Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

I’m always interested when the heroine is a scientist, mathematician, engineer or what have you. But somehow, the hero always winds up being a *better* scientist, mathematician, engineer or what have you… Why not a heroine who’s a top astrophysicist who falls for a stormy artist type?  I grant you that class distinctions probably prevent her from falling for a policeman or soldier, but why not an opera singer or a chef?

Off topic but must be said: I FUCKIN’ LOVE SCRUBS!  And as much as I do love Dr. Cox, my 20 something heart generally does its little dance for Zach Braff’s fine ass.

I constantly see the “artist” job in the heroines, and I tend to be irritated by them.  As someone currently attempting to get a college degree in being an artist, the description of these woman who paint sunsets and wild horses just irritate me.  Can they do some real art please? Something worthy of my imagination.

How fantastic to find an abstract painter in a romance novel!  That it what i quest for!

I know its been done often enough, but my favorite carrers for both sexes in a novel lean toward the office job area.  I just love the thoughts of crisp clean suits and wild passionate love.

I’ve never seen a hero who was psychic, it’s always the woman. I’d love to see a romance where the woman is the police detective having to work with a male pyschic for a change. You also hardly ever see a woman fall for a blue collar guy. What about a woman boss falling in love with her male assistant? You also will never see a hero who is a plumber, exterminator, or works for the electric company. If he’s blue collar he’s always a fireman, cop, or construction worker but he owns the company.

I’ve seen both heros and heroines as writers quite a bit, with the men usually being successful and—of course—much desired by their female fans, while the women are usually struggling or generally more low key or less successful. 

Let’s see…unheard of careers.  Seems like if you are a character with an oddball job you are relegated to being a wacky sidekick.  (Though I think that a meat packer or butcher hero in a book could be rife with puns about sausages and whatnot.)

I’d love to see more techno-geeky girls AND guys.  Brains are hawt.

Great topic!  I have read some where the hero is an alleged felon, working to clear his name.  I don’t generally like those, but I have a healthy bias!  I also like when both work in office settings, both somewhat equal in high paid jobs.  I confess that I prefer when both are high paid and marriage means more money!  After all, its a fantasy, right?  When the hero starts giving up money, I think, “Hold on a second there buster!  There is a way you can have both!”

Anne, there’s SEP’s Nobody’s Baby But Mine, where Jane’s an astrophysicist (or just a physicist?) and he’s a football player, not a scientist.  Although he’s going to be a family doctor after he’s done with football, FWIW.

I love the warriors—soldiers, cops, just warriors (glomming JR Ward’s warriors at the moment!  Yum!).  But I also love Suz Brockmann’s Alyssa Locke—a warrior in her own right.

I’d have to disagree with Katie Ann, though—all the female writers I remember reading about are usually very successful romance authors, which I always find strangely self-referential.

Um, I guess I read too many historicals were they don’t “do” anything to really answer this question.  And Amanda Quick’s “hobby” heroines really bugged me.

I think it would be fun to see a romance novel where the hero is in the sort of job that, because of societal stereotypes, would make a lot of people (including maybe the heroine, at first) assume he’s gay.  So how about a hero who is a high-end hair stylist or fashion designer?  Ballet dancer? Florist?  I don’t remember ever reading a book where the romantic hero had any of those jobs.

And I wonder if someone could pull off a romantic lead (male or female) who works as something like a mortician or an entymoligist?  Something a lot of people would find vaguely creepy.

BTW, Elizabeth mentioned psychis.  Kay Hooper’s books are more like romantic supspense than straighforward romance, but she has a whole series with psychic leads, both male and female.  (I’ve thought some of those books were quite good, others not so much.)

They say write what you know, so I did.  Had a helluva time selling the Pink books because every marketing department scratched their heads and said, “No, we can’t sell a CPA - too boring.”  That’s why my editor rocks, because she thought it was just different enough to be interesting.

The heroine I’m writing now, and the hero, are petroleum engineers who put out well fires.

Barbara Colley writes a mystery series about an older woman who has a house cleaning service.  I’ve only read two of them, but I liked both, a lot.

I wish someone would write about a heroine who drives the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.  My God, the possibilities are endless.

I have to agree with Anne in the first comment. She pretty much gave my opinion so I won’t write it out again here.
Personally I am a chemist/educator and my love is a sometimes employed spiritual healer. If its true in real life why not in a good book?

Thanks, Sarah F., I’ll check that out. 

There is of course a problem with writing exotic occupations — I expect many romance writers have as vague an idea of the day-to-day life of a mathematician as I do of that of a romance writer, and getting that sort of thing wrong is intensely infuriating.

>>If its true in real life why not in a good book?<

<

Dare I say this? Because you know him and love him. I? Do not.

A hero who's a high end hair stylist? Uh-uh. It would take me too long to get past it. Much longer than the glancing-at-the-back-cover stage. It could be the best romance ever. Would I buy it? Nope. Not unless at least fifty people told me "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS!" But how do you get THOSE fifty people to read it?

Listen, I'll read a good CPA hero anyday, because I get that "Oooo, he's really gonna let loose in the bedroom" vibe. I'll read about a cop or an Irish pubowner, because I can picture a sexy, successful man in that role. But a shoe salesman? A waiter? A cover-band singer? Hey, I could go find one of those for myself right this minute. I don't need to read about it.

Hey, my husband is a distance education specialist. Nobody wants to read about that, and he'd be the first to tell you.

What would I like to see? Hmm. I do love the male psychics in Kay Hoooper's books. Tortured and hot as hell. More of that would be nice. Oh, how about one of those shipwreck treasure hunters? With a heart o' gold, matey. Holy shit, that would make a great

heroine!

Elizabeth - Nora Roberts has a male psychic in one of the Donavon Legacy stories.

Sarah. F - I totally agree with your about the Warriors; give me someone in the Military, Police Force, Fire Services…...oh my!

I’m not so hot on the Medical profession just because it triggers my icks when I think about that type of work!

1. Most common: Businessmen in general, usually upper echelon. CEOs, etc. Warriors. Soldiers in fantasy and sci-fi worlds. Artistic types: musicians, actors. Vampires and werewolves.

2.  I recall a convo on a list where someone tried to justify their hero, who was a pig farmer. Being from rural PA and knowing what a pig farm smells like, I expressed the opinion that no matter how sexy he was, a guy up to his butt in pig shit just wouldn’t work.  In general, anything that leaves a lingering stink is out. I lived witha guy who worked on a regular farm, and the smell of cowshit is just not romantic.

3. Cops. I have a major cop fetish.

A felon COULD work if he was misunderstood and truly repented, and was in jail for something that could be written off as a stupid mistake or trusting the wrong person, male or female. That’s hott. Bad guys getting redeemed is fun, and then you can have some lovely action scenes.

More normal folk. Teachers. Waiter aspiring to be an actor. If the ending must be all HEA, have them get their big break or an opportunity. Good people who get a break. In this economy, that would be a nice bit of cheering up. Kind of like what eighties movies did to make geeks like me feel better.

Jen Crusie’s heroine in Bet Me is an actuary.  Insurance agents make jokes about how boring actuaries are.  I told my DH, an insurance professional for over 30 years that the heroine was an actuary and he cracked up.

“How does the hero tell if she’s awake?”

Insurance humor.  Gotta love it.

As far as heroines in historicals with careers, it’s iffier.  It’s like making them orphans—sometimes you need to do it to speed the story along and avoid complications like the norm of the woman being under her parents’ control until she marries.

I’ve written pirate heroines, but my latest one in Captain Sinister’s Lady is a girly-girl who makes cosmetics and soap.  I wanted her to have an unexceptional career that’s reasonable for her time and place.

There was a great Harlequin in the 80s by Claire Harrison (terrific writer) with a very butch Russian ballet dancer hero called Casimir.  “One Last Dance” it was called, I think. 

I write for Harlequin and the only absolute veto on hero’s career that I’ve ever had was a Tax Inspector.  Nobody loves those guys, apparently.  And yes, I’ve done a sheikh, in my time.

Sophie

And I wonder if someone could pull off a romantic lead (male or female) who works as something like a mortician or an entymoligist?  Something a lot of people would find vaguely creepy.

It’s not entirely the same thing, but if a character like Gil Grissom from CSI could be done in fiction, it would be HOT. Smart *and* sexy. Yum. (Of course, that’s my own personal bias I’m tripping over…)

I’ve noticed british Noble of some sort for men and for some odd reason investment specialist for women… then again every book i pick up seems to be regency lately (i don’t mean to!)

i found the male commic strip writer and high artsy artest female an… interesting pairing, got boring with the guy worried that she’d think his work is stupid though.

truthfully, I really don’t mind the jobs, i’ve kinda come to ignore them.  however, i’d love to see the hero in a stereotypically gay profession and the female with any job really.

