Peg Kerr's Journal

Although both of my novels have romantic elements, I've never considered myself someone who generally reads romance novels myself. There are a few exceptions. Jane Austen, of course, is the most important one. I adore Jane Austen, as long-time readers of this blog know. Interestingly enough, it was a science fiction writer who got me to read Jane Austen, when I was (I think?) somewhere in my late twenties or early thirties. Eleanor Arnason made an off-hand comment at a panel at a science fiction convention (or perhaps it was one of our one-on-one conversations afterwards; my memory is hazy) that one of the best Iago-like depictions of evil she's ever read takes place in the opening chapter of Sense and Sensibility. Fanny Dashwood cleverly leads her husband, step-by-step, to repudiate the promise he made to his father on the latter’s deathbed to support his sisters. She gets him to agree to a little, and then a little more, and a little more, until by the end he is actually congratulating himself for his generosity for resolving to behave in totally dishonorable and miserly way to the women his father commended to his care. I was intrigued by her description of the passage and so read the book--and I was hooked. It's curious, that my introduction to romances was due to my writerly curiosity about how to write an effective villain.

Of course, Jane Austen wasn't considered a 'romance writer' in her day because the marketing category simply didn't even exist yet. Even today, I think that people who dismiss her as a mere romance novelist (often without reading her) are missing the point. She wrote about love and marriage, true. But she was hardly a wild romantic, but more of an Augustan realist with a very keen sense of the absurdity of human nature. When it comes down choosing between the worldview of Marianne or Elinor Dashwood, I think Miss Austen would clearly side with Elinor.

I also read Georgette Heyer's novels, which were recommended to me by a friend. I loved them and reread them almost every year. I had a couple Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge romances, which I picked up because I read Joan Aiken's children's books, and because Joan Aiken wrote continuations of Jane Austen's works.

Last year I picked up the Sons of Destiny novels of Jean Johnson (ladyofthemasque) because I'd read and enjoyed some of her fanfiction. These were fantasy romances. Magic+sex=fluffy and fun.

But last month, I did something I'd never done before. I'd just finished the Jean Johnson books and when I got the bookstore gift card from my family, I went into a bookstore and headed, somewhat uncertainly, to a section I'd never hung out in before: I think I'll buy a romance. Any romance, I don't care. Um, well, a good romance. But which one? No recommendation. No knowledge of the author. Could I pick a romance up off the shelf and just read it cold?

I didn't know and I had literally never tried doing such a thing before. I have a sense of a slight preference for type (I was gravitating toward the historical romances, particularly regency) but I have no idea who popular romance authors are. As a genre, I had a little idea of how the marketing works from reading, of all things, Elizabeth Peter's Die for Love, a marvelously snarky and fun murder mystery set, of all places, at a romance writers convention. Yeah, Elizabeth Peters was right. The covers of romance novels ARE embarrassing. I thought about Joanna Russ' essay "How to Suppress Women's Writing" as I browsed the lurid covers. Here was writing by women, for women. It's wildly successful, but I'm embarrassed to pick it up. I thought a lot about that as I browsed, but yeah, I was uneasy about being seen carrying a book with those stereotypical clinch bodice-ripper covers. How interesting. Was I buying into the disparagment of the genre without thinking about it?

My first two picks were okay. Fun and pleasantly salacious. I enjoyed them well enough that I went back last weekend and picked up four more, again, picking cold. OMG. This last attempt was much less successful. I squirmed at the egregious errors, in history and voice. It was like biting into a bon bon, hoping for some delicious chococolate, and encountering plastic. Well, that was a waste of money. The cover blurbs were useless and "New York Times Best Selling Author" is no guarantee of quality, believe me. The historical errors irritated me, and the cliches were a turn off.

Well, what do other people think are good fantasy novelists? So I googled "Best romance novels" and picked a book that came in #1 on several lists: Outlander by Diane Gabaldon. There are over sixteen hundred reviews on the Amazon page, so I guess a few people have read it. I was interested to discover, when I got to the bookstore to pick up a copy, that although it was considered a rather groundbreaking book when it came out, and won the best novel of 1991 from the Romance Writers of America, it is now shelved in "Fiction." Not Romance. No clinch on the cover.

So I'm diving into the book, and so far it's certainly gripping my attention. No taste of plastic in my teeth so far. I'll keep you posted.

MyCharityWater Campaign Report:

$5,000 CAMPAIGN GOAL
$1826 RAISED SO FAR
91 people served
42 donations
29 days left

The Charity:Water blog posted about this campaign, and I felt more than a little envious. He raised more than $25,000? What fundraising mojo does he have that I don't have?

