Why I Love SEP (And Why She's Brilliant) (And Why Cale McCaskey Isn't)

A writer named Cale McCaskey has a blog post up about "The Problem with Romance Novels." It's a bad essay with an over-reaching thesis (really, dude? all romances?) and the only examples he provides are of three works of literature (Jane Eyre, Pride & Prejudice, and Romeo & Juliet), which he argues--badly--are not romance novels.

Yale (I admit I didn't get into Yale Law. I went to Penn)

So, being the uber-bitch that I am, I posted a comment. I'm not proud of this, but I mentioned my Ivy-League law degree (McCaskey makes a "so what" point about Ivy League colleges not teaching romance novels, which is absurd because Yale had a course recently on romance novels) and my top-ten MFA program. Specifically, I said that Stonecoast (that's my MFA program) requires its students to write an essay in the proper format: State a thesis in the first paragraph, cite three examples that support your thesis, and then write a concluding paragraph. His blog post would fail, I argued, and then I (being a bitch, remember) suggested that he revise it and repost.

Cale McCaskey (I want to make sure Google Alerts lets him know what I'm saying about him) deleted my post, which is pretty ballsy considering that I'd at least read something he'd written. I bet he's never read a romance novel.

Which is too bad, because some of them are pretty damned fine. It just so happens that I wrote an ESSAY for school about just such a novel. And here's that essay:

       In Dream a Little Dream (Avon Books, 1998), Susan Elizabeth Phillips uses two little boys to get the reader emotionally sucked into the story. One little boy, Edward, is alive but his well-being is at risk and he could be taken from his mother by Child Protective Services at any time. The other little boy, Jamie, is dead, so Edward’s presence triggers intense grief in Jamie’s father, Gabe. Even though neither Rachel nor Gabe seeks our empathy, their near-frantic emotions surrounding their sons grab us by the throat almost from the first page. (Conveniently, Edward also serves as a wedge of conflict keeping the adults apart for nearly all of the story.)

       Rachel is living in her car when she returns to Salvation, N.C. on a quest to find some money she thinks her late husband, a charlatan televangelist, squirreled away. That money is her El Dorado, where she’s no longer one disaster away from losing her son to a social service agency. Phillips has stacked the deck against Rachel: no immediate family, hated by the community, broke (as a result of Edward’s recent hospitalization for pneumonia), and scrawny. Even though she denies herself food that she could give to him, she can’t guarantee her son’s physical well-being.

She experienced a surge of helplessness so powerful it nearly crushed her. She wanted to stockpile everything for [Edward], not just food, but security and self-confidence, a healthy body, a decent education, a house to live in. And no amount of self-deprivation would do any of that. She could starve herself until she was a skeleton, but that still wouldn’t guarantee that Edward’s belly would stay full. (Dream, p. 77)

Offering sex in exchange for a job (admittedly with the hero), a step that was previously unthinkable for Rachel, becomes a deliberate, desperate choice. She will do anything for the money to feed her child. And the reader is acutely aware of how close she is to failing her son. It’s her love for Edward that fuels our love and fear for her.

       Gabe falls for Rachel slowly, but he can’t stand Edward. Everything about Edward bothers him; the boy is a weakling where Jamie was robust, timid where Jamie was fearless, and miserable where Jamie was joyous. Of course, those complaints are all just manifestations of Edward’s real fault: he’s right in front of Gabe while Jamie is gone. Gabe has shunned his family’s sympathy but he’s also blocked his grief, preferring an emotional limbo. Edward makes that numbness impossible. Worse, Rachel’s devotion to Edward eats away at Gabe’s humanity, his decentness, mocking his memory of his wife telling him he was the gentlest man she’d ever known. If Rachel had been childless, they could have had a less complicated affair, but the way Edward reminds him of Jamie is a barrier Gabe can’t breach.

