Wednesday, September 14, 2005
I'm working my way backwards through Patricia Gaffney's Wycherly trilogy. Why? I have no clue. I bought all three a few months ago because I'd heard much about it on AAR and loved Gaffney's Crooked Hearts, but after I bought them, I put them in my very short TBR pile because I didn't feel up to reading something that appeared to be emotionally draining. The day before yesterday I picked up Forever & Ever on a whim and finished it in a day, starting To Have & To Hold immediately afterwards. I haven't started To Love & To Cherish yet, but I'll get to it soon.
I realized that I wasn't..."mature" enough to read them when I first purchased them, oddly enough. I can't really describe it, but it's turning out that for me, it seems like works by certain authors are just sitting there, waiting for me to catch up with them(much like I feel "ready" to read some Laura Kinsale). Another astonishing thing happened: as much as I enjoy Judith Ivory's books, it isn't until I read the last page that I realize that I liked the book. But as I was reading the last two books in the trilogy, I knew I would like the entire book even though I was only on page 50, or on chapter four. This has never happened to me before in my entire life of reading and it has stricken me with a sort of bemusement.
It also made me realize why I've grown bored with romances: there's too much emphasis on the male protagonist being the "hero". If you set him up as one thing and he grows from it over the course of the book, I'll accept his acts of unkindness towards the heroine more than setting him up as this huge selfish, hedonist and then having him save kittens or having qualms about the state of his conscience. Also, I've grown tired of this obsession with making all "heroes" dark,tortured,rakes. Connor from Forever & Ever was just a plain old honorable man. He had no "dark secret" or some lame family issue that caused him to never "trust another woman again!" He was just himself. Even though Sebastian from TH&TH had a horrible family, we didn't even find it out until the end of the book so it never turned into a pity party on behalf of his behavior.
They also restored my faith in myself. I've been running about like a chicken with my head cut off because of my age and what I want to write. You know what? Who cares that I'm only twenty-one and I want to write novels with a strong romantic thread in them? I'm sorry, but I don't write fantasy and I don't think I'll ever want to write YA novels,and I am not interested in writing literary fiction either. So I'm writing what I'm writing and that's it. If my books end up in the romance section or the fiction/literature section, I don't care anymore. If everyone is decades older than me at book signings and writing conferences, I don't care. I am an adult and shall be one and interacting with other adults for the remainder of my life, so why should I shya way from it because "people" assume that if you're of a certain age, it means you're too young to do certain things. Hell, if I can die for my country, I think I'm old enough to write romances/romantic fiction/whatever.
Writing wise, I'm moving and mixing things up a bit while waiting for my research books to arrive at my closest library branch. It's going quite well. I had a story idea and got excited, ready to drop the WIP like I did in the past, but then I stopped, rewound and started again. I was not going to allow myself to do that anymore. So I jotted down the ideas and left it at that. I'm also really, really intriuged by Anne Bronte more so than Emily or Charlotte. I'm drawing on her two novels as inspiration for my WIP.
i can be. anything.
14.9.05
