Miss Bates hates the word “exquisite.” I don’t have strong opinions about exquisite. It’s a fragile word and thus problematic to assign to a person (though I’ll admit I did use it in Brave in Heart; the hero applies it to a longed-for reunion).
Our associations with language are idiosyncratic, the result of reading, personality, accent, and conversation. Here’s mine.
This is a list of words I like:
I’m alive. I swear.
I’m trying to finish writing the second book in my contemporary series for Carina, not to mention completing my dissertation. I just finished two rounds of edits on the first book for them (the one formerly known as The Easy Part; new title forthcoming). I’m also beginning to think about NaNoWriMo, when I hope to finish Brave in Heart’s sequel. Plus I’ve been teaching and grading. So much grading. Grading like it’s going out of style (which I hope it is).
With all of that in mind, while I was filling out my ballot for the All About Romance Top 100 poll, I decided to share it here.
A few caveats: it’s probably obvious I’m not a long-time romance reader; there’s not much old school stuff here. I did not like the first two books I read by Nora Roberts, so I gave up on her. In general, I don’t like romantic suspense, erotica, and paranormal romance. I’ve read nothing by Susan Elizabeth Phelps, JR Ward, Diana Gabaldon, or Nalini Singh, among others. With all that in mind, I decided to stop at 50 rather than 100.
So, tell me where I’m wrong. Tell me what I need to read.
Continue reading “All About Romance Top 100 Books Poll, 2013 Edition”
I wrote–am writing–a series of contemporary romances set in and around American politics. The first one plays out against a budget negotiation. In the third act, the clock is running low on a possible a government shutdown when…okay, you’re going to have to read the book when it releases in April (APRIL!) to find out. But it should come as no surprise that as I’ve been working through my edits, I’ve been watching current events with more than my usual level of interest.
I am a very long-standing political junkie. When I was a kid, I embraced the gamesmanship of it, the pageantry. If war is politics by other means, as von Clausewitz tells us, then elections seemed like politics by metaphor. I was obsessed.
One of my earliest memories is watching the 1988 election with my family. They coded the maps differently then. I remember watching the country slowly filling up with Republican blue and imaging a blue tide sweeping the nation. As if elections represented something real and permanent and not a choice between not-all-together different candidates, likely all rich white men okayed by party bosses. The winners, chosen by a small majority of the percentage of the enfranchised who choose to vote, likely going on to careers of no import in a system where the outcomes resolve conflicts ground out in decades prior, like the 2004 election litigating issues from circa 1972.
In college, politics stopped seeming like a game. I became involved with a number of issue-based causes, including sexual and relationship violence response and prevention, which led to the years I spent in Washington <redacted>. Then I left DC for graduate school, for a far more healthy relationship with books and nineteenth-century periodicals. And by far more healthy, I mean not at all healthy.
For me, politics is 90% cynicism and 10% fervent, irrational, glowing hope. While I listen to Americans talk about the government shutdown today, I share all of their frustrations even as I want to scream, “But we have to sleep in the bed we’ve made! We are complicit in this system!”
And if we made it, we can unmake it. We can make it better.
Against history, against empirical evidence to the contrary, I believe that. I believe we are empowered and choose not to act. I believe we can be and do better. Alone and collectively.
So while I watch the news, I’ll be dreaming up plots. Plots about the overworked, largely powerless, aides who are working on too little sleep and too much caffeine to enact dreams conjured about a Washington that doesn’t, and hasn’t ever, existed.
And none of those plots will be stranger or less realistic than what’s happening on the Hill today.
(Edited for clarity.)
Author and all-around Edwardian expert Evangeline Holland has put together a week long celebration of historical romance that promises to be a thoughtful examination of the state of and issues in the genre. Today, I’m arguing that historical romance doesn’t teach us about history — and that’s awesome. Please join me!
Seamus Heaney, the poet laureate of Ireland, died on Friday. As I’ve written about here before, Ireland is a very special place to me. For a while, I thought I was going to study Irish literature. That didn’t happen, but I’ve spent a lot of time reading Heaney, and Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, and William Butler Yeats, and Eavan Boland, and Paul Muldoon. I know contemporary Irish literature better than I know contemporary British literature, better perhaps than I know contemporary American literature. I’m an Irish American, and the literary tradition in Ireland moves me and wounds me and puts me back together again.
I can’t teach poetry without speaking about Heaney, without using examples from his beautiful oeuvre, without hearing his voice in my head.