One of my favorite H/H pairings was in Kathy Love’s Getting What You Want: the heroine was a super-smart research scientist and the hero was a contractor with severe dyslexia.

There was a mortician hero in one of Pamela Morsi’s historicals, and Judith Ivory’s hero in The Proposition was a ratcatcher.

Oh, and not only do I watch SCRUBS, but I watch it with my son.  Who’s across the country in college.  We phone each other during commercials.

Stop! Stop! With each comment I read, another of the Muses whispers in my ear and I have enough stories started already!

Great topic…keep ‘em coming!

Diana Hunter

This is more chick-lit than romance (though the line between the two is foggy, obviously), but…with all these chick-lit heroines who are editors, I’d like to see publishing careers written more realistically—that is, as underpaid, hectic, neurotic, and hilarious. I’d also like to see some publishing heroines who *aren’t* superstar editors: Where are the production coordinators? The contract assistants? The subrights managers?

Personal bias up front: I’d love to see a librarian heroine who wasn’t mousy & virginal. We’re not all Marians.

I read a great Bombshell, The Orchid Hunter by Sandra K Moore, with the title coming from the heroine’s job. It had fascinating background on what they do and the legal grey areas involved.

My dad was an RCMP officer (retired now) so the cop fetish just confuses me. To me, cop = old bald friend of my father’s.

Generally speaking, I’d like to see occupations written about with a touch more realism. Yes, I know, this is escapist fiction, but (to pick a job at random) being a vet is not all cute li’l puppies; it’s also about sticking your arm up a cow’s butt.

As for stereotypically gay careers, c’mon: nobody thought of ice-skaters, especially after that cowboy vid? I remember an 80s movie The Cutting Edge with great fondness. Bad boy ex-hockey player forced to partner with snobby figure skater! Sparks fly & complications ensue! Somebody‘s got to rewrite that one as a romance. I’ll buy a gazillion copies.

‘I’d like to see publishing careers written more realistically—that is, as underpaid, hectic, neurotic, and hilarious.’

Bless you, AnnElise. That is the perfect description.  :gulp:

Elizabeth,
You said that “I’d love to see a romance where the woman is the police detective having to work with a male pyschic for a change.”  I have the book for you! 

Its title is Last Girl Dancing by Holly Lisle.  She’s a homicide detective that goes undercover and the hero is a psychic that runs a dojo.  I really enjoyed it.  :)

I have other comments to make about this, but I must return to actually working.

This could just be my Project Runway obsession talking, but I would also like to see a fashion designer hero. Gay or straight.

A politician heroine could be interesting too.

Claire: I’m with you on the artist heroines. The heroine in Beauty by Susan Wilson is the only remotely realistic painter heroine I’ve ever read. The others are so bogged down in stereotypes of how people think painters act that it drives me nuts.

I’ve seen a number of heroines who own small businesses, mostly having to do with food or gardening.

Personally, I think any profession except cop or detective is pretty useless, since the characters spend most of their time leaving work early while some hapless assistant with no life of their own picks up the slack. Sort of like characters with kids who are seen once at the beginning of the book, then dropped off at the good hearted neighbor’s until the poor tyke is either kidnapped or trotted out for the wedding at the end.

Danielle said, “My dad was an RCMP officer (retired now) so the cop fetish just confuses me. To me, cop = old bald friend of my father’s.”

Hahahahahaha! So true! I was raised by an FBI agent, and so all these “sexy FBI agent” characters just make me go, “Huh?” I knew and adored many a Bureau agent (hint to authors: agents and their families refer to it as the Bureau, not the FBI), but they came over and smoked smelly cigars and played poker, you know?

I admit to having trouble with cop heroes/heroines because of what I know about the divorce and domestic abuse statistics amongst police officers.

And I have trouble with doctor heroes and heroines because of what I know about the divorce, infidelity and drug abuse statistics amongst health professionals.

A little knowledge can suck for your suspension of disbelief.

That said, I’ve just sold a romance with a doctor hero—albeit an historical—and I’m currently writing a cop romance. So I guess hope springs eternal even in the eternally cynical.

SB Sarah - it was D.B. Sweeney in The Cutting Edge. And, yes, sigh, a great movie!

I’m with those who have an aversion to professions that produce a distinct, residual stink. Pig farmer wouldn’t work for me. Or roofer (I hate the smell of hot tar). Or septic tank maintenance man. I can’t imagine hot romance with anyone who needs a total hose-down before I could get within ten feet of him.

I admit being a sucker for the warrior professions - soldiers, cops, PIs, firemen, etc. The ones that promote men using their specifically manly-manness. Testosterone heavy stuff. I think that’s the cavewoman in me fighting to break free.

I’ve never been one for the business tychoons. What kills me, though, is how stereotypes about certain professions color the entire view of the person. My hubby is a CPA, and he couldn’t be farther from the balding, pocket protector sporting, black socks and shorts wearing geek you might imagine. And I have a feeling there are a heck of a lot more non-geeky CPAs out there than there are totally ripped, studly super-hero like Navy SEALs.

Even so, give me a SEAL any day. I’ve got the CPA at home.

Selah March said, “I admit to having trouble with cop heroes/heroines because of what I know about the divorce and domestic abuse statistics amongst police officers.”

That’s my problem with military heroes. Domestic abuse stats are high, and there’s a notorious code of silence about it. (The only Navy SEAL I’ve ever known personally was an abusive jerk married to one of my cousins. I realize he’s not representative of the group as a whole, but I still can’t enjoy romances with SEALs as heroes.)

Also, military/cop/“warrior” heroes tend to be very alpha-male, and though I know many readers find this appealing, nothing makes me close a book more quickly. I want confident/competent, not arrogant.

Why not a heroine who’s a top astrophysicist who falls for a stormy artist type?

Because NY won’t buy them. So most people who actually want to get published don’t bother writing these kinds of books (or they write one, get hammered, then never write another one like it).

NY wants ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA heroes. They want the hero to make the heroine’s life better (both of those are quotes from Avon rejections). And they really won’t look at anything else unless NR or SEP writes it. Or that’s the impression I’m under after reading my own rejections and seeing those of my friends and fellow writers. Look at HQ’s line descriptions. No beta heroes need apply.

I have a MS with an ALPHA heroine who rocks the world of the hero (who’s a completely capable guy, just sort of a beta when it comes to his love life) and I got told about 50 times that while they just loved her (she’s so unusual!) he was too much of a wimp. Grrrrrrrrrrrr. That was the fricken point!!!

D.B. Sweeney - that’s right! He’s like the poor-man’s John Cusack. My bad!

No, he isn’t. He’s cute, but no. No.

Here’s help: The Which John Cusack Are You? Quiz.

I have trouble getting excited about heroes who are professional athletes.  I am sure many of them are great guys and devoted family men, but I tend to think of them as pumped up, betitted, man-whores.  I can sum it up in one word….Groupies. Yikes!

There was a higher rate of unusual professions in romances of yesteryear, especially in category romances.

Such as - heroes: clown, ice cream seller, puzzle compiler, zoo keeper, pro marathon runner, copywriter [specialising in greeting cards], boxer ... *thinking* ... oh, yes, tax inspector!! [he was stuck with a typical free spirit during one stormy night during a stopover - that was a Loveswept, IIRC], pro drag driver, ballet dancer, recordist, TV cameraman, fire jumper, stuntman, harpist ... *thinking* ... oh! believe it or not, garbage man [he wasn’t even working as an undercover cop - he was severely dyslexic and had low self-esteem; he meets and falls in love with uni professor heroine during one of his routes every week; it’s a nice romance, IIRC]. Loads more. 

Seeing that the list is quite long, I shan’t bother listing heroines’ here. :D It’s a shame that it’s a lot more restrictive these days. Mind you, back then, there were loads of heroes as businessmen or corporate raiders, which can get a bit boring.

OMFG!!!  Sophie Weston was here.  When I was a baby romance reader, I remember reading the sex scene of one of her Mills & Boon.  I was in high school—like, actually present at school when I read it—and it went on for 20 pages, and it was sooo hott!  And I was so embarrassed!  I loved her books then.  Lovedlovedloved them!  How cool is that?!

Hey Sarah, apparently the Lady Heather and Grissom thing is not over yet.  I read a recent interview where they said there would be further exploration…

And more importantly, can a boring career yield a firecracker of a romance?

Why not?  Jo Beverly is taking a poll on the name “Darien” over at the AAR Potpourri Board right now, and I basically feel the same way about her question as I do about this one—in the hands of a talented writer who imagines his/her characters as fully formed individuals, names, career choices, wardrobe, quirks, etc. are all mere elements of a character.  And what the author chooses to do with those elements will determine my ultimate opinion of their value.  Where I have problems is in those books where it seems like the author views these elements as interesting in and of themselves and allows them to stand in as a proxy for character or relationship development (i.e. cop and suspected killer—just because there’s built in tension or drama there does not mean a whole Romance will emerge from and free-form around such tension).