       At five years old, obviously Edward doesn’t have much depth as a character, although Phillips gives him lots of personality. But he makes a delightful Cupid. Toward the end of the book, Rachel has given up on finding El Dorado and decided to leave Salvation because she loves Gabe too much to stay. He proposes, but they both know that a future is impossible while Gabe can’t love Edward. Edward (who wants to be called Chip) has dreamed up a way to keep Rachel from taking him to Florida: he and Gabe will pretend to like each other. But Edward can tell that Gabe’s not pretending very well, and he yells at Gabe, then causes an accident. Gabe spanks Edward.

    The child rubbed his elbow, even though it wasn’t his elbow that hurt. He tilted his head to one side and caught his bottom lip between his teeth. It quivered. He didn’t look at Gabe. He didn’t look at anything. He just tried not to cry.
    And in that moment, Gabe finally saw the child as himself, instead of as a reflection of Jamie. He saw a brave little boy with flyaway brown hair, knobby elbows, and a small, quivering mouth. A gentle little boy who loved books and building things. A child who found contentment not in expensive toys or the latest video games, but in watching a baby sparrow grow stronger, in collecting pinecones and living with his mother on Heartache Mountain, in being carried around on a man’s shoulders and pretending, if only for a moment, that he had a father.
    How could he ever have mixed up Chip and Jamie in his mind, even for a moment? Jamie had been Jamie, uniquely his own person. And so was this vulnerable little boy he’d struck. (Dream, pp. 317-318.)

It takes Rachel a chapter or so to believe that Gabe’s let go of his grief, but by that time they’ve found the money, cured a little girl’s leukemia, and sorted out all the subplots.

       As a writer, I admire the efficiency with which Phillips tells the reader to care deeply about Rachel’s well-being. Without Edward, Rachel’s quest is self-serving, not self-sacrificing. Without Edward, she’s rootless and even prickly. Without Edward, her resistance to Gabe would seem stupid. Similarly, Gabe’s grief for his own son would surely have muted faster if Edward had not been an affront to his heart. Most importantly, Phillips takes care to make Edward plausible and distinct as a fictional little boy.

Now, that's an essay! And that's a great romance novel. I'd be happy if I could write one even half as effective as Dream a Little Dream.

As for Cale McCaskey, here's a comment he posted, probably around the same time he deleted mine:

I will not rehash stupidty [sic] people. Read prior comments before trying to post your own to make sure your nonsense has not already been gone over or it will be deleted. I don't have the time, nor the inclination to deal with a pack of throw-away housewives who still sit around thinking about romance like a 13-year old girl. You can do that if you want to, but do it away from me. I like women, not little girls. I think you'll find most men in the upper half of the IQ spectrum feel the same way, as do most women.

I could write a five-paragraph essay on the thesis that McCaskey's blog post fails because it's riddled with restatements of the thesis instead of supporting evidence, plus his comments are larded with ad hominem attacks, but I won't bother. I think Google Alerts has enough to work with here.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Student

I dropped out of my writers' critique group; last week's holiday party was my last meeting with them.

I'm reflecting on this as 2011 closes because it's symbolic of what I suspect will be a number of changes, some exciting and some just sad, that come with the new year.

In the case of the writers' critique group, it seemed pretty obvious to me that it wasn't going to go well if I continued to attend meetings while I was working on my MFA program. And I can see already that my instincts were right. Even doing my homework, reading books about writing, makes me want to rave about what I'm learning to the other writers.

For so many reasons, that would be highly annoying. I'd be lecturing them--which they neither need nor asked for--and I'd be suggesting that I now know something they need to know--which is almost certainly not true.

Of course, I considered the alternative, namely to attend the meetings but not say anything. Ugh. I love these people, but not enough that I could glue my lips together, sit on my hands, and smile like a Sock Monkey for two hours.

So starting next week, working with a critique group will be confined to ten days in January and ten days in July. I'll have a mentor/instructor for the months in-between, someone I'll email pages of my WIP(s) and wait for comments and suggestions.

