Don't forget the library...

Romance for Men

This is interesting: Ellora's Cave have opened a new line in romance novels - aimed at male readers. How about that?

Of course, men have been covertly sneaking reads of female-oriented romance books since the beginning of fiction (and quite a few have written for the genre), but I'd be very interested to see if it's viable way of marketing. Will men own up to buying romances? I can't begin to guess what the covers will look like, for a start!

Full details are here, but there are two statements in the guidelines that raised my eyebrows. Authors apparently need to change the standard style to concentrate on:

• More of what men want or need from women: sex, love, acceptance, admiration, dirty talk; less of what they don't need (judgment, drama, expectation of anticipating woman's needs).

 And to

• Remember that sex is largely visual and verbal for men (for women, it is mainly mental and emotional).

Well, I'm shocked. According to this measure I am, yet again, proved to be a man.

The Handsome Prince - out now!

Some day your prince will come (and come again)...

It's changed publication dates a few times, but The Handsome Prince: gay erotic romance is now definitely definitely out in glorious paperback print - and selling fast by the looks of things.

Edited by Neil Plakcy, this anthology has a lineup that includes stories by Heidi Champa and myself, and varies from tradional(ish) fairy tale settings to historical to contemporary encounters with princes both literal and figurative.

My own tale, Reckless, is about a young nobleman who is best friend, protector and bodyguard to the prince and heir of the kingdom - and secretly, desperately, painfully in love with his Prince Charming.

So here's an excerpt...

---

Our audience applauds, and as I rise to my feet again they cheer me. It isn’t my place to make a speech in return, but I meet Alberic’s eyes and nod, a private flash of acknowledgment passing between us.

But still I can’t smile.

Soon afterward we repair to the lodge to change out of our sweaty hunting clothes and dress for the dinner that will be laid out in the pavilion. Servants bring linen cloths and bowls of hot water to the prince’s chamber and kneel to tug off our high-topped boots, and then retire as we strip off our vambraces and padded jerkins. Alberic flings his crown of may-blossom over a wall-mounted rack of antlers with a laugh, and is soon talking away happily, but I do little more than grunt. This is always a part of the day that I dread as much as anticipate, and today in particular I cannot shake off the black cloud over my shoulders. As the prince’s companion, I usually share his bedchamber – or his tent when on campaign, or his carriage. On one shamefully arousing occasion I even shared his bed and the lady-in-waiting in it; afterwards her story, whispered in confidence to friends, became the envy of the Court. Understand: we do not seek privacy from one another.

This rustic room in the hunting lodge is no different. Its high windows let in shafts of dusty light, and I covertly watch Alberic make the motes roil as he crosses the beams. The prince’s hair is standing up in sweaty tufts and the golden dusty light clings to that too, and to the smooth and glistening skin of his shoulders as he washes his chest. Little dark flecks of forest debris are plastered across his back; I ache to brush them off. Alberic has no upper-body hair except for the sun-blonded streaks on the backs of his forearms; the muscles of his hard stomach are as smooth as ripples in sand, and as golden. It’s one of the many images that haunt me at night.

Water droplets lick the furrows of his ribs under his raised arm, and race to darken the upper edge of his hose. The sight makes my stones grow heavy in their tightening purse of skin. It’s always like this: he’s oblivious and I am in torment.

With an effort, I pull off my torn shirt and glance down at my own torso. Like the prince’s, my body is honed by fencing and hunting and hard riding. The bruises won’t show up properly until tomorrow, but there’s a pink furrow scored across the flat of my stomach, slicing through the dark hair, almost all the way down to where my hose sits low on my hips.

“What’s that?” Alberic asks.

“That’s where the boar’s tusk grazed me.”

Alberic swears a mild oath and crosses over to touch the scraped skin with his wet fingertips. His touch tickles and I have to force myself to hold still. The smell of Alberic’s fresh hot sweat is pushing through his cologne and my cock jerks in response to the touch and the scent, making me nervous. “Another inch closer and...” says the prince, wonderingly.

“And I’d have been disembowelled.” I can feel myself quivering and to mask the tremble I brush Alberic’s fingers away.

“You’re angry at me?”

“Yes.” It’s a relief to admit it.

“Because I risked your life?” The cheeriness dies out of Alberic’s expression. “I’m sorry: you know that. I got carried away in the excitement. It was a bit reckless, I know.”