Also, a career is a little different from a job, at least in my mind.  I associate careers with some conscious vocational interest that blossoms into a consistent direction (even if it’s not forever).  Some people, of course, can turn jobs into careers and vice versa, but I think with any career there has to be enough of interest to the people involved in it to make a compelling portrait of it in fiction (including Romance).  And the same goes, really, for jobs.  Think of Charlaine Harris’s Shakespeare series— Lily Bard cleans houses for a living, hardly a glamorous occupation, but one Harris uses in fascinating ways, IMO.  Where it gets troublesome for me—again—is where a certain job or career becomes synonymous with certain qualities (i.e. dog walker/trainer = bubbly, quirky heroine; homicide detective = burly, alpha hero with a surplus of chest hair and a big cock—I mean gun).  Oh, and I hate it when ambitious women need to be “loosened up” by the big bad alpha carpenter, or the big bad alpha cop hero needs to be “softened up” by the oh so nurturing nurse next door. 

As for what I’d like to see more of, since I primarily read historicals, I’d like to see more careers there, actually—more books written about people who work, but not in a way that they need to be pulled from the gutter and transformed into productive wanna-bes to the ton.  The way some historical Romance is written, you’d think that everyone outside the ton is a mere half-step away from plunging right into the nearest open sewer, or is just on their way out of one.

In terms of contemporary Romance, fewer cops, doctors, and bland corporate execs, please.  I’ve never felt that contemps were any less formulaic than historicals, and more than anything, I’d just like to see more books like, for example, Laura Leone’s Fallen From Grace or most anything by Jennifer Crusie.  More women in the sciences, for example, who aren’t mousy geniuses or pseudo mad scientists bent on destroying the world or concocting a DNA cocktail with some hunky jock.  More normal and less paranormal, as well.

I´d like to see a scientist heroine who is not mousy, shy, quiet, ponytail and white labcoat wearing. I´m all that, the walking proof of the geek stereotype; but my female friends from college who also are chemical engineers actually belong to the Fashion Club. Hell, they might be chick-lit heroines for what I know.
Hey, what about a chick-lit featuring a female engineer? That would be a change!

Trudi

It’s me again…

I just remembered reading on old series of books by LaNora about ballet dancers.  I seem to recall that one of the heros was a ballet dancer and very yummy. 

You know a profession that you never see in romance?  Men in a customer service role, such as a phone bank, or a normal guy in a risk mitigation role, or a mortgage consultant.  You also don’t see many men that are teachers (outside of college professors) or training consultants. 

We also rarely see the anxiety that a person in a new relationship feels when someone goes away for a three day business trip that they CAN’T avoid.  The h/h somehow ends up going with them, or they don’t go, and we never get to see those anxiety-ridden moments where the girl is staring at the phone willing it to ring because she really hopes that this business trip won’t cool off the possible good thing she’s discovered.

Enough rambling from me.  :)

I came up with a story idea a few months ago about a geek girl who falls in love with a sweet-faced, shaggy-haired boy whose greatest claim to fame is his hugely popular web comic. I called it Hipsters in Love.

Yeah, personal fantasy fulfillment much?

I agree that I’d love to read more romances that feature heroes in non-traditional, non-manly-man occupations. Dude, professional dancers are HAWT. And I could totally dig a femmeboy androgynous hairdresser/interior designer for a hero, but I like femmeboy androgynous types, period. The only sticking point for me would be that I am terrible at girly-girl crap, and a hairdresser/interior designer must, by necessity, be very, very interested in things I don’t give a flying fuck about.

A tattoo artist for a hero would be interesting. I very, very briefly dated a tattoo artist, and he turned out to be an ass, but ohmigodsohot. He had a tattoo-in-progress on his back of this huge, elaborate Chinese dragon, and whoa. But then, I like a little ink and edginess on my men.

I’ve noticed that there are very few romances about grad students. There could be some interesting possibilities for conflict, especially if one of the students is involved with Freaky Research. (I mean, seriously, a lot of the gruntwork for all the freaky-deaky experiments is done by research assistants at places like CalTech and MIT.) But again, this is assuming that one finds geeks sexy. Y’all know how I feel about the state of geek portrayal in romance, I’m sure.

Oh, and I second everything Robin said. But I always do.

As far as felons go…what about Faking It by Jennifer Cruise? He’s a theif, which isn’t exactly felonious, but it is dangerous.

I understand why the pubs want alphas, but there are certainly enough jobs around that they don’t all have to be CEO/cop/dr. guys. What about a mediator? You get the power/leader thing, but the sensitivity to be able to communicate without the heroine teaching him. Or a male RN instead of a dr. because he got into medicine to help people hands-on. He could get with a female drug rep or hospital administrator.

What about the creative end of business, like art directors or filmmakers (indie, please)? Chefs? Photojournalist and foreign/war correspondant or translator? A man who makes beautiful custom furniture and an interior designer? The strong craftsman with his powerful, deft hands might go over better than the moody painter of lighthouses.

I’m with Candy on the grad student action. Geeks are so sexy. Think of all the time in the lab late at night and the awkward sexual tension… I’d like the heroes to be smarter and not so powerful. The heroines should be less naieve and dreamy.

As I was thinking about this, a lot of the pairings I came up with seem more suited to erotica than traditional romance. Probably something to do with the power balance… Man masseuse and executive woman. Artist and model.

Suddenly thinking of Sam, the pickle salesman, from a delightful little movie called “Crossing Delancey.”

I loved him. I want more pickle salesmen in romances. Maybe a little more ethnicity, in general.

There did seem to be more category romances from the 80s/early 90s where the h/h had different jobs. Loveswept were great at this. To add a few more to Maili’s list: professional diver, anthropologist, photojournalist, politician, sculptor, ice climber, botanist, art restorer. Even a female carpenter, as I recall. What happened?

A few other careers to throw into the mix: poet, museum curator, adventure travel guide, comic (funny is sexy), environmental technician, working for a non-profit organisation, running a music store and gig coordinator.

I’m with everyone bemoaning the lack of females in tech-type office jobs too. Women usually seem to have creative/customer-facing roles. Maybe it’s partly because the work in these sort of jobs is easier for people to get their heads ‘round?

And sorry, but I’m absolutely fed up with military/secret agent/spy/warrior heroes. These days, I’ll read the back of a book and think, “Oh, another navy SEAL. And look, he has half a dozen equally sexy team-mates. In a bachelor auction. Yawn.” Selah & annElise pointed out some of the other pitfalls.

Why on earth is an alpha hero the only kind that can make the heroine’s life better? And why have so many careers become so identified with specific personality traits that people feel they can’t get past the stereotype to the author’s own ability to create a character?

BTW I reckon Grissom got into the BDSM scene during his mis-spent youth and he’s been running from it ever since.

you guys all stole my ideas.

but i’d just like to put my two cents in for Nora Roberts, because no matter what career her characters have, you can always tell that she researched it in a major way. one of my favorites is Born in Fire, because glass-making is SO cool! (hehe no pun intended). from arson inspectors to photographers, they always seem so real and believable. yup.

The most cliche in my opinion would have to be the hero being an ex vetran. Or is in the Military in some form or fashion.
You have to admit, nothing beats a man in uniform ^_^

Currently reading: Hazard - Jo Beverley

I’m with everyone bemoaning the lack of females in tech-type office jobs too. Women usually seem to have creative/customer-facing roles. Maybe it’s partly because the work in these sort of jobs is easier for people to get their heads ‘round?

Or because a) those jobs are more “left brain” = female, and b) they are easier to back out of when the heroine—satiated with her 50th big dick induced orgasm of the day—realizes she’s IN LOVE and can’t wait to ditch her job as a jingle writer for life as the wife of a corporate CEO cum Navy Seal and birth a whole lot of babies as she stares at her antique platinum wedding ring set and her spends her days shoe and bootie shopping?

Speaking of music stores, I remember that the heroine of Tom and Sharon Curtis’s The Golden Touch owned a music store.  The heroine of LaVyrle Spencer’s Spring Fancy was a physical therapist, but instead of it being one of those “I am woman see me nurture” kind of things, it was “I am jock and I like physical work (and I like to see people get better).” 

You know, I totally understand the way that the “superwoman” thing has created a tremendous bind for women, many of whom would love to stay home but financially can’t, most of whom end up doing both the out of home working and the in home working, married or single.  And I realize that perhaps part of the fact that career roles are seeming more constrained might have to do with a certain backlash against the increased roles women have in the various professional spheres, but can’t we still have reactionary Romance that’s interesting and creative in terms of career/job choices?  I love a good comfort read (sans subversion), but definitely not a boring one.

