Erin Satie

I just finished Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy.  Not as entertaining as some other disease books that I’ve read, but rabies is fascinating and Rabid contains some pretty crazy anecdotes.

One of them is period appropriate and so crazy I had to share.  Namely, that in the mid-nineteenth century many people believed that sexual frustration caused canine rabies.  As Wasik explains:

“Dog owners confronted with the masculine fervor to mount during walks, or with the recurring frenzy of feminine heat, could be forgiven for later imagining that it was these unconsummated passions (and not the unseen nip from a stray in the streets) that caused their pets to be seized by canine madness.”

One doctor, Henry William Dewhurst, a man of “murky scientific standing” (which does make me suspect this particular delusion couldn’t have been too widespread), backed up his wackadoo theory in 1830 by observing that when sexual urges are “unable to be gratified, as was intended by the great Author of nature, pure madness breaks out.”

Which gets around to this basic truth, which most people recognize but bears repetition: the Victorians were as sex-obsessed as anyone else.  What we think of as Victorian prudery is a manifestation of that obsession, a symptom of it — not a separate beast at all.  You’ve got to have sex on the brain to put a skirt around a piano leg.

Anyway, Wasik goes on to describe an 1845 Italian screed that provides a nice anthropomorphic distillation of every single Victorian sexual hangup you can imagine.  Based on the assumption that rabies is a form of canine blueballs, “Monsignor Storti” suggested that:

“Each male dog would be brought to a central location [as Wasik clarifies elsewhere, "mandatory canine bordellos"] for his urges to be satisfied.  Immediately afterward, he would be neutered and then sold.  And then — presumably in order to keep these dogs from generating rabies eventually — all male dogs would then be destroyed after two years.”

Where are the female dogs?  Killed as puppies or relegated to these dog brothels?  And doesn’t this sound like a blurb for a YA dystopian novel?  Victorian newspapers must be full of plots for YA dystopian novels.

I don’t think anyone ever tried to execute this horrible idea.  Small mercies, right?

So my work in progress, The Duke Who Never Forgets, is set in Derbyshire.  I’ve been looking up some locally appropriate surnames – did you know you could do that?  There’s a website, here, that gathers lists of English surnames by county, often dating them back to their earliest appearance in records.  Very handy for a romance author striving for authenticity and local flavor.

There are a lot of fantastic names to choose from, some glorious and crunchy like Widgery and Kippax, some that have a perfect traditional feel that can’t just be invented, like Orme or Harrop.

And some names that are too fantastic and silly to be believed – like Topliss or Toogood, Hickinbotham or Luckcuck.  Luckcuck!  And let’s not forget the inevitable Longstaff, but have you ever met anyone named Lillycrapp before?  Or Purseglove?  Spendlove, Makepeace – there’s a sentence in there, I think.

What a pleasure this book was. I’d been aware of it for a while now, and I’ve read and enjoyed one of Ms. Long’s books in the past – I Kissed an Earl – but my book buying is usually a direct result of review reading, and the reviews made me hesitate to pick this one up. A lot of people didn’t seem to like the heroine, or didn’t enjoy how prickly her romance with the hero remained through much of the book.

Man, I wish I’d ignored those reviews earlier. Like No Other Lover was just my type of romance — and the writing! Ah, gorgeous.

I loved Cynthia. She’s hardened by experience, and mercenary out of necessity – she’s a few pounds away from absolute penury – but these qualities only make her depth of feeling, her fundamental goodness more remarkable, more precious.

Isn’t that the juice of historicals? One of the ingredients that gives them their special sauce? We’re reading and writing about an era when a woman’s future depended so greatly on her husband that the choice of him constituted the most important business decision she’d ever make? And that’s if she were lucky enough to make the choice, rather than have it made for her. So, no, Cynthia isn’t all sweetness and light. She’s not saintly. She’s exactly what she ought to be.

Not only does Like No Other Lover feature a complex, flawed heroine with a heart of gold, the hero – Miles – is an explorer and naturalist. I love brave, adventurous heroes. I love the Victorian age of exploration. And I loved Miles in particular, who sees the world around him with the detachment of a scientist, the relish of an expat, and the cynicism of a man who remembers being mocked for exactly the passions that have now made him famous.

