Googling books for research and pleasure

I'm on a Jo Beverley kick and have just read A Lady's Secret. In her notes at the end, Beverley points out a good resource for writers, particularly of historicals: Google Book Search.

I'd been using it unwittingly for my other blog -- I found old-timey books on wet nursing such as A Treatise on Hygiene and Public Health.

You can also often search selections of current books to see if there are passages to interest you, such as The History of the European Family, which also gave me invaluable information on breastfeeding rates from days gone by.

Google Book Search is trying to scan in many copies of old and rare books to preserve and share them for free, and publishers and authors of newer books can offer a glimpse into their pages as a service to potential readers.

As a writer doing research or a publisher promoting a book, it's worth looking into. As a reader scouting out good new reads, it's also a treat!

Truth in sexual advertising

I'm loving this YouTube R&B song I first saw on Jo Beverley's blog:


My favorite line has got to be: "Chafing...." Or maybe: "I could give you 7 minutes if you don't move around too much."

Back to romance with Lady Beware

I've finally had some time recently to pick up some fiction. I've been enoying Lady Beware. I always love Jo Beverley's writing. She's a very skillful writer, with obvious competence in plotting, characterization, and dialogue. She's one of my biggest inspirations for what I want my romance writing to be like. I don't feel like I'm up to her level yet, but when I'm editing my work, I always compare it to writers like her.

I also love her Company of Rogues series. I think if you came in on the series in the middle that it would be confusing, which is why I always check bibliography lists to make sure I read series in the right order. Usually the library will have any earlier works as well as the current ones, and often they're automatically arranged by publication date. But to be sure, I check the author's website, such as Jo Beverley's book list here (it's not the easiest site to navigate, but it has a lot of info, including links to her blog and for joining her Yahoo! Group).

Anyway, I'm not done yet with Lady Beware, so I won't comment too much yet except to say -- man, I missed romance novels! It's so fun to be reading one again. Hooray! I love how drawn up I can get in the story, and at this point the Rogues characters seem like old friends to me. I'm always rooting for them, and for the romance, and Jo (I call her Jo) has never let me down!

A poem a day

I mentioned in my last post that I get WritersDigest.com emails, and I was fortunate enough to read the latest one in a timely manner.

Because...

Robert Lee Brewer who is a poet and has a blog called Poetic Asides --

http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides

-- is hosting a poem-a-day challenge for April, which is National Poetry Month, to get some good raw material going. These are supposed to be quick and dirty attempts to achieve some first drafts -- then, at the end of the month you'll have 30 poems to start working on during May, which is apparently National Poetry Revising Month.

(A separate topic to muse upon would be the dubious necessity of magazines anymore given the quantities of information and entertainment now online, as WritersDigest.com and its bevy of blogs is proving. Remember when some online sites, apart from porn, charged money just to be read? That was lame. Thank goodness for advertising revenue!)

So, I know this is a romance writer's blog and all, but I'm so geeked by this challenge. Is it all right to be a poet and a romance writer? I usually try to keep the two separate in people's minds, because be honest -- are you wondering which one I must suck at? The truth is, I'm awesome at both...)

But, seriously, if you're eclectic with the genres like me, feel free to play along. You can post your poems in the Poetic Asides blog's comments, or you can be a reclusive wretch like me and just accumulate privately.

Today, as Day Three, is haiku day, a three-line form (as practiced in English, anywho). I've learned a lot about haiku from reading Robert Lee Brewer's various blog entries on the subject and the links he gave. I especially like the easy-to-follow run-down with lovely example haiku in this resource by Michael Dylan Welch. (Does having Dylan as a middle name automatically make you a poet?)

I did not, however, learn enough about haiku to be brave enough to post my attempts. But I welcome future prompts that motivate us to wrestle with poetic forms. I love freestyling it, too, but I love the way a framework can provide security at the same time as inspiration. Being a fan of puzzles, I love the challenge of fitting my words and ideas into the form. Being a fan of history, I love knowing that a multitude of poets have come up with countless other conclusions to the same challenge.

I guess that's what intrigues me by the whole idea of the poem-a-day prompts in general. The first two were to write a poem on firsts, and to write a poem from someone else's perspective. (You can see that attempt at my parenting blog here.) I love being given a little bit of structure that I can add my own creativity to.

To all my fellow poets and poetry lovers out there, enjoy April!

WritersDigest.com

I had a subscription to Writer's Digest magazine for years, and I still receive their e-newsletters and visit their website. They've recently updated it and said to help them get the word out, so I figured why not. So here it is:

http://writersdigest.com/

I've found a lot of helpful writing advice and inspiration in their pages, whether paper or virtual.

If you're looking for nitty-gritty, you can't go wrong with their series of writing books. They probably have something published on just about any topic that interests you or would help in your writing -- and, if not, maybe you're just the person to author it! For my own writing, I found especially helpful summaries of research on everyday life in Victorian England and America, and I know I'll be looking to their bookshelves and website again when it's time to start submitting to agents.

Theological injunctions against romance novels

In the spirit of the Cracked piece, I share this advice against romance novels from a conservative Christian advice column:

Almost two years ago I nearly gave my virginity away to the first guy who asked for no other reason than loneliness. Since puberty I've had sex on my brain. I'm a 23-year-old Christian woman and it just doesn't seem normal for me to think about sex as often as I do. ...