As for the military heroes, while many readers might find those books patriotic, during a time of war, it’s too serious a subject for me to find easy escape or romantic thrill in those books.

Or is right brain supposed to be the girly one—I can never get that straight (probably because I’m mentally handicapped by being blonde AND left-handed).

...and female, Robin. Do not underestimate the damage done to your grey matter by virtue of your lack of a Y chromosome.

Oh, yeah; I forgot.  See?  I can’t keep very many things in my tiny little brain at once.

Maili and EvilAuntiePeril make interesting points about how jobs seem to have been a lot more varied back in Ye Olde Days of category romance.

The Spencer book I mentioned in my last post was the first Harlequin Temptation (pub. 1984), and the back cover contains the following bold statement:  “The new, compelling stories of passionate romance for today’s woman.”  And in that case, “today’s woman” was an unapologetic jock who cheated on her fiance—a computer engineer—with the hero—a body shop owner—and gave absolutely no hint of giving up her career.

It’s interesting, at least to me, to think about how this line was launched during the Regan years, and how people have commented on the interesting combination of conservative (i.e. rapist heroes) and progressive (i.e. heroines with actual careers who cheat on their fiances) elements in 80s Romance.  I’d like to say that I think the sex is more liberated in current Romance, but having just recently read Christine Monson’s Rangoon, I can’t. Maybe today’s more progressive Romance elements can be found in the overt marketing of Romantica (even though I often find these books just as conservative as straight Romance) and straight erotica for women, and in some of the paranormal directions.

I agree with those who ix-nayed on the avy-SEALS-nay.  Unless he was somehow not an alpha male dickhead.  We forget that most military operations require teamwork, which means most soldiers are followers, not leaders.

Give me a guy who doesn’t fit any of the Greek letters, but is just an interesting human being.  Is that so hard?

P.S.: I saw a really hot tree surgeon today.

These are all such interesting points! I third (fourth?) the grad student suggestion. I find competence and focus and enthusiasm wildly sexy no matter what they’re directed at. Does that make sense?

I’ve also been rereading a lot of Dick Francis novels lately. I like his heroes—they are the very opposite of alpha, generally fairly introverted and laid-back, but really, really good at whatever it is they do: jockey, antique dealer, hostage negotiator, photographer… It really works for me, but of course they’re all written in first-person singular from the hero’s POV, and the romance (if any) is fairly secondary. But still.

[...]I like his heroes—they are the very opposite of alpha, generally fairly introverted and laid-back, but really, really good at whatever it is they do: jockey, antique dealer, hostage negotiator, photographer…

I have to admit that I yearn for that type in American romantic fiction, but it’s so damn hard to find any. I’m f.ed either way because British romantic fiction doesn’t have enough ‘escapism’ for me even though it generally has the type of heroes I like, but American romantic fiction doesn’t generally have the type of heroes I like, even though it provides wonderful escapism.

I do find it interesting that for some rom readers, it seems important for heroes to be Alpha. It doesn’t matter what he does for a living, just as long as he’s *Alpha*, even if it goes against his background, e.g. British-set historical romances.

I also generally avoid romances that feature heroines as TV presenters - I can’t stand them in real life and I don’t see why I should stand them in fiction. Unfair, but there you go. To come to think of it, I avoid heroines as newspaper journalists as well. There seems to be an invisible law in romance genre that these journalist heroines have to be TSTL. Hang on, has there ever been heroes as journalists lately? I can’t think of any. Weird.

I love a good beta hero. Or even better. . . hmm, what’s the term for the quirky loner type? Omega? But the key for me, if you’re going to sell a beta hero, he can’t have an uber-beta job, like being a florist or a customer care specialist. An ALPHA hero in one of those jobs could be downright hilarious and interesting. Why are the Russian skaters/dancers sexy? Because you can tell, at a glance, that these men are alpha, or are doing a damn good job of pretending.

I’m not into the ultra-alpha hero. I don’t like him. But please, please, please don’t even give a hint that a man might be a pussy. Sensitive? Fine. But he has got to, without a doubt, be 100% dependable in a terrible situation. A man more sensitive than my inner, secret, squishy self? Huh-uh. Sorry. Call me regressive.

Grad students? No, no, no, no… Bad idea.  God. 

Well, maybe my problem is this: it’s not different professions I want, so much as *depth* in the profession.  The top executive who seems to have endless time to chase the heroine around the world bothers me (mostly) because he’s not really an executive — he’s been stamped “executive” as if it were “blond” or “blue-eyed”, something that’s just a description, not something that you spend most of your time and mental energy doing.

A working scientist probably spends a lot of his off hours thinking more or less intensely about the stuff going on at the lab.  And not blandly (“the experiments were going badly”) but in detail (“keeping the glassware clean enough for DNA work was a nightmare”). More broadly, he’s going to think like a scientist (of the sort he is) — a mathematician will look at difficulties in terms of problems that can be solved by pure thought; following the solutions becomes routine.

So, a grad student hero(ine) should *be* a grad student — and that is usually, most of the time, incredibly difficult and demoralizing (look at http://www.phdcomic.com/ for a humorous view of it).  And while successfully completing a thesis would be one nice resolution, it doesn’t lend itself to tidy climactic breakthroughs.

Concretely, the story of Jocelyn Bell discovering the first pulsar sounds exciting, until you add up the number of miles (sic) of chart-recorder paper she had to examine.

Um.  Or maybe the grad-student suggestion hit a little too close to home.

I read a book a long time ago in which the male was a construction worker but didn’t own the company.  I think he was slumming because he was burned out on being CEO of some billion dollar corporation or something.

Seriously now, I’d love to see a female engineer as a heroine, being one myself.  Maybe paired with a male in sales or marketing, where it’s not a complete alpha profession, and you can get a lot of sciency/non-sciency interaction going.

The cliched professions have been covered. I don’t think we’re going to see a whole lot that breaks the mold at least for first books, but I think established authors get to play more.

Diana Norman always gives her heroines jobs in her historicals. And not just your average run of the mill job either. She’s well worth checking out for the historical addicts, although the path of true love is always pretty damn rocky.

Also, while Minette Walters isn’t really a romance author, her books tend to contain romances in them. ‘The Scolds Bridle’ pairs a left-brain abstract artist husband with a right-brain logical doctor, and they are pretty damn hot together. Even if at the start you’re led to hate him with a very great passion, because Walters is a mean and manipulative wench.

Or because a) those jobs are more “left brain” = female, and b) they are easier to back out of…

Just to expand a bit on my comment (nice bit about the booties, btw). There’s a strong tendancy these days to believe that science and technology are fields for experts: people with years of study and experience behind them. By contrast, creative professions are supposedly more instinctive, involving people just nurturing their own natural talents.

Now I’m pretty confident that a lot of people in “creative” jobs would cheerfully beat me over the head with an aesthetically pleasing, beautifully crafted and yet substantial objet d’art if I suggested they didn’t require some degree of professional expertise to reach their level of ability. And some engineers I know would give their right spectrum analyser to be able to design elegant solutions as instinctively as the genius in the corner. So this is a pretty artificial divide.

As Robin pointed out, it’s a divide that contributes to the gendering of careers. But I think it also connects to the way that we see science/technology as too “complicated” for laymen to understand and therefore less interesting. Any unqualified hobbyists in this area tend to be classified as socially-challenged geeks who only rarely contribute anything worthwhile to the body of knowledge.

Various people in this thread have pointed out that the portrayal of artists’ work in novels is usually inaccurate. But most of us have dabbled in art, and amateur and professional are perceived as points on a range of abilities. This gives anyone writing about the field a way of relating to the subject. They can imagine that if they were an artist, they’d paint pictures of horses, or people, or dead sheep in formaldehyde. Everyone’s allowed an opinion when it comes to art.

By contrast, someone with school-level science or math(s) isn’t seen in the same way. The gap between amateur and professional in the scientific/technical world is wide. The impression a lot of people have is that working in such an area involves dealing with complex concepts and absolutes of right and wrong which demand a certain level of expertise and consequent authority.

The business of authority feeds into the masculinization of these roles, and probably explains why I have very occasionally been advised that my job might a) cause my ovaries to shrivel up and fall out, or b) make me unattractive to men (presumably due to the growth of excessive facial hair and appreciation of fart jokes). It’s either that or the weird effects of electro-magnetic rays from the lab on female hormones.

But the divide between technical expert and layman affects more than gender stereotypes. It links up with the way work in technical fields is frequently so specialised that people find it rather scary and unapproachable. But it is possible to make it interesting with the right approach and decent research. This helps people feel they can get a handle on what someone does and how it fits into their own world.