I wouldn’t call romance a major theme in Heaney’s writing, but he did write several poems about his wife that I find deeply moving: “Night Drive” (“Your ordinariness was renewed there” makes me shiver) and “Honeymoon Flight” (which isn’t available online, but which ends, “Travellers at this point only can trust”).
When I write this week, I’ll be thinking of his words from, “The Flight Path”: “If I do write something, / Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.”
Chuid eile i síocháin, Seamus.
… or gone from the Internet, at least for a little while.
I’m teaching several classes that start this week and trying to finish writing my dissertation and the second book in my contemporary series for Carina, in addition to maintaining some semblance of a personal life and sanity. Thus my leisurely summer schedule (and the blogging that accompanied it) has come to an end.
I’m still working on a massive post — which will probably turn into a short series — about how we do read and how we should read. Expect that thesis to run by the end of September. I will also continue to post fine romance recommendations, though perhaps not every Friday. In other words, I’ll still be here, just less frequently.
In the meantime, check out the highlights of my blog here, please consider reading/reviewing my novel if you haven’t, and enjoy a song that I’ve been grooving on lately.
Cheers!
For the end of summer, today’s fine romance is the best teen romance ever: Cameron Crowe’s 1989 masterpiece Say Anything. It’s another film I can’t be rational about, perhaps because of its resemblance to my own love story; however, on frequent repeat viewings, it holds up remarkably well. I find it every bit as honest and sweet as it more lauded contemporaries by John Hughes and it features the best teen party scene ever. Plus, there is the beta hero glory of John Cusack — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Opening on the day of graduation, Cusack (here, the “basic” underachiever Lloyd Dobler) decides that it’s finally time to approach Ione Skye, playing Diane Court, the smart but shy girl he’s been pining after for years. He invites her to the aforementioned party and for reasons that aren’t clear to her she says yes. They start dating, her family issues unwind, he stands by her, they face complications, they overcome them, and that’s pretty much it.
If you love Say Anything, it’s not for the machinations of the plot, which are few. It’s for the hilarious but realistic dialogue, the brilliant secondary characters played by Joan Cusack, Lili Taylor, and Jeremy Piven, and the music, notably Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”
So grab your boombox and revisit the 80s tonight with Say Anything.
In the course of fifteen months, I’ve posted 100 times (!!!), chronicling my journey from being an aspiring novelist, to publishing a historical romance with a small e-press, to selling a contemporary series to a big e-press. It’s been stupefying. To celebrate, here are my top ten posts in no particular order:
What would you like to see in the next 100 posts?
First, a short digression. When I was in labor, my husband read to me and what would do for such a moment? Only the most distractingly beautiful words set down in English of course: “The Eve of St. Agnes” by John Keats. In fact I very nearly named my daughter Madeline (though didn’t).
Today’s selection is Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009), which features Ben Whishaw as Keats and Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved. If you know anything about Keats, it is probably his premature death at age 24, so I think it spoils nothing to say that the film isn’t a romance in the happily ever after sense, but it is deeply romantic and astonishingly lovely.
The film opens in 1818. Keats has left medicine to pursue poetry and it’s going, in a word, badly. The critical response is mixed (ever heard of the Cockney School?) and he’s watched family members die from consumption and senses the disease stalking him. Then he meets Fanny Brawne. They fall in love and enter into a secret engagement lasting until his death in 1821.
Early biographies of Keats often point out that Brawne wasn’t beautiful and harp on their correspondence, arguing that she isn’t brilliant and accusing her of being inconstant. Campion is engaged in a feminist reclamation, arguing that Keats was the jealous, insecure one and that Brawne loved him deeply.
While this is important to know, you could go into the film thinking it entirely fictional and still come away with the same emotional impact. The score, the costumes, the performances, the muted, autumnal tones of the cinematography: every detail contributes to a powerful movie that’s at once elegiac and ravishing.
I’m not sure why it didn’t get more awards consideration, except that it was released in the same year as The Young Victoria, and evidently we can only handle one romance at a time. For me, however, it’ll be Bright Star tonight.
Some more lovely people have reviewed or featured Brave in Heart in the last few weeks. In case you missed it…
The In Love with Romance blog ran a very nice review (yay recruiting more readers for American historical romance!).
At Indie Jane, I discussed writing American historical romances and National Treasure.
Amanda Schalaby, author of Rhianna and Audra, interviewed me on her blog.
Thank you so much everyone!
Emma Barry 