Sometimes I think I am a sex addict and that the only reason I am still "pure" is that after that near-miss, I just knew that I shouldn't date until I was ready to get married. I guess my main problem is that during my weak times, if I get overtired, overstimulated, or overstressed, I'll give in to more than just the thoughts. I'll read a heap of those secular romance novels then repent and pray that when I am half asleep I won't touch myself in an inappropriate manner. Last night was one of my failures and I've yet to repent because I am afraid I'll do the same thing tonight. There are times that I feel like my prayers go unanswered because my behavior is nearly habitual. I may only fall in this area six or seven times a year but I've been going on like this for at least eight years. There is supposed to be no limit to the number of times one can repent of the same sin, but . . . [...]

And the response:

[...] Now about that self-fondling. Naturally it troubles you; but if you've repented, then God has forgiven you (yes, really), you needn't listen to the Accuser, and the practical issue is what you can do to avoid it in the future. The idea going through your head right now — that even though you're full of regret about last night, you shouldn't repent because you might fail again — is just another of the Accuser's tricks. In fact there are several things you can do. If you think a bit, you'll find that you have certain habits that awaken the temptation to touch yourself in inappropriate ways. You mention two kinds of awakeners just in your letter: One of them is letting yourself get overtired and overstressed, the other is trying to get a loneliness fix by reading secular romance novels. Exhaustion is the enemy of virtue, and those novels are the feminine equivalent of Playboy. I'm sure you can think of other such awakeners. It will be much easier for you to avoid wrong behavior if you first identify, then learn to avoid, the things that tempt you to it.

[emphases all mine, baby]

Wow. This is so me from junior high. Well, not the almost-not-a-virgin bit, because I was quite the never-been-kissed little dork, but the fear of sexuality. Fortunately, I'd gotten over it by age 23. Unfortunately, perhaps, it took marriage at 22 for that to happen.

When Sam & I got married, I was so mad that people no longer cared what we were doing behind closed doors. They'd made such a big deal out of it up to the day we wed (when we weren't doing it), and now that they knew for sure that we were doing it, it didn't matter anymore! What had all the fuss been about, then?

This is all bound up in the freaky-weird traditional Christian perspective of sexuality. After I got over being annoyed with people, I loved being married and no longer feeling any inhibitions or guilt.

When I was in junior high, a friend & I stumbled upon romance novels. They were the perfect insight into our budding sexuality, and I loved to read the most thrilling and naughty passages over again and again. At some point, my friend & I felt terribly convicted and we pledged to destroy all the novels in our possession.

I never touched another romance novel until my roommate in college, a Christian college, happened to be a big romance-novel buff. I started borrowing hers and loved them. This time, not just the naughty bits, though those were nice, but the stories. Oh, the stories! I was swept up in the ... well, the romance of them.

And it was about that time that I started to get a grip on what being someone who's sexual meant, and what it didn't mean. I started just not being so dang uptight anymore, like Miss 23-Year-Old Virgin who touches herself half a dozen times a year and is paralyzed with guilt.

This is one reason why, within my particular culture, I have trouble telling certain people in my life that I read romance novels and in fact am writing one. I know some people will just think they're trashy, and that's their prerogative. I just watched the movie of The Jane Austen Book Club and had read the book too, and there's a great interchange between the sole male member of the group, Grigg, and his no-nonsense dog-breeding amour. He keeps recommending science-fiction novels, and she keeps telling him that they're uncomplicated garbage with no character development, and he finally tells her [paraphrasing], Once you've read any at all, I'll be happy to hear your opions on them. I definitely get the impression from most people who diss romance novels that they've never picked one up.

But the slant of this post relates to the other group I fear to discuss romance novels with, and those are the people who truly think romance novels are wrong. If they could issue fatwas, they would. They're not evil people, they're not mean, they're trying to think through this issue, and they've determined that God doesn't want us reading anything too steamy.

I think it's all bound up in the notion that sex is frightening and dirty and shameful, and I now know enough to refuse to believe that. But how to get that across to people like the advice seeker or the advice giver above?

My hope with my romance novel(s) is to present a worldview that's both moral and sexy, where the good sex is the healthy offshoot of a healthy relationship. I think it's possible, and I think it's worthy.

And, my advice to the woman afraid to touch herself down there? Get over it, honey. Go to town.

A little background

I thought I'd give an idea of my writing journey so far, just so you know where I'm coming from and where I have yet to go.

Three years ago, I guess it was, I took a year off from working to finish my romance novel. I made the mistake of telling people so.

Everywhere I went: Is your novel finished? How's that writing coming along?

And always, always: What's it about? 

After what ended up being nine months instead of a year, I was two-thirds to three-fourths done when circumstances dictated that I start working for actual money again. And how.

And then we had a baby, and everything was topsy-turvier.

But I'm back, baby. I'm determined to finish this sucker, and with the support of my husband, who has agreed to do more than his share of the paid work in our business, I just might manage it. He's admitted he's just looking forward to being a kept man when I get my fabulous advance and multi-book contract. Ha ha!

Now, the reason I hated answering the question "What's it about?" is because, for me, writing is all about an urgency to say something.  If I say it out loud, it takes the energy away, and I no longer have the unmet need to get it down on paper. So I never wanted to talk about my writing as it happened, because I was afraid I then wouldn't do the actual writing. For some reason, people took offense at this and thought it was some petulance of mine that I refused to spill, and they made fun of me and my top-secret plot. Oh, well. I figure if I tell you the truth straight out that you'll take my real reason seriously.

So, that said, I'm unlikely to tell you anything about the novel until it's published, but I'll gladly share my thoughts about writing in general, and, after it's finished, the submission process. (Yipes!)

But, please, please, please, accountability can be great and all, but please no one ask me if it's finished yet! I don't need any more pressure than I give myself. :) But I'll take all the well wishes and writing dust you care to send my way!