Then I realized he is one of the co-founders of Twitter.

Oh. Guess that answers that.

(Only 29 days left! There's still time to make the goal!)

From work.

I stopped in Barnes & Noble the other day and out of sheer habit checked the romance shelves under "H" with the faint hope that perhaps I might find a Georgette Heyer I didn't already own. To my absolute astonishment and wild delight, I found a brand new edition of The Grand Sophy, which heretofore I had only owned as a dog-earred Xeroxed copy. Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen are just about the only romance novelists I buy. Austen is always in print, but Heyers are difficult to find—but Harlequin is re-releasing six of them this year: The Grand Sophy (in the stores now), followed at monthly intervals by The Foundling, Arabella, The Black Moth, These Old Shades and Devil’s Cub. ( Here’s a delightful excerpt from The Grand Sophy )

Peg

Rob forgot to take the computer with him to work today. Negative: I have to wait yet longer to have my DVD drive fixed. Positive: I can post my end-of-the-month list of books on time.

A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer. Re-read. I heard Caroline talking about the system of magic in this book at World Fantasy, which is what made me pull it out again. I was surprised to find how little memory of the book I had, which is quite unusual for me. I'm glad that a sequel will be released soon.

North to Freedom by Anne Holm. Re-read. Actually, the original title which was used for this book's release in Europe is much better: I am David. World Fantasy prompted this read, too: I was on a panel at WFC on influential books read as a child, and this one sprang right to mind. This book holds up well, no matter how many times you re-read it. I read it to the girls this month, too.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Kate Bernheimer, ed. A collection of essays. Was particularly impressed by the ones by Terri Windling, A.S. Byatt, and Linda Gray Sexton and . . . oh, there were a whole host of good ones. (Alas, also one or two that were just unreadable, but out of 28 essays, they were few. The book was well worth the money).

The Lord of the Rings: The Making of the Movie Trilogy by Brian Sibley. Because yeah, I'm a fan.

The Nonesuch by Georgette Heyer. Re-read. Because it's getting cold again, which means I'm starting to make butterscotch pudding in the microwave at night, and for some reason, every time I eat warm butterscotch pudding, I want to read Georgette Heyer. A very odd but extremely strong correlation. This is the only Georgette Heyer I picked up and read cover-to-cover, but I dipped and skimmed through a number of others this month (all over bowls of butterscotch pudding), including The Toll Gate, A Civil Contract, The Foundling and Cotillion.

Jane and the Prisoner of the Wool House by Stephanie Barron. I really like these books and think they are well written. The author purports to have "discovered" some hitherto unknown Jane Austen manuscripts, and Jane is a detective uncovering murder mysteries. If you love Jane Austen's novels and are very familiar with them as I am, you will be delighted to see the lines that "pop" out of the text which you recognize as coming from Jane's published work. The books are following Jane's biography (and seem to be carefully researched) and you see what inspires Jane's fiction. This one is in the newest in the series; number six or seven I think. Great fun.

Four Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright. Re-read. Another favorite from my childhood that I pulled out to read to the girls.

The Sandman: Prelude and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman. First time I've read this, I'm ashamed to say, thanks to kijjohnson who lent me her copy. I am happily reading on in the series.

Here's one book that I only had an opportunity to read about half of before I had to return it to the lender, but I'm including it because I thought quite a bit about it this month:

Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter by Jack Zipes.

Hmm. I note with disapproval that I'm not doing enough research reading for the new book. Must address this next month.

Peg

Talked to kijjohnson today, who, to my delight, is finally reading the Lois McMaster Bujold books. She made some remark that she hasn't been able to do anything else, but has simply been gulping them down one after another.

This started a chain of thought for me today that led me to brood on the issue of obsessiveness (a topic which I have obsessively considered before). Right now, I'm re-obsessed with Lord of the Rings, as I just got my DVD copy of the first movie. Kij is like this, too, and in fact, that's one of the bonds between us. Other obsessions I have had over the years, starting from when I was very small:

The Chronicles of Narnia
the Bible
fairy tales
Laura Ingalls Wilder's books
the Lucy M. Montgomery books (Anne of Green Gables and its sequels)
Star Trek
Star Wars
Beauty and the Beast (the television show)
the King Arthur tales
Robin Hood
LOTR, as well as Tolkien's other works
Harry Potter
Jane Austen
Georgette Heyer
Lois McMaster Bujold

This tendency in myself to obsess about story has been an extremely strong aspect of my character, beginning since, I would judge, I was about eight years old. I like stories with a wide scope: many characters, vivid scenery, heroes to cheer for, villains to hiss at. Essentially, I like a fully imagined world (scenery AND character AND history AND . . .), where I can totally lose myself.