In other words, I'll be home, working on my own to learn everything I can learn so that my writing improves. Writing is already a solitary occupation; I'm about to make my education as a writer solitary for 11 months of the year.

It's worth it, and I'm seeing that already, even before the course has officially begun. One of my assigned texts is Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder. It's about screenwriting, which I don't do, but it's really about what makes stories work. And sure enough, it showed me something that's (possibly) missing from Blackjack & Moonlight. Luckily, I'd submitted an excerpt from B & M for one of my Stonecoast workshops, and luckily that workshop is being run by the instructor who'd assigned Save the Cat! for a presentation she's doing on story structure. So I have hope that she and my fellow students can tell me what I need to do to add the missing element.

It's just that I want to natter on about this now. It's a bit like that boor in The Graduate: "Just one word...Plastics," only in my case the word is "Primal." But I'll spare you the details.

It's going to be a new year, that's for sure. I'll still post here as I think about romances and romance fiction. I'll just try hard not to post hectoring screeds about writing technique.

Because you don't need that.

TBR Challenge - It's Not Wallpaper But It's Still Not to My Taste

Over at AAR, Lynn Spencer posted a great piece on what a shame it is that so many Regency romances don't bother to take place in the Regency period.

Chatsworth House

Coincidentally, my TBR Challenge read for December is A Regency Christmas, a holiday anthology from Signet. It was published in 1989, theoretically the heyday of more historically appropriate regency romance. Apart from the issue of the value of money, which no one seems to get right,* there's enough of the flavor of the Regency period. For example, The Kissing Bough by Patricia Rice has two gentlemen soldiers returning from the Peninsular Wars. Gayle Buck's Old Acquaintances turns on a misunderstanding between the hero and heroine that resulted in her ending their engagement (four years before the story starts) without much discussion. That seems consistent with the lack of contact even engaged couples had back then; at one point Judith tells her erstwhile fiancé that there's been no opportunity to discuss anything: "Whenever we were private, we either fought or you kissed me."

Mistletoe in the wild

[It was at this point in my reading this post aloud to Brit Hub 2.1 that he pointed out how most of our ideas of what Christmas looks like come from the Victorian time. There's a wreath on the door in the cover illustration--a classic Allan Katt scene--and of course that's Victorian. But, to all five authors' credit, none of the Victorian traditions, such as ornaments and trees, show up in this collection.]

Alas, for all their sense of time and place, four of the five stories aren't romantic enough. Hell, one of them--Edith Layton's The Duke's Progress--literally doesn't identify the heroine (!) until the last two pages (!!). Drawn-out misunderstandings, the inconvenience of far too many extra characters (lecherous in one story and larcenous in another), and downright dawdling all add up to slow pacing and a distinct feeling that historical accuracy isn't enough on its own.

Mind you, I didn't need blatant sex. I needed romance. I needed the hero and heroine to meet each other quickly and have a relationship. Admittedly a troubled relationship, but one of interest or intrigue that leads to love. You'd think in a novella, this wouldn't have been hard, but it isn't until the very last story that the reader gets all the angsty goodness and charm of love rekindled.

Mary Balogh's The Star of Bethlehem makes up for the other four stories. It's got its own problems--we're asked to believe that a husband and wife can have marital relations for TWO YEARS and never discover that they love each other (well, maybe that's historically accurate, who knows)--but it's charming and sweet. And very romantic. I can't say much about the plot because I liked its surprising elements for just that reason: they surprised me. Period detail, a lovely romance, and even some surprises? Skip the other five stories, but don't miss this one.

* Here's the Parliamentary white paper on the subject, now updated to 2002. Yes, £1 in 2002 was the equivalent in absolute terms of £8 in 1812, but £1 in 1812 had the same purchasing power as £50 pounds in 2002.

