Party Lines: Teaser One

So Party Lines will be out in three weeks. You probably want some teasers, hmm?

It’s very cold here. This seems appropriate.

She played with the scarf hanging around her shoulders. “Because having dinner with a Democrat is partying where you’re from?”

“No.” He reached over and tied the scarf—a ridiculous, lumpy, red thing—firmly around her neck. Keeping a hold on the ends of it to keep her close, he added, “Because I barged in on your meal, asked you to eat with me. And where I’m from, if a man invites a woman to dinner, he pays.”

“You’re bad at that feminism thing.”

Over the course of the evening, he’d eaten, so he was no longer hungry. For a time at least, he’d been warm—though seriously, Iowa, forty-five seconds outside and that was fading. Soon, he’d be back in his room and he’d get some sleep.

But staring down into Lydia Reales’s face, the neon lights from the Applebee’s sign illuminating her eyes and coloring her cheeks, he suddenly felt massively less satisfied.

The moment stuck to them until they completely passed what might be just a friendly touch. Until he couldn’t help but look at her mouth. Until he tugged on her scarf, trying to pull her closer, not to kiss, but just to nestle under his chin for a moment.

She saved them both by not moving. Which was safer. Smarter. The right call.

With an exhale, he released her scarf and stepped back. “Yes, I am.”

He found his rental car and drove back to his hotel room alone.

These two are a lot of fun. You can preorder them at Amazon, B&N, Carina, iBooks, Kobo, and Google Play or add them to your Goodreads shelves. Reviewers can request it at Netgalley.

Winter Blahs Giveaway

Thanksgiving has barely ended, Hanukkah is just over a week away, and Christmas looms. Winter weather is sending almost everyone in the United States scurrying for our blankets and cranking up our thermostats. And I’m up to my teeth in papers to grade and dissertation defenses to prepare for (really there’s just the one).

To help with the stress and cold, I’m going to give away a digital copy of a book–specifically one copy of any book I’ve written. There’s the Civil War, second-chance-at-love angst of Brave in Heart, the cynic/idealist budget negotiation of Special Interests, the opposites attract scandal of Private Politics (which has a Jewish beta hero!), and the not-releasing for a month cross-party campaign banter of Party Lines.

The rules: you must be able to accept either an .epub or a .mobi file. And you must comment below and tell me which book you’d like. I’ll pick a winner on Friday, December 15 make that 12, at midnight EST.

ETA:

Screen shot 2014-12-13 at 8.07.49 AM

I gave everyone a number, 1 through 9, and the random number generator spit out 2. The winner has been emailed!

eARCs of Party Lines

Party Lines is now on NetGalley!

I feel somewhat weird posting this because I support the blogger blackout and have concerns about the commercialization of book discussion. But…I wrote the book and I’m proud of it and I want people to read it.

While all of the books in the series are oppositions attract romances, this is an enemies-have-a-steamy-affair book–an affair that threatens their jobs, values, and sense of self. It’s banter-y and fun and heart-wrenching and, yes, they exchange flirty emails wherein they fight about the Bill of Rights. Oh, and there’s a presidential campaign. This is probably the only romance anyone can name that includes parts of stump speeches because I’m really good at knowing what readers want. (Ha!)

If you blog about or review contemporary romance and are interested in featuring or reviewing the book, doing an interview with me, running an excerpt, etc., please send me an email–-author.emma.barry (at) gmail.com–-and we’ll see if we can work something out. I don’t actually have ARCs yet (hopefully soon!), but if you have a problem with your NetGalley request, or if you don’t use NetGalley, let me know.

For more information about the book, including the opening chapter, look here.

The Dashwood Rule

If you are a person who reads about media on the Internet, you’re probably familiar with the Bechdel Test. Taking its name from Alison Bechdel a Gilmore Girls actress (ETA: or not. Yeah, I’m an idiot. It’s actually named after MacArthur Genius Grant winner Alison Bechdel, whose graphic novel Fun Home is way super awesome. I’m going to leave this error here so we can all laugh at my silliness, which is legend), the Bechdel Test grades books/movies/TV shows/etc. on the basis of whether they include two or more named female characters talking about something besides men. It is astonishing how much media, and specifically media targeted at women, fails to meet this standard. Even within genre romance, in which female friendships are frequently represented, not every book passes the Bechdel Test.