The romance between Miles and Cynthia is beautifully done. Each has a fixed goal, and each is determined enough, driven enough, that those goals are not easily budged. Miles must marry the insipid Lady Georgina to secure funding for his next expedition to Brazil. He’s wildly attracted to Cynthia and soon recognizes her as a kindred spirit, but he can’t imagine choosing her – or any woman – over his life’s work. For her part, Cynthia must secure a wealthy husband within the next two weeks or she’ll be forced to enter service as a paid companion.

The two start out very much at odds. Miles thinks badly of Cynthia for her mercenary tendencies but he desires her intensely. He offers to help her reel in the other male guests at his house party in exchange for a kiss. Cynthia resents Miles’ contemptuous attitude, but she’s a practical girl. She has to be. So she accepts his offer.

And that’s the beginning. Honesty. Plain speaking. An amazing, unforgettable kiss. The romance is delicious. The more that Miles and Cynthia like one another, the more painful, the more bittersweet the read. They’re by turns hostile, understanding, admiring, even hurtful with one another. This is a romance that pulls in all the emotions. There are tremendously funny scenes – for all her gorgeous, gorgeous prose Julie Anne Long has a fantastic sense of humor – and very poignant ones.

This is a book that’s dripping with gorgeous description, rich with sensuality and desire, but at heart Miles and Cynthia’s romance is about getting to know one another. Appreciating one another. Peeling back layers of pretense, looking at the heart of another person, and admiring it.

Exactly what a romance should be. Highly recommended.

The blog will be quiet for the next few weeks as I settle in to my new home – I’ve moved out to the family farm in Kentucky, where my cell phone barely gets service and none of the roads are digitized.

Once I’ve got Internet again I’ll be updating as usual.

In the meanwhile, I am so excited to announce that my novel, Sweet Surrender, finaled in the historical category of the 2012 Marlene contest!  Check out the complete list of finalists here, and wish me luck in the final round, when Avon editor Esi Sogah will pick a winner.

Have you noticed how often, in books or television, an orphaned hero or heroine gets a last letter from a dead parent?  ”Dear Child,” it often begins, “if you are reading this, something bad has happened to me.  Here’s some advice you might find handy.”

It’s often hard to suspend disbelief about the arrival of such letters.  The parent writes it and arranges for the child to receive it at a far-off yet opportune moment, always exhibiting a prescient awareness of events years in the future while blind to the disaster right at their doorstep.  Yet I completely understand the impulse to orchestrate such a message; often it’s that fleeting, heartfelt connection to a dead loved one that motivates the hero/heroine to continue his/her journey.

A 2010 episode of This American Life just popped up in my podcast queue, Held Hostage.  I just finished listening to the first act, which ended on a rather grim note.  It described how people kidnapped in Colombia might find themselves held hostage for years, and so many people were held hostage at any given time that weekly radio shows sprang up so that family of the kidnapped could deliver messages over the airwaves, wishing their loved ones courage and strength in capitivity.

One of the stories was about a political prisoner who was held hostage for eleven years, with an interview from his teenaged daughter – a girl who’d never really known him.  Ultimately the Colombian government attempted a rescue, forcing the kidnappers to beat a hasty retreat.  So hasty, in fact, that they cut loose their excess baggage – their hostages – executing them all.  But they found a diary with the executed political prisoner that he’d kept over the eleven years of his capitivity, with messages to his family, drawings of what he thought his daughter might look like.

Heartbreaking, and for once real.  I’m flagging the story for myself and any other writers out there looking for a way to send plausible and emotionally wrenching letters to their characters from beyond the grave.

Today I want to talk about a blog post over at The Awl, Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing. It’s really nice to see someone take Romance seriously and write about it thoughtfully, but I disagreed with the author, Maria Bustillos, on almost every point she made.

So let’s talk about that.  I agreed with a lot of Bustillos’s initial points:

[R]omance is by far the most popular and lucrative genre in American publishing, with over $1.35 billion in revenues estimated in 2010….It would be crazy to fail to pay close attention when that many people are devoted to something.

True.  And yet, as Bustillos points out,

Romance literature is underground writing, almost never reviewed or discussed in the newspapers or literary rags, or at a dinner party. One is supposed to be embarrassed to have a taste for it.