So when the innkeeper decides to charge £2 for each member of a party of 8 stranded in a snowstorm--because, you know, there was a blizzard every single Christmas during the Regency--that would be the equivalent of £800 in 2002 terms. And they didn't all get separate rooms, either. For a night's lodging in a 3-star hotel, maybe, but that seemed a bit extreme for the coaching inn equivalent of a Red Roof Inn, even allowing for the market forces at work with insufficient choice and ultimate demand.

Me? I'd have had the innkeeper charge them two crowns per head--a crown for lodging and another for their meals. That's half as much and it strikes me as exorbitant but not nonsensical.
.

I, Publisher

This week, Ross and I become publishers.

Thursday, December 8, is the release date for Tara Buckley's first erotic novella, The Realm of You. In it, Tara looks at the ways communication in a marriage can get derailed by assumptions. Oh, and there's lots of kinky sex.

I am not Tara Buckley. To explain how I've come to be Tara's publisher, I have to back up and explain about getting rejected a lot.

In 2010, when my writing actually sucked, I minded the rejections. This year, my writing is pretty good and getting better. More importantly, I'm writing the sort of books I want to read. They just happen not to be the sort of books agents want to flog to editors, or that editors want to publish.

None of that means that there aren't a lot of other people who'd enjoy my books. At least two of my rejections started, "I love [the characters, the set-up, the dialogue, etc.]" and ended with "I just don't think [there's enough conflict, it can succeed in the market, etc.]." I take that to mean that even the odd agent or editor enjoyed my work, but didn't think it could succeed in a tight, competitive industry.

These rejections don't bother me any more. Last summer, I made a deal with Ross: I'd query everyone I could think of. By the end of the year, if I hadn't gotten an agent, we'd self-publish in 2012. I've sent out about 50 queries and, counting the no replies as "no, thank you," I've gotten about 50 rejections. Time to self-publish.

The more we talked about it, the more Ross and I realized this was a good fit. I could do the social media and some of the marketing (as well as write the books--or as we like to call it, "create content") and Ross could do all the formatting necessary for the three platforms: PRC (for Amazon's Kindle), EPUB (for B&N's Nook) and a modified DOC file (for Smashwords, which serves most other devices). Plus, as a former lawyer, I could handle the quasi-legal aspects of starting a business in Pennsylvania while Ross, who has had his own business(es) for decades, knows more about the corporate side of things.

That left two of the traditional roles of publishing to outsource: editing and graphic design. We're probably going to use a freelance editor who used to work for Silhouette for my novels, and we've used Heather C. Paye for our website banner and some cover art.

Which brings me to Tara. Tara Buckley is the pseudonym of a talented writer who wrote a BDSM erotic novella in her "spare" time. I offered to read it, and loved it. Tara was going to self-publish but hesitated because, you know, the whole business with Judy Mays getting slammed by some parents in the school district where Judy teaches English rather demonstrated that outing oneself as an author of erotica isn't always wise.

Harmony Road Press to the rescue. Ross and I offered to publish Tara's novella. That led to another writer thinking this sounded like a good idea, so Christina Thacher's BDSM novella, The Locked Heart, about a young woman whose sex life will never be the same after a chance encounter in an airport hotel bar is due to be released on December 15.

Meanwhile, for various reasons my own writing isn't likely to be ready until late spring 2012. So for a few months, Harmony Road Press is publishing erotica--really well-written erotica. If this takes off, it could be we have to start a different company to publish my legal romances. I mean, they have sex in them, but they could seem like flat beer next to the heady concoctions Tara and Christina have served up.

Just like that, I've gone from worrying about story structure and character development to learning about metadata, frontmatter, and the delicate minuet one performs to market a book without seeming to be shoving it down people's throats. I knew I'd have to learn this stuff when it was my work I was flogging enthusing about, but while it's easier to rave about someone else's stories, it's scarier to feel responsible as the publisher for a book's release.