Over the weekend, I read Erin Satie’s excellent historical romance The Secret Heart. One of the things I liked about the book was not just that it passed the Bechdel Test–the heroine, Caro, and her close friend, Daphne, discuss art and paint–but that the hero and heroine have conversations about things other than each other and their relationship.

For example, early in the book Caro and Adam talk about their respective (and suspect) passions, ballet and boxing. Caro explains,

“Dancing makes me feel powerful. In control. Like— I don’t know— a watchmaker— and my body is the watch— and some people say God is like a watchmaker—”

“So dancing makes you feel like God?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know, maybe a little.” She folded her arms beneath her breasts and hunched her shoulders, tipping her chin into her chest. “I don’t mean it like that.”

“Like what?” Adam snorted. “Blasphemy?”

“It’s just. So, God the watchmaker.” She raised her arms and let her hands illustrate her words as she spoke, enthusiastic despite herself. “He builds the whole universe”— she mimed a child stacking blocks—“ and he winds it up”— the fingers of one hand twisted while the other held her imaginary watch steady—“ and lets it go, and then…” She flicked her fingers wide, miming a starburst. “Everything works!”

She glanced in his direction, something sad and solemn in her expression. “Except that the universe is nothing like a watch. It can’t be. It’s full of living things.”

(Kindle Locations 446-453)

As good passages tend to be, it’s wonderful on several levels, but for the moment, I want to focus on how the conversation reveals the characters’ philosophies about the world. Caro and Adam pursue their arts for disparate reasons, seeing the relationship between their bodies and their human-ness differently, which is part of how we know even before they do that they will understand each other better than anyone else in their world and would thus be good together. These ideas come out of their backstory, but I don’t think Satie could have substituted any other conversation here that would have as concisely or effectively shown us who the characters are, why they are different, and why they are similar. Sure they’re talking about deism in a way that reveals their education, the early Victorian world in which they live, etc., but this is all about character development. And it’s a way of doing that development that doesn’t feature in every romance.

I proposed on Twitter yesterday that we need a new test to capture this quality, namely a way to celebrate when the hero and heroine (or hero/hero, heroine/heroine, etc.) have a conversation about something other than their respective personal histories or romantic relationships.

I suggested calling this the Dashwood Rule. I was thinking about a scene in a Sense and Sensibility adaptation in which Margaret Dashwood defends her mother’s cousin and his mother-in-law, saying, “I like them. They talk about things. We never talk about things.” But Miranda Neville pointed out that the “things” Margaret likes are the characters talking about people, love, scandal, gossip, and so on, which is sort of the opposite of what I mean. So perhaps it needs a different name.

But regardless I think we should recognize and celebrate romance in which characters talk, really talk, about art, music, philosophy, history, sports, beliefs, and ideas of all kinds–in which, in other words, all the things that we love about our partners in real life get represented on the page.

So the Dashwood Rule*: live it, learn it, love it.

* Or whatever we decide to call it.

Party Lines: Opening Chapter

If you live in the United States, it’s Election Day, so you should vote. And when you’re done, I have a reward for you: the opening chapter of Party Lines, the final book in The Easy Part series. (Non-Americans can just read the chapter.) Party Lines is smart, sassy, and steamy–and it has the best opening chapter in the series.

I’m nervous about this book. It was hard for me to write and it’s different structurally than the first two. But I love it so much and I want you to love it too.

Warning: this chapter contains very minor spoilers for Special Interests and Private Politics, major banter, and a few adult words.

Continue reading “Party Lines: Opening Chapter” →

A Fine Romance Friday: Arsenic and Old Lace

It was difficult for me to pick the right film for today. It’s Fine Romance Friday, yes, but it’s also Halloween. I dislike scary movies intensely. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from the time I watched the first 10 minutes of The Silence of the Lambs. Plus, scary movies don’t usually have romance–something about serial killers not being romantic.