This is also true, and I think it’s a shame.  Especially because, again in Bustillos’s words,

For all the scoffing from various quarters at the fairy-tale messages they contain, romances largely deal with practical, everyday matters; they’re more like field guides for resolving the real-life difficulties women face.  As those difficulties have changed over time, the romance novel has adjusted accordingly.

This is even true of historical romances.  These days, the heroines in a lot of historical romances are aristocratic ladies who are so involved in their charitable activities as to effectively be career women (A Secret Affair by Mary Balogh, Trial By Desire by Courtney Milan, and Wicked Intentions by Elizabeth Hoyt are all recent examples of this trend).  And then there are the historicals featuring women who must work to earn a living – like Anne Mallory’s Seven Secrets of Seduction, whose heroine works at a bookstore.

Bustillos does a great job talking about what romance is, why it’s important, the big ideas that it concerns itself with.  Her arguments about romances fall apart, in my opinion, when she starts comparing genre romance to literature.

People in the romance community complain all the time that romance is typecast.  What a shame to see an author who clearly has felt the sting of this prejudice turn it around on another genre which, let’s all be frank here, is struggling and deserves a little more understanding.  Yes, I mean literature.  Or maybe Literature.  With the capital L.

Bustillo defines literature as “‘serious’ fiction”.

“Serious” or literary fiction is supposed to be that way because it’s meant to be like Dostoevsky, leaving no stone unturned in the human psyche, shocking us, showing us things we’d never understood or even thought about ourselves before. There’s not much room for fun in books like those.

She includes Art Spiegelman’s Maus as an example of genre-bending apparently because Maus - a comic about the Holocaust – is just as “serious” and depressing as Dostoevsky.

Too many people already think that literature can’t be fun, and that’s a horrible misapprehension.  I’ve read a few books by Dostoevsky and I’ve read  Maus.  I love them both, but I’m horrified by the idea that literature is inherently melancholic or unhappy.  Or that self-discovery must be inherently melancholic or unhappy.  That’s just not true.  Two cases in point: Tom Jones is about as fun and cheerful a book as I’ve ever read, and ditto Tristram Shandy.

Having begun to dig herself a hole, Bustillos grabs her shovel and makes it even deeper:

But surely it’s not necessary to point out that the rarefied world of American literary fiction is brimming with dull, predictable and zero-ly engaging books.  Most “literary” novels, in fact, take not one single risk, offend no taboo, and leave every sacred cow grazing undisturbed in the placid fields of their conventionality.

She’s suggesting that books that take risks and break taboos must be riskier, edgier — better.  This, from an author trying to defend genre romance, with its predictable HEAs and often conventional morals.  That’s a false dichotomy.  Risky doesn’t mean engaging, any more than breaking taboos guarantees quality.

To sum up: literature cannot be defined by the fact that it’s depressing. That does a disservice to literature.  Literature cannot be defined by its ability to shock or break taboos.  That’s a poor litmus test, since it would exclude plenty of amazing books (is Pride and Prejudice shocking?) and include all sorts of awful ones (dunno what to name here…shocking but awful…shocking but awful….maybe it’ll come to me later).

So what is literature?  I’m going to point back to a post I wrote a while ago, Story vs. Ideas, where I try to answer the question.  Check it out for the full argument, because I’d like to see it catch on.  In short: the more literary a novel is, the more irrelevant the story becomes and the more important the ideas in it are.  Nothing to do with who’s smarter, better, anything like that.  It’s a fundamental difference in nature.  There are books with great stories, there are books with great ideas…and there’s a place where they meet in the middle.  Which is a great place to be, by the way.  The sliding scale has nothing to do with quality.

Bustillos seems proud to tell us that she has no idea what the “lit-fic novel du jour” is, in a tone of deep contempt.  What do we feel, romance readers, when people tell us with a sneer that they’ve never read a romance?  Haven’t we learned not to take pride in ignorance?

Right now I’m reading a “lit-fic novel du jour”: Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory.  It’s fun.  Really fun.  It’s full of wit and humor.  It breaks conventions and taboos.  It’s edgy.  It’s more or less realistic (so far, though Houellebecq often sneaks in an element of sci-fi by the end of his books).  It’s everything Bustillos thinks literature can’t be.  Good thing the people who gave Houellebecq the 2010 Prix Goncourt weren’t judging according to her rules.