I'm incredibly lucky to be working with Tara and Christina, who are both busy professional women with full lives and a sense of perspective. (Also a sense of the absurd, a very useful perspective when dealing with a neophyte like me.) Most of all, I'm floored by how gifted my husband is. He's figured out all sorts of tricks and shortcuts to making Harmony Road's books look right. If you like the table of contents or the progress bar at the bottom of a Harmony Road book for the Kindle, for example, that's all Ross.

If you like the books themselves, credit Tara's and Christina's hard work and deft touch with the kink.

And if you find any errors, let me know. We've all worked hard to put out great stories in a professional fashion, but mistakes can still happen.

Groundhog Day: The Romance Novel Way

In the classic comedy with Bill Murray, a weatherman is forced to relive Groundhog Day over and over until he gets it right.

I feel as though I've been reading that premise, over and over.

I'm a little peevish about this because it deals with my current bugaboo: external conflict. I got a rejection recently from an editor who read the whole of Blackjack & Moonlight and said, "There’s never a difficult choice or insurmountable obstacle in front of them, nothing at stake, and at no point am I brought to the point where I doubt the inevitability of their happy-ever-after."

(By way of rebuttal, here's a beta-reader's comment, which I received weeks before the rejection: "As is true with most books of this type, you realize that you are near the end, in your gut you know that the story has to work out, but you can't see how it can happen in only a few pages." Does it strengthen my argument or undercut it to tell you that this particular beta-reader doesn't normally read romances?)

Anyway, the archetype of external conflict is Romeo & Juliet (or, if that's too distant an example, how about Twilight?). Huge barriers keep the lovers apart, and yet they come together. Okay, so in R&J they [spoiler alert] both die, and in Twilight, well, I'll admit I stopped reading after Book Two, so I'm not sure, but it seems like Bella should have a tough time surviving the consummation of her love for Edward.

I write about urban professionals, however, and I base them in part on urban professionals I know, have worked with, or might have some resemblance to. What I've observed is that smart people can solve their external problems a lot faster and more easily than the problems they've made for themselves.

In other words, smart people can screw up their own lives more efficiently than anything rational I can throw at them from the outside.

What? Oh, right. Groundhog Day.

Here's the pattern of a book I started recently. Heroine is a child prodigy musician who gave it all up years ago and is now running a bar she bought. Hero is a rock musician coming back to record years after quitting when a band member died. When the book starts, the hero comes into her bar & orders a drink he doesn't bother to drink, all the while thinking about how attractive she is. He leaves. He comes in the next day, orders the drink, talks to the heroine briefly, thinks how attracted to her he is, leaves. Comes in a third day, orders the drink, talks a bit more to the heroine, thinks about her, leaves.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Eventually she gives him the only one of her CDs he doesn't have (because he couldn't get it used on Amazon, presumably). He admits to himself that he decided to record the come-back album in this particular town because of the heroine.

Sorry, what was the conflict again? I'll admit it, I gave up at that point. I was supposed to believe these two people were locked in a situation that prevented them from having anything to do with each other, but clearly that wasn't what was happening. What was happening was Groundhog Day without any self-awareness.

I ask a bit more of my characters than illustrating that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

A book I'm reading now isn't quite so bad, but it shares the quality of assuming that if the characters repeat to themselves that ONE reason they can't give in to the attraction they feel for the other person, we readers will understand how vitally important it is for them never, ever to think they can be together. (I think the hero's reason is that the heroine is Italian. Yeah, like I'm moved to tears by his plight.)

The point of the movie is that eventually Bill Murray's character learns that he has to do things differently. Learning to modify the ways we trip ourselves up--that's not an automatic, one slap-to-the-forehead-is-all-it-takes, realization. And I know a lot of people who never get there. (I used to say of a relative that he kept hoping the airlines would lose his emotional baggage, but it never happened.)

I agree with the editor that it's nice when a book has believable external conflict, but I only like those stories when the conflict isn't something the characters are unable to see, won't acknowledge, are idiots about, or need an outside agency to fix magically. Having the hero and heroine stub their toes on an issue over and over again without thinking, "I should try a different path," that's just dumb.