At the moment, however, careers are becoming shorthand for personality traits and wallpaper rather than avenues of exploration. I suspect this has a lot to do with what some in the industry think is an acceptable level of engagement and thought on the part of the average reader, which is a shame.

expand a bit?? I lied.

I just remembered one of my favorites.  I guess I did not think of it right away because it is not a typical romance novel, but the hero in “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffeneger is a librarian.  I think that is pretty hot.  Of course I am currently working on my Master of Library Science so I may not be an impartial judge.  Henry DeTamble is an interesting character.  He is a beta at heart and would love nothing more that to have a quiet life with his family, his books, and music, but his life is so screwed up by his spontaneous time traveling that he has to do some pretty badass stuff just to survive.  One of my all-time favorite tortured heroes.

You know, thinking of books that are already published where the hero or heroine has a career that’s a little off-beat, I’m surprised no one has mentined Maggie Osborne’s western historical romances. 

One of the things I like about her books is that the heroines are almost always unconventional in some way for the time in which the books are set. 

She’s had heroines who are gold miners and trail scouts; actresses (a not-at-all respectable profession in the 1800s), store clerks, a hotel owner. 

I can think of one book that opens with the female lead getting released from prison and another where one of the female leads (she sometimes intertwines more than one romance in a story) is in a wheelchair because she had to have a leg amputated after a carriage accident. In another, the book opens with the formerly-respectable, middle-class, unmarried heroine pregnant with the baby of someone other than the man who eventually becomes the hero.

Her books are on my must-buy list.

So this is a pretty artificial divide.

Definitely.  Goedel, Escher, Bach anyone?  (plus you’ll be happy to know, EAP, that I’ve allowed by copy of Nation and Narration to return from exile for a paper on terrorism I’m doing)

At the moment, however, careers are becoming shorthand for personality traits and wallpaper rather than avenues of exploration. I suspect this has a lot to do with what some in the industry think is an acceptable level of engagement and thought on the part of the average reader, which is a shame.

What could be more of a shame is that, by and large, those folks may have been right—at least as far as sales figures go.  On AAR recently, Karen Templeton commented that sheihk Romances sell really well.  WTF?  (another discussion on orientalism, anyone??).  And I wonder:  are all these people who love love love sheihk Romances as open minded about the actual cultures/reliongs/political issues?  Is this the ‘make love not war in the Middle East’ crowd, or is it simply the exoticism? 

As more exacting Romance readers have emerged on the Internet, I’ve noticed more comments like “you’re overthinking that” or “this is just supposed to be entertainment, not literature” or “Romance good/literary fiction pretentious, depressing, and bad”—it’s almost like a weird anti-intellectualism in the burbs of Romancelandia (another pretentious recommendation: Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life).  It has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with intelligence of course, but with expectation, and I wonder—with frustrated longing and clenched fists—if what we might see as low expectations on the part of the industry have gone largely unchallenged by sales figures AND reader response.  That’s one of the reasons I’m so in support of online communities like this one—because I know there are plenty of Romance readers who have different expectations and who haven’t necessarily spoken out, and who want to have more books that aspire to different directions and interests.

Plus, I’ve heard that women have more neural connections between brain hemispheres, so we’re not only better at multi-tasking, but also at handling complex information, even in our escapist literature (because “pure” entertainment?  It says stuff, too, even, and perhaps especially, when we’re not so focused on paying attention).

I’ve noticed that there are very few romances about grad students.

Maybe b/c we’re exhausted, cranky, emotionally unavailable, poor, drunk, and miserable?

Okay, it’s not really *that* bad, but grad student life is so unromantic that, as much as the idea of grad student romance appeals to me, I’m afraid I’d just get annoyed if the novel made the whole experience out to seem really romantic/fun/exciting.

So I agree with Anne. However, I know of at least one great grad student chick lit romance—Megan Crane’s English as a Second Language, which is pretty much exactly the life of a grad student in English, as far as I’m concerned. :)

They’re not exactly romance novels—more romantic mysteries—but Donna Andrews’s hilarious Murder With Peacocks and its sequels feature a heroine who is a creative blacksmith and a hero who is a theater professor/sometime syndicated television show actor. And when the heroine first meets the hero, he’s working in his mother’s bridal shop for the summer, and everyone thinks he’s gay.

Re: grad student romances: I have more close friends with assorted post-graduate degrees than I ever thought I would. As a consequence, I got to witness a lot of the cranky, snarly, unromantic aspects of it. In between studying for their comps, calibrating lasers, tearing their hair out because of wonky data sets, bombarding nitrogen compounds with high-energy electromagnetic waves, fixing incredibly complex equipment with spit and duct tape because of budget cuts, designing their own software using C++ and a prayer because they couldn’t find something that would fit their needs on the market, etc. etc. etc., they still found time to have pretty damn interesting love lives AND run triathlons. (OK, only one of my friends with a PhD ran triathlons on top of everything else. Her idea of what constitutes “fun” is sometimes downright perverse.) The thing is, insane schedule aside, grad students tend to be dedicated and smart, and many seem to have developed a pretty wicked sense of humor (a survival tactic, no doubt—it’s either laugh or collapse in a quivering heap and sob, yes?), all of which I find very, very sexy.

I therefore strenuously defend my idea that grad students in a romance novel would be sexy. SEXY, YOU HEAR ME?

EAP, you make several excellent points about the divide between artsy/feminine and technical/masculine, especially this one: “At the moment, however, careers are becoming shorthand for personality traits and wallpaper rather than avenues of exploration.”

Ohdeargodyes. Scientist = egghead who talks like Spock, but oddly enough, doesn’t at any point actually quote Spock. Cop = alpha with big

gun. Computer nerd = small, skinny, milquetoast individual. Captain of Industry = hard-bitten, cynical ass given to sexually harassing and impregnating his amnesiac secretary before marrying her in a supah-secret ceremony in the hopes that he’ll win her lurve before she recovers her memory and remembers that oh, hey, he’s an ass.

OK, that last one actually DOES happen with distressing frequency in real life. But I think the point still stands.

Grad students? The hero would either be too young for my taste or one of those perpetual students. And there is nothing less sexy than a perpetual student for me.  :shut:

And I didn’t find the bad housing and piles of dirty laundry all that appealing when I was IN college. I don’t think I’d be turned on now.

Totally off topic, but I found this fascinating. . . I was in Provo recently and we drove by Brigham Young Univ. You would not BELIEVE all the family housing there. I’ve never seen so many dorms with playgrounds before.

Well, yeah, I’ve got piles of dirty laundry too, but they are now in a nice house which is a key difference for me. Now my place is more than big enough to hide weeks’ worth of dirty clothes in the closets and/or the laundry room. Loverly.

How about a forty-year-old heroine who quits her career to go back to grad school, then falls into a mad hot affair with her younger prof? Damn it, Candy, I think you’ve inspired me.

I’m afraid I can’t really agree that the difference between expert and non-expert in technical fields is artificial.  It is real, produced by many years of hard work. If a non-expert spent (say) four years studying full-time, then yes, their knowledge might be pretty close to someone with a bachelor’s degree.  But without that base of knowledge, it’s just not possible to really understand a subject. You can have an appreciation of a subject — hence Gödel Escher Bach and Six Easy Pieces — but in terms of in-depth understanding, it really does take a lot of work.

As for art, having lived with a working artist, a glassblower, it took him just as much time and concentration to acquire his expertise as it does a scientist.  I could half-way understand what he was doing — all right, you lay the colours on the inside of the tube — but actually doing it required skills you just can’t get without practice.

That said, there are a lot of amateur glassblowers these days; it takes them a few years to get to be any good at it.

So the distinction is not professional/amateur, it’s years of experience/read a book about it once.

I’m afraid I can’t really agree that the difference between expert and non-expert in technical fields is artificial.

I might be wrong, but my understanding was that EAP was calling the creative/technical divide that’s often ascribed to the arts/sciences as artificial, not the professional/amateur difference.  And your post definitely demonstrates how intricate and technical (and creative) both the arts and the sciences can be.

“escapist literature [...] “pure” entertainment?  It says stuff, too, even, and perhaps especially, when we’re not so focused on paying attention”

I completely agree, Robin. Nothing is just ‘pure fluff’. Even candy floss is sugar and colourings. And you can analyse why people like sugar, where the sugar comes from, why particular colourings are preferred, who manufactures the candy-floss machines, how the candy-floss makers feel about producing their candy-floss and whether candy floss is losing out to other forms of fair-ground food.

And I think half the fun is being able to read the book in an ‘escapist’ way, and then the other half of the fun is to analyse it in an ‘intellectual’ way (but it’s an intellectual escape, because it’s more fun, perhaps, than intellectually analysing something else).