I considered several Hitchcock films, but they didn’t seem particularly related to the holiday. “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” has Linus and Lucy in the pumpkin patch. But then it came to me: Frank Capra’s 1944 screwball comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. Sold!

Starring Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, and pretty much every character actor in mid-1940s Hollywood, it’s the simple tale of a writer who has made a career decrying love and marriage…that is, until he falls for the girl-next-door. They have a quickie ceremony on Halloween at City Hall, but before they can escape on their honeymoon, they run home to tell their families. Hijinks ensue.

The plot of this film is batty even by the standards of a screwball comedy. It involves sweet old ladies committing murder, sibling rivalry, delusional relatives (literally), criminality, plastic surgery, jokes about publishing, and a meditation on Teddy Roosevelt and masculinity. Oh and Cary Grant plays a guy named Mortimer. It’s delightful.

Pauline Kael famously wrote that the screwball comedy “turned love and marriage into vaudeville acts and changed the movie heroine from sweet clinging vine into vaudeville partner.” Arsenic and Old Lace isn’t the most successful example because it’s a bit light on the romance. I want to know how Priscilla Lane got Cary Grant to propose in the first place and I want her to be a more equal partner than she is; she’s forced to be the damsel in distress a lot. If anything, the film substitutes Grant/Mortimer’s aunts for character development of the romantic lead. They are the main feminine presence in the film, though they are totally charming. Additionally for all the trappings of humor, it’s a dark film and can be legitimately scary. So I don’t think it’s a pure screwball comedy. But it strikes a compelling balance between a few spine tingles, a wonderfully witty script, and several sequences of laugh-out-loud physical comedy.

If you’re looking for a light Halloween film with a bit of romance, I commend Arsenic and Old Lace to you. It would pair nicely with some elderberry wine–though hold the arsenic.

Thoughts on Online Book Discussion

I keep writing and deleting this post. No one needs my thoughts on this matter; no one asked for them. Others have explored this topic much more elegantly and insightfully (see here, and here, and here, and here). This is little and it is late. But I can’t leave this unsaid.

Talking about books is the most important part of my intellectual life. When I was a freshmen in college, I was an English major, but considering changing to classical archeology (true story). Then I stumbled into the first half of the American literature survey. It was as if I had landed on a planet with more gravity. Everything shifted and settled around me; everything changed.

In that class, I found people talking about books in the way I did in my head except they did it out loud. And they did it better than I did: more insightfully, with connections to texts I’d never heard of, respecting theories I didn’t understand. So I kept taking English classes. I studied British literature and Irish literature and literature in translation. I analyzed contemporary popular culture and critical theory and linguistics. I wrote about Austen and Shakespeare and Marx. I fell in love with New Historicism. But thanks to that first college literature course, early American book culture stayed central in my heart.

For a while after college I did redacted things in Washington, but I missed books. I missed talking about books. So I went to graduate school to get back the feeling I got from the literature classroom. And now I do it all day.

When I started reading romance almost four years ago, the reason I kept doing it wasn’t how romance did deeply imaginative things related to gender norms and sexuality (though also that), it was the book culture I found online. Here were people talking about books in way I did at the university except without all the things that can come with academics–some of which had become loathsome to me. The online romance discussion seemed more radical, more subversive, and more democratic than what was happening in my university classroom.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I felt like I could start writing because of the online romance community. The academic world routinely makes me feel stupid and disempowered, but romancelandia does the opposite. The book culture around romance gave me permission to use my voice in a way I’m not certain I would have otherwise.

I don’t think this is about Kathleen Hale anymore. Not really. It’s about the fact that the book culture online has stopped feeling fun. Since I’m now writing and have a vested (albeit tiny) commercial interest in that culture and since I don’t review (related to my author role), I’ve mostly seen this from the sidelines. But the hype machine and its relation to book blogging seems qualitatively different today than it did 3.5 years ago when I started reading book blogs.