I'll take smart over dumb every day of the week.

Edited to add: This post prompted some loving concern from good friends--and really, if your loving friends can't tell you when you've posted the equivalent of toilet paper stuck to your shoe, who can?--that I come across here as  a bitter crone  a holier-than-thou smartypants  an arrogant know-it-all  all of the above in this post.

So here's a confession: I don't know how to do this right. I don't believe anything I wrote here is "more right" than what I wrote in this post on how everyone's entitled to love what they love. I didn't intend to suggest that anyone who loves books in which the characters bumble about in a lovably dorky way is wrong to love those books. It's much more likely I'm writing the "wrong" books than that any of you is reading the "wrong" books. And that's without the obvious fact that there are no "wrong" books, just (maybe) a bad fit between the reader and the book.

Here's the irony: I wrestle with this issue. The balance between me as a member of Romlandia, as an individual reader, and as a writer--I don't have an answer how to get that balance right. I'll admit it: it's an internal conflict that I can't work my way through. Several times today I arrived at the following as the bedrock truth:

I just don't know.

.

So, yup you got it: a post defending smart internal conflict over dubious external conflict ended up making me admit I haven't got all my own internal conflict worked though. Which means if this were a romance, there'd be no HEA!

TBR Challenge - The Child Detective

I had a mad crush on Encyclopedia Brown when I was little. I read as many of the Nancy Drew books as I could find. And I adored the adolescent detective in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Christopher, who seemed like he might have some form of autism.  So, to satisfy this month's "non-romance" TBR Challenge, I went back to a mystery with another child sleuth. I like their common sense and their ability to ferret out the obvious details that adults overlook. I like the way their minds work.

But Flavia Sabina de Luce, the 11-year-old protagonist in Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie just annoyed the hell out of me. She's bizarrely knowledgeable until she isn't, intrepid but rather cruel, clever when it suits the plot and dim at other times.

Or maybe I just didn't care who killed the red-haired man in the de Luce's cucumber patch.

Mind you, I can see why the book is an "International Bestseller." (According to Wiki, Bradley sold the rights in three countries based on a synopsis and the first chapter. Maybe that's why I didn't like it so much--sour grapes.) Set in 1950, it's got that made-for-PBS feel of an English country village back when you cycled everywhere. Flavia de Luce is "plucky." I can imagine she appeals to readers who would have enjoyed Joan Hickson's Miss Marple so much more if she'd only been pre-adolescent and thus inherently an idiot.

Mind you, Flavia isn't most people's idea of an idiot. She's a keen amateur chemist with a specialty in poisons. (She avenges herself against her older sister by contaminating Ophelia's lipstick with urushiol, the extract of poison ivy. Never mind that poison ivy doesn't naturally occur in England. It does grow in Canada, where Alan Bradley's from.) But there were times when it seemed implausible that a girl of her age could know some things, like the names of obscure volcanoes, but then not know what a "rhetorical question" is, for example.

Similarly, she knows what Leonardo da Vinci's Vetruvian Man looks like, but doesn't know what body part her sister is talking about with the advice, "If you're ever accosted by a man, kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes." Maybe I was the unnatural 11-year-old, but I think at that age I could have deduced what general area of a man's body was meant by the "Casanovas."

It's easy to see the antecedents for Bradley's inspiration. Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle for its wacky family dynamic, Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm for its cast of wacky characters made wackier by virtue of shadowy past tragedies, and all of the Miss Marple mysteries. As with Agatha Christie, the implication in Sweetness is that the rural police are good-natured but dim, useful only for a) arresting the wrong person and then b) arresting the right person after our intrepid amateur sleuth has sussed out his or her identity.

The problem for me is that the wackier the characters and their dialogue, the less I believe in the mystery and its attendant danger to our girl detective.  For a taste of the wacky, here's a truly implausible bit of a long, long monologue by Laurence "Jacko" de Luce, Flavia's father, describing his childhood at a public school:

Mr. Twining was more kindly than adept [as a conjuror]; not a very polished performer, I must admit, but he carried off his tricks with such ebullience, such goodhearted enthusiasm, that it would have been churlish of us to withhold our noisy schoolboy applause."