1. Arty Farty Retail: art, flowers, witch stuff (having run one of these I can say it doesn’t pay and is a pia). Or, ‘between jobs’, or menial job because of some tragic thing involving ex-lover/husband/boyfriend that requires them to live under false identity or some other kind of nonsense.
2. Realtor. Fast food shift manager. Rat catcher. (this exists. Know someone who supervised someone who wished for their old job: rat catcher at Beechnut factory)
3. For the heroine? A real CEO, or CFO of a Fortune top 100 company, who got the job not because she was family, but becase she kicked ass and took no prisoners. And, one who didn’t need to compromise for the Hero for some lame ass reason.

Do movies count? in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain she’s a waitress and he works in a sex shop and in a haunted house…

I write mostly BDSM, and so my first two male Doms were stock Alpha Males and doctors (though doctors of what wasn’t specified. If you look close, you might see that one of them was a botanist, the other might have gotten his degress from the kind of university that advertises on matchbook covers.) I like using doctors because of (a) their natural authority, (b)the healing metaphor—their women are usualy brought to sexual life under their care, and (c) the sexiness of arcane knowledge and the implication that they know their subs better than the subs do themselves, and (d) the perverse sexiness of latex gloves and lab coats—the way a woman’s sexuality can break through that screen of professional objectifatication doctors subject us to.

My first heroine was an ingenue, but I prefer my subs now to be more alpha women. I like the sparks that are generated between two strong personalities, and I want to get away from the idea that sexual submnission involves personal submission and degradation.

I’m abandoning the cliches in my new books. My latest Dom owns a beauty shop and controls his engineer sub through her make-up and clothing, and in another he’s a reclusive nature painter whom a bored housewife has to coax into domming her.

Ok, I’m just commenting so that I can show up after the Doctor, because I love love his stories.

Also umm…I agree with Robin!

the creative/technical divide that’s often ascribed to the arts/sciences as artificial, not the professional/amateur difference.

Yep, thanks Robin. Just to qualify - I wasn’t trying to sweep aside the tremendous amount of work required for anyone to develop their expertise. Just rambling on about how the arts are seen as much more accessible than the sciences.

Since I sit on both sides of the fence, it’s something that I do wonder about. People are willing to listen to me go on and on about my research in an artsy field and will happily comment and make suggestions. Sometimes they even hang around and read bits after I untie them from the chair.

But if I try to explain my job, which actually deals with t’internet and phones and things we actually use, within about 30 seconds their eyes glaze over and they’re chewing through the knots in a desperate bid for freedom. This seems kinda odd.

But these are my own impressions and it sounds like you’d be able to provide a lot of food for thought on this, Anne, so I’d be interested to hear your take on the matter. And anyone else’s, of course (if making this request doesn’t mess up the thread…)

Aw, thanks, Arethusa. You’re sweet.

But as far as writing goes, we’re not in the business of doing studies of people’s jobs. When we’re writing the usual romance or romantica novel,our characters’ occupations are pretty much emblematic of who we want them to be. If my heroine is a soft and sensitive ungenue, I’m not going to make her a CEO or a telephone linesperson or factory worker. Unfortunately, she’s going to end up in a flower shop or art gallery, depending on how much Earth Mother she has in her.

Similarly, if I want her to be a hard-charger with no time for her emotional life, she’s not going to be working in a day-care center or as an editor for a poetry journal. In fiction, occupaton is a function of character, and we tend to choose jobs that have stereotypical qualities associated with them, whether that’s fair or not.

The female submissive in my new novel is a grad student in mechanical engineering. I chose that because it means she’s young, she’s smart, and she’s had to repress her feminine side to compete in this traditionally male field. I know that’s a stereotype and a cliche and unfair to female engineers, but it gives her instant recognizability and gives me something interesting to work with.

I could write a story about an actuary, say, or a communications facilitator, but what do those job descriptions bring to mind? Nothing special, I’d guess, unless you happen to be one, in which case I’d probably get the details wrong and you’d write me a long and rambling letter on the importance of actuaries and communications facilitators in the modern world and how tired you are of people misunderstanding what you do, let alone putting your job in a dirty story.

In fiction, occupaton is a function of character, and we tend to choose jobs that have stereotypical qualities associated with them, whether that’s fair or not.

But don’t you think this depends on the type of fiction we’re talking about? Some fiction obviously makes better and/or more extensive use of types, depending on its purpose.  Maybe this is a difference between erotica, particularly BDSM, where roles are so important, and, say, Romance, which I would argue is theoretically, or at least ideally, more character-driven.  In character-driven fiction, I think that relying too heavily on type can doom any real power or purpose in the writing.  So maybe it depends on whether you see your writing as particularly character-driven or rather purposed based on roles and on behavior stereotypically associated with those roles.  It would be interesting, IMO, to explore those differences a bit more. 

Overall, though, I find it so refreshing when an author in any genre presents me with a type I think I know and then turns my expectations on their head, because, as someone who has read so many books over the years, I love it when my expectations are thwarted in a good way.

Yeah, Robin. You’re very right. I should have made it clear that I was talking about the kind of quicky romantica I’ve been writing and not capital-f Fiction. Most of the stuff I’ve written concentrates on the romantic and sexual relationship between two people rather than on any sort of in depth character study. I’m more confortablke in short stories where characterization has to be bold and fast.

On the other hand, playing against type can also be a bit too cute and precious. The hard-boiled cop with the tender heart, the ballerina who practices karate, these have become kind of gimmicky. If you’re doing real character-driven stuff, that character’s going to come out in spite of their occupations, not because of them.

EvilAuntiePearl talked about her very real-life job in IT and the way people’s eyes glaze over when she tries to decribe what she does. No offense to her (sorry, darling), but that’s the kind of thing we usually read fiction to get away from. We want to see the occupations that evoke instant association and stereotype. Past a certain level of interest—in office work say—we just don’t care what the person does. They’re an office worker, and we let it go at that.

On the other hand, playing against type can also be a bit too cute and precious.

I agree; in fact, I would argue that some of this—like the examples you rendered—is simply playing to a new type, the against-type types, which we can all easily recognize, as well.  I’m not saying that occupation doesn’t matter or that you can’t tell anything about a person because of what they do (or even that people have to be different than the stereotype portrays them to be).  All I’m saying is that for character-based and driven fiction, I appreciate characters who are individuated as much as possible, who are more than a clonglomeration of cliches and symbols and veneers.  In other words, I want it to be character rather than just caricature.

EvilAuntiePearl talked about her very real-life job in IT and the way people’s eyes glaze over when she tries to decribe what she does. No offense to her (sorry, darling), but that’s the kind of thing we usually read fiction to get away from.

Again, I think it depends on the kind of fiction and your expectations as a reader.  I agree with you that sometimes readers seem to want to escape anything close to reality for a while (but even then, I think an overall sense of authenticity and cogent logic still should guide a work of fiction). 

Someone, though, in this thread mentioned Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife, which not only features a rather untypical librarian, but also an artist of paper sculpture whose work is sometimes described in quite technical and exalted detail.  Niffenegger plays on the symbolism of her craft, for sure (she makes these giant birds), but she was also using the technique in specific ways.  And the technique began with the intricacies of paper-making, through which the narrator sometimes tooks us, step by step, piece of equipment by piece of equipment, procedure by procedure, mapping and revealing this technical but transformative process.

Tim O’Brien’s In The Lake of the Woods also comes to mind as a book where occupational detail is quite important.

Then, of course, there are the whaling chapters in Moby Dick . . .

EvilAuntiePeril, I know exactly what you mean about the eyes-glazing-over phenomenon — it’s like clockwork. I go to a party, somebody asks me what I do, and I say I’m in math.  I get a lof of “oh, you must be so smart!” (frankly, I think anybody’s Ph.D. is damned difficult), “oh, I could never do that!” (do you see me trying to write poetry? be glad), and “I had this terrible teacher in high school…” People’s eyes do glaze over, even, to some extent, my girlfriend the astrophysics grad student.  When my ex-roommate talked about glassblowing, people’s ears perked up. Why?

I think a big part of it is where the difficulty lies in the two fields.  In math, if I can explain it and you can understand it, you’re done — you can do it. In glassblowing, my roommate would talk about how you do certain things (say, how you lay colours on a tube then cover them with clear so they won’t discolour in the flame), and I’d understand what he said — but I was still years away from being able to *do* it.  The talking and the understanding are not the doing.  If something was that easy to understand in math, it would be that easy, period, and it wouldn’t be a subject of research.

That’s not all of it, though; people have a charged relationship with technical fields, especially math.  Look at the difference between saying “I just can’t do math” and “I just can’t read” — one will get you sympathy, the other scorn. 