Before The Map and the Territory, I read Kim Harrison’s new release, A Perfect Blood.  You know, the tenth book in her super, insanely awesome urban fantasy series, The Hollows?  I loved it too.  Love.  She’s built a series full of fantastic characters that feel so real, impossible conflicts, high stakes, friendship, romance, a series-spanning plotline that blows my mind.

Bustillos does a pretty good job when she stick to defending romance on its own merits.  But she also shows is how easy it is to make exactly the same mistakes that have kept so many romance readers insecure and ashamed about our reading habits.

Enough with the war.

We can have it all.  We can read it all.  Literature can be fun.  Genre books can be smart.  We do not need to hole up in trenches, literary snobs on one side and romance proletariat on the other, sniping at one another.

Do you listen to Radiolab?  Because, if not, you totally should.  It’s one of my favorite podcasts.  They did a great program called The Bad Show, all about why people do bad things.  A perpetually fascinating topic, especially to anyone who’s ever tried to invent a villain.

I suggest listening to the Radiolab show, which is fascinating and entertaining.

I’m interested in the segment about the Milgram experiment.  You’ve probably heard of it before, but in case you haven’t and don’t want to listen to the show, here’s a quick summary.

Milgram ran a test where a bunch of guys in lab coats instructed volunteers to deliver electric shocks to an actor masquerading as another volunteer.  The real volunteer asked the actor volunteer questions, and each time the actor responded incorrectly, the volunteer delivered a shock.  The electric shocks were not real, but the actors pretended that they were.  The real volunteer was told that the shocks increased in intensity with each wrong answer & so the actor screamed, pounded at the wall, and eventually begged for the volunteer not to deliver further shocks.  All along the way, lab coat guy instructed the volunteer to proceed with the experiment.  If the volunteer continued to deliver shocks, the actor volunteer would fall silent – seemingly dead.

Sad truth?  65% of all the real volunteers were willing to kill the fake actor volunteer.  Because they were told to.  In the 1960s.  In the US.

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So I’m digging into my new novel, tentatively titled The Duke Who Never Forgets.  I’ve always been a plotter, and I pride myself on building at least one cool ‘twist’ into every book I write.

With The Orphan Pearl, the twist comes when you find out exactly why the hero, Luke, is so convinced he’s on the lookout for an orphan girl when he ought to be on the track of the Orphan Pearl.  This was my take on the Big Misunderstanding.  My attempt to write a story where two smart, intelligent people are kept apart by one crucial piece of misinformation.

With Sweet Surrender, the twist comes when Adam is accused of murder.  He’d been making love with the heroine, Caro, when the crime was committed and he’s too honorable to name her as an alibi.  Caro has to choose between her reputation (which is everything to a Victorian debutante) and Adam’s life.  That leaves Caro face to face with the reality of love for the first time – caring about someone else’s welfare more than her own.

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I just finished reading Scandal by Carolyn Jewel and I’m still in a muddle about it.  It’s a historical romance that questions the desirability of rakes as heroes, which I appreciate.  I’m a modern woman, a proud feminist, but I still lust after these bad boy characters.  Why?  Should that trouble me?

In Scandal Carolyn Jewel presents us with a heroine, Sophie, who’s captured the attention of a reformed rake, Bannalt.  Sophie knew Bannalt at his worst, so she’s in no doubt about what kind of man he was.  He cheated on his wife and disdained the whole concept of fidelity.  All while Sophie suffered from the neglect of her own rakish husband, Tommy, who patterned his misbehavior on Bannalt.

By the time the book opens, Sophie and Bannalt are both widows.  Bannalt is in love with Sophie and he pursues her with marriage in mind.  Sophie turns him away because, as she explains, “I would rather die than marry the man my husband wished he could be.”

If Sophie were a friend of mine, I’d cheer her on.  I’d agree when she says that cheating bastards don’t change.  But Sophie isn’t a friend of mine.  She’s the heroine of a romance novel and the cheating jerk, Bannalt, really has reformed.

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