I know this is supposed to be the translation of childhood into an adult man's vernacular, but Mr. de Luce is so bland and distant up to this point that having him spout sesquipedalian words just makes him even less interesting. As he's locked up on suspicion of killing the fellow in the cucumber patch when he makes that speech, it's particularly odd.

Sweetness is a wildly popular book--I know this because it took forever for my Wish List copy to arrive via Paperback Swap. Just as well I didn't like it; now I don't have to worry about how long it will take to get any of the sequels.

Now that's one way to reduce a TBR pile!

"It Must Be Good in Bed"

As the daughter of two Brits, my mother was hardly a profane woman.  Nonetheless, she had an earthy explanation whenever she was introduced to a dubious candidate as boyfriend / fiancé / husband of a female acquaintance: "He must be good in bed."

I love the philosophy imbedded in this. There was no intent to insult the woman's choice of man, even if his charms eluded my mother. Instead, she was respecting the fact that she couldn't know all his finer points, and that some of them might be quite personal indeed. We're not usually privy to the sex lives of our friends so we have to assume that both parties are making a fully informed choice for bed- and life-partners.

[And yes, the sentiment is rather lopsided with regard to gender. My mother was born in 1919. She had more experience with the concept of a woman discovering that a man was not good in bed than with the reverse.]

Two things happened recently to remind me of my mother's attitude.  First, I had a conversation with Janet W. about two highly-respected authors of historical romances.  Janet admitted that while she enjoyed the books of Author #1, she (Janet) had stopped reading recent releases as they came out. By contrast, she still read the books of Author #2 as soon as they hit bookstore shelves even if it's undeniable that Author #2's current work wasn't up to her best.

I took an opposite position. I do read Author #1's most recent releases even though I agree they aren't as good as her very best work. With respect to Author #2, I start each of her books - even the very famous ones - with a good bit of trepidation. A couple of her books rubbed me the wrong way - including one that Janet recommended very highly.

What followed was a spirited discussion along the lines of, "you've got to be crazy," at the end of which Janet and I just laughed and agreed that there's no point disagreeing with another reader's reaction to a book after the bedroom door is shut.  In other words, a book can strike me as a bad bet, but when I hear how much Janet loves it, I figure it must be the book equivalent of "good in bed."

The second incident had a friend asking on Twitter if any writers would like to write some fan fiction to expand a short story by Mary Jo Putney, "Sunshine for Christmas."  (She had no takers.) I had to find my copy of the anthology, Christmas Revels, in order to remember what the story was about. It's a sequel to The Rake, in which Lord Randolph Lennox travels to Italy in December to get away from the English weather. There he meets an English governess, Elizabeth Walker, who agrees to show him around Naples.

It's a charming story, and I enjoyed it, but it certainly doesn't leave me with a desire for more. Another story in that collection, "The Black Beast of Belleterre" does make me wish it were longer, even as I think it's actually perfect the way it is.

Ironically, the same friend on a separate occasion tweeted how much she loved about a story by Author #1 (the one I still read). I read that story and had to scratch my head. Again, as much as I love Author #1's writing, that particular work seems charmless to me, whereas I believe it's the only thing by Author #1 that my Twitter friend truly loves.

Now, obviously all of this is further evidence that we should allow people to like what they like for the reasons they like it. But there are times where it's perfectly reasonable to argue over plot points, characterization, prose style and the like. Nothing requires us to forgo the charms of discussing books.

Here's where the sentiment of "he must be good in bed" can be helpful. The love for a particular book is no less personal than the love for another human being. Even where a review points out its flaws, the reader may just love it. Once the discussion is at the level of "Why do I love it? I just do," then it's more polite to say, "well, it must be good in bed," and let each other love what we love.