This has always totally baffled my family (by which I mean my family of origin; my husband understands this completely). Why is Peg going to see Star Wars for the ____nth time? I couldn't explain it when I was 16 years old, and it always rather embarrassed me. Other people around me were able to read a story or see a movie and shrug and say, "Well, that was interesting" or "I suppose that was rather good," and then go away and forget about it. But not me. My imagination has always seemed to need some story that I turn over and over and over in my mind (like Gollum muttering over his "Precious," I suppose--I forget who it was who remarked that Gollum is a picture-perfect example of the psychological concept of addiction).

As I've grown older, I understand it a little better, I think, although it still is somewhat embarrassing to admit, even to myself. I tend to hide the full extent of my obsession from the people who know me (by which I mean the Muggle, or mundane world: my coworkers, for example). And yet, I have to admit to myself, that a large part of my life is spent simply thinking about whatever it is I am obsessing about the most. At work nowadays, I replay the LOTR:FOTR movie continually in my head, or listen to the soundtrack in my mind, or think about the fanfiction I've read lately, all while continuing to do my work. I would estimate that at least 50% of every day sometimes is spent just thinking about whatever my current obsession is. At night, I'll surf the Internet, or read essays about an author, or simply brood. I turn stories over and over in my mind, thinking about how the author created them, how the characters interact, how the world is made vivid, and about the issues and themes revealed in the story: how do you go on with your life if your greatest love was someone has died? How do you get over being betrayed? How can you be a hero when you are scared to death? How do you show faith when you have never had anything to depend on in your life? How do you come to know and understand yourself truly in your relationship with other people--both in people you love and people you hate? Who are you, and how does that change as your role in life changes, and as you make hard choices?

Why do I do this? I don't know. Sometimes (quite often, really) I wish that I didn't, and I get totally exasperated with myself. But I have done a good deal of reading about the creative process, and I have learned that this is a tendency that is shared by many other creators. C.S. Lewis wrote approvingly of those readers who read stories over and over; he thought more highly of them than readers who read something only once. The Bronte children, for example, built a whole imaginary world as children, based on the toy wooden soldiers that Branwell owned, which they turned into a series of stories set in "Glass Town," later "Verdopolis" and "Angria." Tolkien himself is another great example, of course, brooding over his imaginary languages and the history of Middle Earth. I take comfort sometimes, when I get too discouraged over the fact that I have been blocked from writing fiction for a number of years, by remembering that Tolkien himself was a blocked writer, and the book that he wanted to publish the most he never finished, although he put fifty years of work into it (The Simarillion).

I find that my tendency to obsess is closely related to my tendency to feel stories deeply. Stories move me more than most people, I think. I say this and wince--it seems downright conceited somehow (I feel more deeply than you do). Yet I really believe it's true. Someone who knows me pretty well once remarked that I have less of a carapace protecting me from the outside world than most people do, and so that I get much more rocked my life's joys and woes than most. Powerful stories feed right into that, plugging right into my imagination, jolting me like someone mainlining heroin.

It's both a curse and a gift, I think. Obsessing can give me wild delight, but it also uses vast reserves of physic energy, reserves which the wise part of me knows I should be using creating my own work, but I don't because I'm obsessing over someone else's work. I worry, too, that I might lose track of my own life because I've sunk so deeply into an imaginary one. Perhaps it has gotten worse since I have discovered the Internet. It used to be, when I was stuck in a particular obsession, I would quietly keep it to myself because I didn't know any other people who felt about a certain story as I did. Now, with the Internet, it's very easy to find many, many people just as obsessed as me. The possibility for endless time-wasting, in discussions, in speculations, in mutual delight, grows exponentially.

I think that the Internet has made things both easier and harder for the obsessive creator. We have the ability to find each other now. But if you want to create your own stuff, as, say, a fantasy novel fiction writer, the Internet can stand for a continual temptation to forget your own work and immerse yourself in someone else's work. Who knows how many great Tolkiens this generation might have produced who instead frittered all their time away playing computer games on line?

Throwing this out for thought. I think I'll go re-read "Leaf, by Niggle" by Tolkien, which he wrote in conjunction with his essay "Tree and Leaf," about fairy stories. He wrote it as he was struggling with the fear that his obsessiveness over detail would prevent him from ever finishing The Silmarillion.

Cheers,
Peg

P.S. Aargh. There's a bat flying around in the house. Must go deal with this.