“Yes it was.” In private, we dispense with formal politenesses. “But I’m not angry because I was at risk – I’m angry because you were.”

“Me?” The smile flashes into Alberic’s eyes again. “You worry too much, Tancred. Cluck cluck cluck, like a hen.”

“Alberic, be serious. You’re the heir to the throne: you have a responsibility to all of us.”

The prince just grins. “Stop being sulky, Tancred.” He clasps my face firmly, framing it in his hands, looking me in the eyes. “I know how much you’ve done for me. I haven’t forgotten. I appreciate every bit.” Then he swoops in and plants a kiss on my lips. It’s a firm, quick, masculine kiss – a prince’s benison. The sort of intimacy only royalty gives one the right to bestow.

Once more I hear the thunder of the boar’s feet.

---

Buy at Amazon US : Buy at Amazon UK

The Rules of Romance

Okay, I write erotica and some erotic romance, but I've felt for a long time that I'm on shaky ground with the romance side of things. Writing simply what I like, I've often felt like I wasn't quite speaking the right language to editors and readers. I've felt like there were secret expectations that no one was telling me about.

So it was back to college for me at the weekend: learning the unwritten rules of writing category romance novels in a full-day intensive workshop run by Jessica Hart, who has written over fifty novels for Harlequin in the last twenty years. She was great.

Inside ten minutes:

"Romance novels are not, despite what you may think, stories about how two people meet and fall in love and overcome obstacles, in order to live happily ever after. They are about how two people, who are powerfully attracted to one another and may even be sleeping together, cannot bring themselves to say 'I love you.' Only when that finally happens does the story reach a conclusion."

"Oh," I thought, as the scales fell from my eyes and I saw the light. "Oh, right. Bloody hell. That makes sense."

There was much more of course. We did Standard Plot Hooks and Backstory Wounds and Incompatible Goals and Scene Functions and all sorts of stuff. And of course this is all based on the pared-down, 50K Mills-and-Boon-type paperback, not the big sprawling historical blockbuster or the tripped-out-crazy supernatural thriller. But it's still important stuff when it comes to writing the emotional tension of the romance thread. I can still apply these lessons to my own peculiar work in future, for that extra zing.

Which is good, because another thing I learned is that I'd rather saw my own head off with a breadknife than switch to writing category romance. I'm sorry to disappoint, but "The Italian Billionaire Surgeon's Secret Christmas Baby by Janine Ashbless" is just never going to happen.

No matter how much you beg.

TftD: We all live in a Capital I ...

This song haunted me throughout my childhood. It has to mean something, doesn't it?

Yes, I've been indulging in some nostalgia shopping.

And if you like your childhood surrealism to come with a dose of romance, there's this too:

TftD: Tangled...

... Bondage and female-dominance  for beginners?

Incidentally, Mr Ashbless and I both really liked this movie. Funny, character-driven romance, with a great supporting cast, likeable hero and heroine, and a hot villain. Totally recommended, if you haven't seen it yet.

See? I do like romance! And, following my last post,  this is one where the heroine breaks away from her mother-figure - who then stabs the hero and is killed by the heroine's animal familiar. Now that's what I call an interesting family dynamic!

Family Matters

Romantic

I've been reading a bit of romance recently ... Actually, one of the books I read was the first volume of The Sharing Knife series by Lois McMaster Bujold, which pretends it's a fantasy about slaying demonic baddies but is written and structured entirely as a romance. Anyway, I've discovered there's a recurring theme in romantic fiction that totally squicks me out. FAMILY.

Also romantic

Not Romantic

Now before I go any further, I am aware that this whole rant is going to say a lot more about me than about any of the fiction I might appear to be criticizing. I am prepared to accept that I am twisted WASP saddo with no emotional maturity, and that all you other romance fans are right and I'm wrong. But what the hell. It's my blog and I'll froth if I want to.

And what I can't bloody bear is the sort of romance where the hero and heroine have met and then he spends several chapters demonstrating what an awesome man he is, and how great a potential life-partner, by dint of cheerfully winning the approval of her family, which usually is huge and includes several creepily possessive, macho brothers and a bunch of giggly sisters. I CAN'T STAND IT. It makes my skin crawl.