I have no solutions here, but it breaks my heart. Because every time I read a good book, I feel less alone. I feel more connected. I feel human and giddy and alive. And online book culture at its best networks those private reactions and feelings. Amplifies them. And it can be awesome.

I don’t know how to preserve it. And to the extent that my author activities may have taken away from anyone’s fun or just contributed to the blurring of public (in the Habermasian sense) and commercial spaces, I am sorry. Because if there’s no joy in talking about books, I don’t know what else we’re doing or why else we’d be doing it.

A Completely Biased Recommendation

Two years ago I had finished my drawer novel and Brave in Heart and had started writing Special Interests. I’d been telling stories in my head since forever, but I’d only been writing them down for about a year. But it turned out putting my ideas on paper was both harder and funner than my vague imaginings. And indeed I had realized I wanted to try and publish. So I decided to find a critique partner to help me become better at the writing part.

The process is sort of like online dating. You craft a profile, stress about it, and delete everything you’ve written. Then you rewrite the notice without the puns and close your eyes as you post it on different writer’s message boards and listservs. When you finally hear back from someone and parse her profile, you exchange chapters. You send notes, read the feedback, and ask yourself if you want to spend months reading this person’s work.

During the weeks I searched for a CP, I read a lot of good chapters and met several interesting people. But the only one I made it to the second-date stage with was Genevieve Turner. And her first book came out today.

Summer Chaparral Cover

I can’t be objective about this book; let the record show that I’m admitting that up front. I’ve read it many times and it’s a palimpsest for me. When I read Summer Chaparral, I see the book it was and the book it’s become and I filter it through Gen’s and my now long-standing partnership and friendship.

But let me tell you why I wanted to keep reading it during our “first date” and why I think you should too.

Summer Chaparral is a Romeo and Juliet tale about an American cowboy named Jace–seriously, the name gives me shivers–and Catarina, the eldest daughter of a Californio family. I’m a heroine-centric reader and Catarina was the hook for me. The closest cognate to her is Scarlett O’Hara, but I hesitate to say this because Gone With the Wind makes me stabby (I talked about that novel at some length here). She’s not beautiful and kind and self-effacing and delusional about her charms as some romance heroines are. She’s pretty and she’s knows it–but it hasn’t made her happy at all. She wants things. Little, normal things in her world, a home of her own and a family and a small measure of domestic power, but she hasn’t achieved them.

Jace wants things too. Like Catarina, the things he wants are small: his own ranch, a life that’s measured on his own (vs. his family’s) terms. And this beautiful, intriguing woman can help him get them. It all seems easy enough, but quite unbeknownst to them (except maybe not at all unbeknownst), they’re playing roles in old family and cultural dramas.

It’s a shot-gun marriage story, in which desire isn’t convenient and doesn’t solve the problems. But what happens after the marriage, and how this one couple must solve personal and sociocultural hurts, is what’s really fascinating.

It’s a story that’s deeply inflected by setting. Beyond Catarina, I wanted to keep reading because Gen is a beautiful writer of place. Her descriptions of the town of Cabrillo are breathtakingly specific and lovely. So between the vain but vulnerable heroine and the nature writing, I signed up for more. I’m really glad I did.

Again, this isn’t a review. I cannot fairly or objectively review this book and I want to support the Blogger Blackout. (Look at me, contradicting myself like a boss.) But, all that being said, if you like “unusual” historicals or spicy historical romance or Western romance or just plain old good books, I think you should check it out on Goodreads or Gen’s website or you can buy it Amazon, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, and All Romance.

Book-Ends

(This is the latest in a series I’ve been writing about how we read, why we read, and what we read. It’s, um, a bit ponderous. These things happen.)

Over at Dear Author today, Janet writes about how the specialness of books should be determined by readers:

If anyone should be deciding whether books are special, it should be readers. No, let me correct that. Anyone can believe that books are special. Authors, publishers, editors, cover artists, marketing advocates – whoever. But the only people who should be deciding for readers if and when and which books are special, are readers.