Art, on the other hand, you can do at home an get something you like, never mind it’s not as good as something a professional artist would produce.  People dabble in art, and produce something they can value.  This can happen in technical fields (e.g. http://www.junkyardjet.com/index.html) but for whatever reason, it doesn’t have the same cachet.

I’m not sure it’s just about difficulty. I think it’s also about connection to something that people already understand. So if you’re a biologist and you talk about observing lions, say, people will be interested because they’ve seen nature programmes/they have a cat. But if you’re a bio-chemist studying tiny molecules, people will feel they have less to say about that. Unless it turns out that you’re doing research into cancers, and then they’ll want to know about it, because they’re interested in cancer (but they wouldn’t want to hear exactly what you do to a cell culture in the lab). Similarly, if you say you’re doing literary research they might be interested (literature is about people, they’re people, they read books) but if you said that you focussed on metre and the implications of using different verse forms in medieval French poetry, you’d probably get glazed eyes, and the same if you talked about complicated theories of grammar or if you used particular jargon (e.g feminist literary theory).

It’s not that research on lions is easy, or that writing literary criticism about Shakespeare is easy, but that people may have some clue what the subject is, and so don’t feel excluded. If they don’t have a starting point at all, they’ll find the subject strange and difficult.

Everyone talks and uses words, so subjects that use words have an advantage when trying to create a connection with someone who doesn’t know the subject. Not everyone understands complex pieces of mechanical equipment, computer programming or maths that’s more complicated than addition, subtraction, multiplication or long division. And because of that it’s much harder to get them interested. I think that popular science books tend to use metaphors and examples from daily life (just as at school maths examples include the ‘if you have one cake and four people….’ type problems) because that begins to create a connection with people, making the subject seem more relevant to their daily lives.

because of my out-of-romance interests, i’ve always wanted to get a more lefty guy… bit like the communist in billy wilder’s one two three, or something like that. guess people who talk about consensus decision making and anti-capitalism sneer at romance novels though… sigh. would be nice if the hero asked her out on a demonstration for once.

I’ve noticed that there’s more politics in historicals, presumably because making a Duke side with the Whigs isn’t going to upset the current social order or offend any readers.

Thanks Laura V., Anne and Robin for the insights. Can I agree with all of you? And also expand some on your points. I’m working on the assumption that everyone’s so distracted by the man-titty they won’t notice me slipping this into the discussion. ‘cos it’s long, and I can’t face editing it.

If people can identify the result of a process in some tangible way, they’re less inclined to worry about understanding the process itself. If we can mentally get a handle on the result, by which I mean things like, “makes sick people well,” “designs houses,” “does something with numbers that encrypts information,” we can assign social and cultural values to it. And if we do this, we can project back these values onto the person who created it.

So someone who bakes cakes is nurturing, warm and caring. If they’re really a violent serial killer, then their cake-baking must be eliminated or explained. Otherwise it’s an uncomfortable anomaly in the mass-murdering scheme of things. But it also has the potential to make said serial killer far more interesting.

Occupations that have an obvious result are therefore an easier way to develop a character by means of this sort of association. Which helps to explain the professions that appear in Romanceland.

Past a certain level of interest—in office work say—we just don’t care what the person does. They’re an office worker, and we let it go at that.

Back on the office job issue, I don’t think Elliot (sorry, darling) quite dealt with the problem to my satisfaction. After all, if that’s the extent of our interest in the office worker, then why should it make a difference whether she works in marketing or IT support? Especially when it’s only a throwaway mention, the office-based heroine usually works in a non-technical role in a non-technical field.

I’d argue that all occupations are stereotyped and the conventional view of technical/scientific work is just jarring enough to affect the easy characterisation of an average office-based heroine. Many people would still feel the need to explain or comment on a woman in a technical role. And then the issue of unapproachability for the layman rears its ugly head.

There are lots more questions that link to the issue of office work. Why is her job in these cases often boring and low-status? Why is the hero’s still higher-status, and (at least to him) interesting? Is this just part of a particular rescue or wish-fulfillment fantasy for bored office-workers or does it have wider things to say about our view of working women? What about the possibilities inherent in the buttoned-down, stiff-shirted passion mentioned earlier on the thread?

Further afield, if jobs are merely a function of character, why are certain jobs avoided and why are there fashions in others, like the wave of alpha male photojournalists in the 80s or the current deluge of similar military types? What happened to the big-haired, shoulder-padded, power-suited, toyboy-shagging corporate mega-beeyatch of early 80s’ bonkbusters?

I’d argue that all of this has less to do with the day-to-day minutiae of any job (even SEALs do paperwork, after all) and more to do with the cultural and social values we assign to a profession. It’s the whys and hows of this that I find intriguing. It’s also been interesting to read how people feel when they know people in real life who don’t fit the stereotype that’s presented, like aging poker-playing FBI agents and cops, or sexy CPAs, actuaries and dentists.

PS. I yearn to read a romance between a female tractor mechanic and a male composer of rousing workers’ anthems set on a collective farm. Or the forbidden love between a sexy eco-warrior and the lumberjack son of a logging company owner.

Here’s another take on it (I did warn that this was too long): If I read, “When Yvonne starting working in her dream job as a legal secretary for Fitz&Frocks, the employment law specialists, little did she know how her life would change,” my reaction is, “Oh, she sounds like a sweet lady. Probably knits floral cardigans in pearls and trained part-time while nursing her aging parents. Bet she gets a pale-blue Volvo and a cat she finds amusingly quirky.”

Compare this to, “When Yvonne started working in her dream job as a legal secretary for Fitz&Frocks, who specialised in dealing with celebrity libel cases, little did she know, etc…” Yvonne has now chucked out her twinset in favour of a pair of f***-me shoes and something tailored by Paul Smith. To say nothing of what she did in her first week with a well-known actor and the pearls to mar the smooth mahogany finish of the boardroom table.

Yvonne #1 would chat to you in a friendly but reserved way at the bus stop. Yvonne #2 would cruise past in her sports car, driving straight through the gigantic puddle and showering you head-to-toe in muddy water. Of course I’ve cheated a bit by using the celebrity effect, but imagine Yvonne working for criminal lawyers. Or human rights or family lawyers.

Everyone’s Yvonne will be slightly different, but unless personal knowledge of a real-life Yvonne comes into it, most of our views would be based on the values we assign to her chosen area of work. The fact that it’s her ambition makes it more telling. Since these stereotypes are often culturally-based, most of us would be able to recognise the description that fits each job.

On the other hand, anything that departs from these conventions will create tension and interest. This doesn’t mean that Yvonne #1 has to have a rubber fetish, just play the jazz saxophone. Yvonne #2 could have big feet. These are pretty crude examples, but this seems to be where stereotypes can be used to an advantage. If it’s deftly done, it’s not playing against character per se, just playing with it.

Just realised that most of my ramble below, while a bit of a revelation to me, is likely old hat to most authors and pretty obvious to most readers. *blushes profusely*. Apologies for the self-indulgence and showing my working-out - it was rather late and I promise to edit in the future. But I still think that even though stereotyping is a useful device for writers, and doesn’t have to be crude, it’s only one turning on the road to character development. It needs more than a job and hair colour, however lustrous, to truly satisfy me. And I don’t think that stereotypes should just be accepted as simply “the way things are” either.

Just wanted to add that even being unemploymed is a “job” and says things about your character, depending on the circumstances of his/her unemployment. (Did they quit, get fired, laid off, resign in protest, opt out of the ratrace etc?) So it’s one of those “not to decided is to decide” things too, with its own connotations and stereotypes.

I think there are two main romantica story archetypes: Sleeping Beauty is one, and Beauty and the Beast is the other. In the first, a woman is awakened by a man’s love, and in the second a woman “tames” a wild male. My first stories followed the Sleeping Beauty archetype—woman with an unsatisfying life is emotionally awakened by a take-charge guy. (I know it’s stereotypical and cliched and maybe even sexist and offensive, but that’s the kind of stuff I was writing, very formulaic.) For my purposes, it made sense to give her some dull and gray job and leave it at that. Her job was a symbol of how unfulfilling her life was.

Now, as to why you dopn’t see more lefty heroes—Both the Sleeping Beauty and the Beauty and the Beast archetype demand male protags who are pretty selfish and willful, arrogant and full of themselvess enough to reach into her life and pluck her out in the SB archetype, or live life as a bad boy in the B&B fantasy

I don’t think you’re going to find many leftists who fit this bill. I’m on the left myself, and I would never think of telling anyone else how they should lead their life, or insisting they should do things my way. But that conflict of wills is just the kind of thing you need to generate some friction in erotic romance.

The values of the left are understanding, compassion, and equality,  and for me, at least, it’s just hard to strike some real fire with those qualities.

“The values of the left are understanding, compassion, and equality, and for me, at least, it’s just hard to strike some real fire with those qualities.”