Oh, I do get that in real life it is practical and agreeable for your husband to socialise happily with your Mom and Pop and your stupid irritating brother and sister. But we're talking fiction here, and in romance I want it to be Hero and Heroine vs the Rest of the World, and to hell what anyone else thinks. I want my hero to be blind to anything but how much he wants his lover. I want my heroine to need no one else but the man who completes her. They should be sticking two fingers up to convention, not kissing its ass!

I mean, like in My Big Fat Greek Wedding ... Her new squeeze spends his whole screen time submitting patiently to the impossible demands of her ridiculous tribe of relatives, because he loves her sooo much ... and I just thought, "Oh, for fuck's sake grow a pair."

And she should grow a pair too, frankly. A heroine who can't cut the apron strings and leave her overbearing mother, or who has a pathological need to tell her sister every intimate detail of her love-life like she's still bloody twelve years old, makes me spit.

In one nameless story I read recently, the hero is sitting in the kitchen, and he gets so turned on by thinking about the heroine that he gets this huge hard-on in front of his his mother and brother. And instead of going off and KILLING HIMSELF like any decent human being would do, he has this sort of, "Ho ho, they've seen it all before" attitude and I wanted to TEAR MY EYEBALLS OUT OF MY HEAD AND WASH THE SOCKETS OUT WITH VINEGAR. How is that erotic? HOW???

Family is not sexy. NOTHING emasculates a hero more effectively than having his blasted mother hove into the text. NOTHING. And you Americans - why does every male protagonist in any long running series eventually have his father (who is inevitably a high-ranking soldier/policeman/hero) stroll into town for a bit of belated bonding with his hitherto estranged offspring? You did it in House and Star Trek:TNG and Lost and B5 and well, just about everything. Well, stop it now! Independence is attractive. Sobbing "Dad, I only ever wanted your approval!" is completely nauseating.

Sorry, Apollo. You'd be quite Alpha without your dad standing there.

And you know you agree with me. Who is sexier, Luke Skywalker or Han Solo? One has a family who have to die before he finds the balls to leave home, while the other is a free-wheeling independent spirit and totally cool. With a big hairy gay buddy.

So here I put my demands on the table. This is what I want from my romance characters:

Hero: Ideally, his family past is a mysterious blank, almost as if he's been spawned, fully adult, from the Hero Vats. If not, his mother is dead. End of. It all happened many years ago, and he should never think about her and definitely not be looking for a mother-substitute in his lover. He can have a father, but must never have personal contact with the man. It's pretty acceptable if his father was some jerk who impregnated his mother and ran off, never to be seen again, his mother died and he was brought up by his Gran. Or in an orphanage. No female relatives of any other kind. He may have one (1) brother, provided that the brother is Evil.

Indiana Jones: stopped being cool when he acquired an annoying Dad.

 

Heroine: Orphans strongly preferred. She may have a family, but if so that family must be Bad. Either they abuse her, or they just despise her, and part of her growth process as her relationship with the Hero unfolds is that she finds she has a value and a strength they never suspected, but it is too late for them to say sorry and now she is free of them. Any Heroine who goes to her mother for advice about her lover must be taken out back and shot immediately. Any Heroine who walks away from her lover because of family obligations (mother is having a crisis and calls her away etc) should be shot, burned until crispy and then fed to stray cats.

There you go. Perfectly reasonable, I'm sure you'll agree.

Mighty viper

(Lord Blackadder, who had no influence on the character of Severin at all, at all. Not even a tiny tangental one right at the beginning. Well, maybe.)

Yay! Well, I couldn't make it in time for a Xmas present to myself, and then parties and redecorating and stuff interfered with my writing schedule,  but on Thursday night I finally finished the first draft of my erotic romance novella The King's Viper. I'm so relieved to have brought it to a Happy Ever After - it's been a long hard journey for me as well as for the characters. My romance is even more gruelling and dark than my erotica, as you know.

I'm now at the stage of filling in the gaps - A sentence clarifying the political background here and there; a paragraph expanding on the female protagonist's feelings at crucial points ... (This is romance, Ashbless! Emote, goddamnit!)

Of course, if you missed it in December, there's a sneeky preview snippet over here :-)

Love never dies - it just forgets things

So at the weekend my mother-in-law turns up with a bunch of flowers and one of her beautiful hand-made cards. "Happy Anniversary!" she says to me.

"Huh?" I say. "Is it my wedding anniversary? Oh yes ... October does ring a bell. Faintly."