I agree with this whole-heartedly, as I do with most of the piece. Books are consumer goods whose use value is determined by the reader. Their worth isn’t intrinsic. While gatekeepers like marketers, reviewers, booksellers, teachers, academics, and other readers influence these determinations–insofar they shape our taste and teach us how to read/make meaning from texts at all–it is ultimately the individual with the book on her couch or on the subway who decides if Moby-Dick was worth the slog.

To the extent that anything separates books from other consumer goods, it is that books in their physical or digital form are unfinished. We must decode them. And I do think that the reading experience provides a more intimate communion with books than consumption does with many other consumers goods. When I read, I have a reading voice in my head that repeats every word (or every few words if I’m skimming). I literally re-articulate everything the writer transcribed (and which editors, formatters, etc. shaped) and then filter it through my education, my past reading experiences, my mood, and so on in order to decide what it means. This is a somewhat different experience than eating an apple, wearing a shirt, or even looking at a picture.

I don’t think that my Moby-Dick is necessarily your Moby-Dick. And my Moby-Dick isn’t the same as when I first read the novel seven years ago. Today’s would be shaped by the first and the subsequent reading experiences. A rose is a rose is a rose: the first rose isn’t the last.

We must “finish” other consumer goods, of course, either by assembling them (e.g., Ikea furniture), making things out of them (e.g., groceries), etc., and we do have to decode other cultural goods, like film, music, and television, but books have always seemed different to me both because I value them more but also because the process takes longer. I’m a fast reader, but it still takes me four to eight hours to read a 70,000-100,000 word novel. I’m going to spend a lot of time with the writer (and the editor, etc.) in my head. And the form in which I’m going to experience a book is closely aligned with the form in which it was produced. A writer wrote on a page and I’m looking at a page, or a screen as the case may be. This may give books a sort of…liveness that other cultural productions don’t have. (I’m not sure what to call this quality.)

So books aren’t special but they are participatory in a way that marks them among consumer goods.

Continue reading “Book-Ends” →

A Fine Romance Friday: Roxanne

I haven’t done a film post in forever! So let’s rectify that with Fred Schepisi’s 1987 rom-com Roxanne. The movie updates the nineteenth-century play Cyrano de Bergerac and stars Steve Martin as a small town fire chief in love with a beautiful astronomer (Daryl Hannah). He assumes she’d never go for a guy like him–namely one with an epic nose. And so when he discovers her crush on the handsome but shallow Rick Rossovich, he gives that guy the right words to succeed with her, saying all the things he wishes he could but doesn’t dare through a handsome mask. Hijinks ensue and the source material is updated with a happy ending.

Roxanne is pretty darn charming. It uses its small town Colorado setting to great advantage, has an excellent supporting cast (led by Shelley Duvall and Fred Willard), and is funny–particularly the self-deprecating exchange in which Martin comes up with twenty creative insults for his own nose and the ear-flap hat/feeding of the lines scenes. In another moment, Martin convinces a group of women to go to Roxanne’s house looking for aliens in order to interrupt a liaison he made happen; his imitations of the aliens with suckers on their hands and feet is a standard joke in my family.

But beyond the obvious humor, I like the film’s quieter moments: the ways in which Martin conveys his character’s vulnerabilities and fears beyond his public persona. The film laughs at his large nose, but it also shows us the shadow of real emotion under the jokes. Plus, the letters Martin writes Hannah are quite romantic.

It’s not ground-breaking and further it’s imperfect. I’m always frustrated that Hannah falls for the ruse. She’s supposed to be smart for crying out loud! But she does get to voice why Martin’s actions were stupid in the last act and he does a good grovel. Plus the film doesn’t engage in any slut shaming for her sleeping with Rossovich unlike another some other films from the same period like The Money Pit.

But despite its imperfections, it’s a great choice for an early autumn Friday, when the sky’s still clear enough to look for comets. On such a Friday, I commend Roxanne to you.