Day three was great for research. Not great for productivity. BECAUSE I guess I forgot that I can’t write on weekends. Not because I’m lazy (which I am) but because I can’t write with people around me. As in I am an unfathomable bitch if you interrupt me while I’m writing. So in order to survive, I must adjust the Novel Experiment from Can I Write a Romance Novel in Two Weeks, to Can I Write a Romance Novel in Fourteen Days. Business days, that is.
On Day 3 I got a lot of reading done. Part of it while my husband and younger daughter participated in a Color Run at a local park. People are running, dancing, wearing tutus, and pelting one another with packets of cornstarch colored blue, orange and pink. And there I am brushing pink dust from my kindle screen and muttering. #BookwormProblems.
I began to read but could not finish a book called Fierce by Clarissa Wild. The premise was nerd girl meets bad boy. Unfortunately, it was terrible. Everything about it sucked. Here’s my Goodreads review of Fierce:
“An absolute abomination. This had to be written by a pre-teen or it’s a poor translation of a tween book originally written in a language not English. In what language/culture does one “follow a class” instead of take or attend? I think most 12 year olds are too sophisticated for this.”
Mean? I guess. Maybe Karma set me straight because yesterday I got a scathing 1-star review of my short story I Saw Lexy Kissing Santa, calling it a “poor Janet Evanovich copy.”
But the good news is that I found a romance novel that I actually liked! Where I Belong by J Daniels. The premise is a girl returns to her hometown for the summer and discovers that the hot stranger she’d picked up the night before is the guy who teased and tortured her when they were kids. So she hates him, but you know, wants to bone him 24/7. It follows all the romance rules including the HEA, but I cared about the characters and the sex scenes were exactly the right temperature of hot for me (ie no buttplugs or riding crops), and I even laughed out loud more than once. It was a good book. For real. At one point I was reading on the couch and I murmured “Oh my godddddd,” and my husband wanted to know what was going on. So I told him, “Oh, well, the guy with the nine inch dick was just revealed to be a cop.” File that under things not to say to your husband.
So what I learned from Where I Belong (which, I liked SO much I immediately downloaded her other book and, I’m almost embarrassed to tell you, fanned her Facebook page) is that the romance genre does not have to have corny dialog or stereotypical characters. They can be as contemporary as last week and the dialog can be how real people talk.
One thing I have noticed in my quest is that part of the book is often from the dude’s point of view. I don’t remember that from the bodice-rippers of eighth grade, so I don’t know if it’s a faulty memory or if it’s a new thing. I wasn’t planning to have any of my book be from the Stripper’s POV, but…should I?
Romance Fun:
Euphemisms for Body Parts in Romance Novels. – From BookRiot.
Trixieland 