifting -- and the fragility, the vulnerability and contingency of erotic power.

Which brings us from Richardson and Sade and Austen back around to James Bond (you did know I'd get there eventually, didn't you?) Well, anyway, to the villains in James Bond, and to an ancient Saturday Night Live skit that I've never forgotten, about a confab of villains -- sort of an evil villain consciousness-raising group, where the villains try to convince each other that the point is just to kill James Bond now, and talk later.

But they never do, do they? Because at the moment of the height of their power over James Bond (which was a naked Daniel Craig in the last one, as I'm sure I don't have to remind anybody), they have to talk. They have to brag. They have to give away everything. Which shows that they're incomplete; they're not so powerful at all.

Which has just enough family resemblance to those beloved writhing-hero-must-declare-his-passion romance scenes to be interesting.

Because who has the power in those scenes? And isn't it always the understanding of one's own incompleteness that blows the solid ground out from under a character? And if it's a romance allows for the possibility of finding completeness in the other.

In SM and in superhero/spy adventure fiction -- I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that in all the genres that are kin of romance -- it's this ambiguity of power that creates the important narrative hinges upon upon which the story turns. In SM sex (which always goes for the narrative element), the popular term for this is "power exchange". And in fact, the panel I'm going to speak on later this week at the Popular Culture Association Conference is going to be called something like Romance and Power Exchange.

But I'm thinking that "power exchange" might not be as good a term as "power slippage" or "power instability" or "power balanced on the fulcrum of its self-expression". Or whatever Colin Firth was acting so well that unfortunately he froze his face into those lines forever. (Be careful what you wish for, actors... or anybody looking for the big score.)

Still, isn't it interesting that the power slips into desire when the hunky object of desire (ie hero or villain) becomes a desiring subject through his (or her) own need to speak?

Which I guess is my question.

Along with: what do you think about any of this?

Or do you think about any of this? (With a wave to the other theory geeks out there)