I turn to Mr Ashbless. He didn't know it was our anniversary either. After some discussion, we go back to my mother-in-law.

"Um. We were wondering ... How long have we been married then?"

By now she's looking disgusted with both of us. "Seven years. You've been married seven years."

My wedding date is just not something I remember. Don't get me wrong - I remember  the date when me and the now Mr Ashbless got together for the first time: 7th May 1988. (Yes, that long.) It just took us so long to actually tie the knot that, well...

Anyway we put the flowers in a vase and five minutes later someone knocked it over - broken glass and water everywhere. Who says romance is dead, eh? Heh heh.
:-)

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The picture comes from this glorious website of compulsively awful book-covers. Who could resist straplines like She was that kind of girl ... it was that kind of party ... the combination was murder, hey?

In memory of Michel Strogoff

I want to share my earliest experience of erotic romance. Specifically the television programme that first jumped out at me and said: THIS IS ROMANCE! THIS IS SEXY! YOU ARE MY SLAVE FOREVER, ASHBLESS!  I don't expect it to ring any bells with most of you, because the programme in question was Michel Strogoff, a series dubbed into English from the French, and it aired in about 1978, at a guess.

I can make no claims to accuracy for the following description of the story, given that this is my memory as filtered through my 12-year-old perceptions and several decades of decaying braincells.

Okay: Michel Strogoff is a Cossack and the Tsar's top agent. He is huge and manly and omni-competent and just a tad irritating, and everyone thinks he is awesome. He has a beard. He is sent off on a long journey across Russia on the Tsar's business. On the way he falls in with a simpering blonde girly, whose name I do not remember. She is the Lurv Interest, but it takes till the end of the story for them to get off together.

Opposed to Michel is Ivan Ogereff, who used to be an officer in the Imperial Army but has now betrayed the Tsar because he is half-Tartar, and is now formenting some sort of Tartar invasion. The Tartars are all barbarians with big moustaches. Ivan looks like a mean version of Legolas and has floppy hair. He is Bad but has some code of honour. He has a girlfriend, Sangarre, who is simply the hottest thing in all the Russias: she has wild curly red hair and is Fiery. She likes to knife-fight. When all the Tartars tell her to shut up because she is Just a Woman, Ivan tells them to can it because he Respects Her Opinion. Ivan and Red are all over each other, in contrast to Michel's chaste affair.

I thought Ivan and Red were soooooo hot.

Michael and Ivan fight, and Ivan gets scarred across the face, thus rising by several million points up the Hot Scale. My twelve-year-old brain was going into meltdown by this point.

Michael gets captured by the Tartars, tied up and threatened, and then they blind him by holding a red-hot sword in front of his eyes. He is then released or escapes somehow, and Simpering Blonde leads him across the Russian wastes. At one point she undresses (very coyly) to bathe in a river while Michael sits on the bank, but that's okay because he can't see her.

Except he's not blind at all, ho ho. He's been lying, or maybe just got better.

Stuff happens. Michael fights and kills Ivan. Red goes crazy over his deathbed and runs to the fortress of Kiev where she smashes her fists against the closed gates, screaming in anguish. Probably Michael and Simpering Blonde live HEA, but I don't care by that point. I am devastated by the death of Ivan Ogereff.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I discovered Romance, with all its suffering, torture, racial tension and violence. The number of tropes from that TV series that have turned up in my own work since ... Honestly, my entire erotic romance career could be viewed as an attempt to rewrite a naff  seventies teatime drama with a catchy theme tune.
:-D

Tough Love

I want to riff off a post of Danielle's today - not just because he paid me a huge compliment, but because it really got me thinking. Danielle was talking about his fear of romance (fictional and otherwise) and one of the things he said - Danielle's blogging style always makes me feel like I've walked into a cloud of butterflies! - was:


i recognise the things what others think is romantic..but i m not always sure what people conect to the word...for me romantic is going and hunt a huge animal and lay it in front of my sweethearts door..there..look..i killed it just for you..its still warm!

And anyway, my personal reaction to that thing that epitomises romance for him is that it's something that I wouldn't find remotely romantic. (Not just because I'm a vegetarian!) I've never really got the gift-giving and receiving part of romance, which I know most people do get. I mean, I like gifts as much as the next person, but even a hugely expensive pressie like a diamond doesn't strike me as more romantic than a kiss. Hey, I'm a cheap date.

Nor am I impressed by carefully arranged surprise trysts in perfect locations with violinists hiding around the corner ready to spring out as he suddenly drops to his knees to propose. (Public marriage proposals on TV actually strike me as uber-manipulative and creepy.) The Big Gesture does not touch my heart.

Yet I do write erotic romance. And what defines that romance for me?

Pain.

It's a theme that runs through practically every erotic romance story I write: true love is characterised by a willingness to suffer and die for the beloved. Blame my Christian upbringing, I guess. If you're someone in one of my straight erotica stories, it might be a bit scary but you can be usually be guaranteed to have a fine old time. But, oh boy, you don't want to be a lead in my romantic fiction, because there you will be in for a whole world of pain.

My very first romantic story, White as any Milk: Black as any Silk features a wizard who falls for a hostile witch, and she puts him through hell:

Then the wave recedes at last, with a terrible hissing undertow that threatens to drag me into utter blackness. I am left broken in its wake. I can't see. My eyes are full of blood.

In Divine Torment Veraine gets captured, tied up, kicked in the nuts, bitten, threatened with castration and torture, left to die of thirst on a clifftop. Oh, and he loses his job ...
In Burning Bright Veraine is smashed over the head so hard it induces months of hallucinations, put through a horrible fever, starved, assaulted by ghosts, captured and tied up, raped (but only in the first draft before it got censored...) then made to fight for his life against a superhuman opponent. Myrna is enslaved, pierced, tattooed all over, nearly drowned, and lives in constant danger of being slaughtered out of hand.
In Wildwood Ash surrenders to his worst enemy and has his blood drained for a magical ritual.
In The House of Dust the broken-hearted Ishara has to open a gate into the Land of the Dead to retrieve her lover: she's there subjected to all sorts of rough sex and humiliation.
In Bear Skin Hazel is punished for betraying Arailt by being exiled, then having to run a gauntlet of sexual challenges to get him back.
In Bound in Skin Cassandra is left penniless in central Europe, has to beg for shelter and a job from a shit-scary nobleman, then gets shot in the stomach and finally transformed into a werewolf.
In Heart of Flame the two romantic leads get variously drowned, fatally wounded (yep), tied up and threatened, nearly eaten by ghouls, betrayed, beaten up and buried in an avalanche.

Life is tough for a romantic hero or heroine of mine. And what's more none of them gets the person they really want till the HEA right at the end of the book!

Oh yeah ... did I mention the sexual frustration theme too? Very romantic.
Okay, I might be a bit worried now.

Which is all to say that at the moment I'm currently writing an erotic romance novella. I'm having a wonderful time: it is safe to say that my characters are not. Starvation, exhaustion, a shipwreck, icy rivers, torn feet, attempted rape, imprisonment, torture, massive sexual self-denial and heartbreak - See how they suffer for my pleasure!

Now that's love.

Love Me Slow

I'm currently writing a short story for an open call, and at the start it gave me serious trouble. It's not the theme: the theme's great. It's not the plot: I know what the story ought to be. It's not the level of heat: that's been left for the writer to decide. It's the stipulation that there must be a strong romantic core to the story.

Now I'm not a romance virgin. Bound in Skin was a romance novella. Heart of Flame is a romance-adventure novel. But I've never written a romantic short story, and you know what? - I'm not sure what one should look like.

You see, for me romance is something that takes time to develop. It's about a relationship. Characters need to interact, to conflict with each other, to discover obstacles and ways to overcome them. My personal opinion is that if your eyes meet across a crowded room and you both go ZAP ... then that isn't love: that's lust, no matter how you dress it up with palpitating bosoms and histrionic emotions. Someone once said "love is lust frustrated" and I think there's a lot in that, cynical as it sounds*. Certainly in all my novels my two protagonists spend most of the book not being able to get their hands on each other - which is why it ends up being love and not just sex.

So I believe romance generally is suited to a long fictional form. It gives the characters time to discover each other, and the reader time to fall for the characters. Encapsulating a relationship within the confines of a short story - now that's going to take some serious craft. It's not impossible, of course, but I have had to wrestle with it.

What do you think? Do you know any great short love stories? Have you written in this form? Or am I just not romantic at heart?

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* though I'm certainly not denying that love can develop after sex. Ask Mr Ashbless.