Well, the French managed to have a revolution and the motto ‘liberte, fraternite, egalite’ (sorry, can’t get accents). I think it could be done, but perhaps more of the conflict would be external, rather than within the relationship (unless one of the pair was more committed to going on marches etc and the other was worried about possible negative consequences). But it probably wouldn’t be escapist reading. And another problem with two eco-friendly, feminist/pro-feminist socialists is that neither is going to sweep the other into a world of ease and comfortable riches. And a lot of people associate diamond rings, nice clothes, foreign holidays, expensive restaurants etc with romance. It’s funny, because it used to be that love with poverty-stricken artists, who lived in garrets, was the epitome of romance. Mind you, those romances didn’t tend to have a HEA.

On the subject of jobs and assumptions, I really don’t like stereotypes, and I wouldn’t make assumptions about the secretary depending on which sort of company she worked for. Jobs can be hard to come by, and sometimes one just takes what one can get. Also, not everyone is defined by their job - their job might involve just one facet of their personality.

But maybe this is why I prefer historical romances. In modern romances one is very often presented with a very unreal world. That’s fine if you want escapism and can suspend disbelief. But it’s true that politics is ignored, and people are more often put in jobs in accordance with particular stereotypes.

I really don’t like stereotypes, and I wouldn’t make assumptions about the secretary depending on which sort of company she worked for. Jobs can be hard to come by, and sometimes one just takes what one can get. Also, not everyone is defined by their job - their job might involve just one facet of their personality.

Really good point, Laura, and I do agree with you that it’s not fair to make judgements like this, but it happens. At the least an awareness of a stereotype might act as a guide when to tread warily around certain traits. It can set up expectations in a reader or act as a “hook” to remember a person. Since someone’s job can easily be a matter of circumstance, I called it a “dream job” rather than just stating her place of work. A dream job says something about who a person is or wants to be, even if this in no way resembles the assumptions someone else might make about it.

Also, companies do hire people partly on the basis of judgements about whether a person will fit into their corporate culture. Some of this can be based on assumptions about dress, personal appearance and a rough assessment of character. The diversity in offices shows how effective this sort of strategy is. Frankly, I picked on poor Yvonne because I wanted to explore how even a stereotype like “just an office-worker” quickly opens up to new interpretations at this level.

And you’re also right about the fact that a career often reflects only one facet of someone’s personality. I’ve been thinking about these examples today, feeling guilty because my descriptions short-changed Yvonne. I can’t help thinking that as with any other aspect of someone’s life, a job can be used to explore their personality in more ways than this. There’s the basic “oh, they work in X so they must be Y.” But if we try to refrain from such judgements, it helps to find out about how they feel about X, how they got into it, whether they want to stay etc. etc. Just like having a conversation with a real person, for me, exploring these sorts of questions give the character substance.

I guess how this is used in writing comes down to the writer’s decision on the focus of their writing and the relative importance of their characters?

On the subject of left-wing romance, I’d say that the values of the left include non-conformity, rebellion and independence. These can be very sexy. Particularly compared with values on the right that might be seen to include repression, conformity and obedience of authority.

But when it comes to the latter, the fact that the power hierarchy is clearer (as Elliot pointed out) helps with another convention of romance: the HEA. This is usually presented as a stable condition where all the loose ends are tidied away. Stability is traditionally associated with clearly defined social structures and everything falling into its appointed place, rather than fuzzy edges and ambiguity. So the eco-warriors and anarcho-syndicalists would have to be cleverly handled to fit in with some of the other conventions of the genre. But personally, I’d love to see if someone could make it work.

Now, as to why you dopn’t see more lefty heroes—Both the Sleeping Beauty and the Beauty and the Beast archetype demand male protags who are pretty selfish and willful, arrogant and full of themselvess enough to reach into her life and pluck her out in the SB archetype, or live life as a bad boy in the B&B fantasy

The values of the left are understanding, compassion, and equality, and for me, at least, it’s just hard to strike some real fire with those qualities.

Interestingly enough, all my friends lean left to one extent or another, and some of them lean pretty damn hard, and quite a few of them are assertive, and a couple of them are even assholes on occasion. One guy I know looooooooves spanking and ageplay, and he’s pretty far left of center, especially by today’s standards, where the center seems to have shifted a bit towards the right. He’s not quite an anarcho-syndicalist, but frankly, I think it’d be interesting to see one attempt to reconcile his ideals about consensus and collective decision-making with his kinks and dom fantasies.

Then again, isn’t BDSM all about being safe, sane and consensual? But perhaps real-life BDSM has little to do with the fictional portrayal? (I wouldn’t know because I haven’t had a chance to read much BDSM erotica or erotic romance.)

I’d also take issue that the values of the Left are “understanding, compassion, and equality,” since that implies that those on the Right values callousness, cruelty and oppression, and though I’m about as Left as they come, I’m not comfortable to make that sort of a claim. Some on the Right do seem pretty callous, cruel and oppressive, certainly (*koff*gaymarriage*koff*southdakotaabortionban*koffkoff*), but then so do some of the Left.

And now to talk briefly about good-guy heroes and romance novels in general: I also think a lot of people underestimate the power, sexual and otherwise, of true kindness. I again point to Christy Morrell of To Love and to Cherish, who is surely one of the sexiest heroes ever created, and who awakens Anne, the heroine, in all sorts of ways, sexual and otherwise. It’s by no means an erotic romance, nor one with any sort of BDSM overtone, which I realize is Elliot’s focus. I know that I find true kindness and gentleness deeply sexy, and I’ve learned from experience that boys who are shy and sweet can oftentimes turn out to be fun little freaks once you get them naked.

On the subject of left-wing romance, I’d say that the values of the left include non-conformity, rebellion and independence. These can be very sexy.

Thank you, EAP. That strikes me as a more accurate take on what modern Lefties tend to stand for—or like to think we stand for, heh.

Stability is traditionally associated with clearly defined social structures and everything falling into its appointed place, rather than fuzzy edges and ambiguity. (...) So the eco-warriors and anarcho-syndicalists would have to be cleverly handled to fit in with some of the other conventions of the genre. But personally, I’d love to see if someone could make it work.

Excellent point. I know that personally, my tolerance for ambiguity and not knowing all the answers is pretty high, and if it fit, I’d be happy to see a romance end on a very hopeful note (like in Seize the Fire by Laura Kinsale, for example) instead of a traditional six-eerily-happy-kids-and-a-picket-fence HEA.

Just realised that most of my ramble below, while a bit of a revelation to me, is likely old hat to most authors and pretty obvious to most readers. *blushes profusely*.

Forgot to address this: EAP, I, for one, find your comments fascinating and not at all Captain Obvious-ish, and will do all I can to egg you on to post more.

Oh, and Robin said this above: Then, of course, there are the whaling chapters in Moby Dick . . .

Indeed. Such as this excerpt here:

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, wove almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,- literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

I loved Moby Dick, but even if I hadn’t, wading through that whole book would’ve been SOOOOO worth it just to know that excerpt existed.

Thanks, am quite excited by all the discussion of my rather glib post and seding a rather cumbersome response.

The job/politics/stereotype issue is pretty similar, really, I think and it’s probably most interesting if the characters depart from the cliche in unexpected ways.

As to values that make a ‘good lefty’, I think that what anyone claims ideal and acts is pretty much different. In my humble opinion power, dominance and personal and public struggle about this are quite compatible with that. And let’s not get into Socialist Realist imagery, it might be low on romance/sex but it definitely has lots of idealised masculinity of an ultra-traditional type.

I think the rebellion factor would make a better read then chapters of discussion on facilitating meetings… Which makes me think that a main argument against leftwing romance is that ideology tends to be more group and public focused then about individual, private lives.

The unpublishable argument is quite convincing though.

There is, however:
The Baader-Meinhof Affair
by Erin Cosgrove

Mara was a loner at the very exclusive Norden College until she meets the fascinating Holden Rife who introduces her to a secretive off-campus world of Baader-Meinhof aficionados.

But how far will Holden’s activist group go in playing out their love affair with these uppermiddle-class German terrorist/revolutionaries?

Mara discovers that Holden’s group is more dangerous than she ever imagined. The devotees blur the line between reality and make-believe in the ‘Baader-Meinhof Games,’ while Mara struggles not to lose herself and her heart to the impossible and impossibly handsome Holden Rife.

Which 1. Is an art project; 2. Heavily ironic; 3. Hence (to me) fun but not working as romance; and also possibly 4. morally reprehensible.

I promise if I post again, it will be on another subject.

I’d also take issue that the values of the Left are “understanding, compassion, and equality,” since that implies that those on the Right values callousness, cruelty and oppression, and though I’m about as Left as they come, I’m not comfortable to make that sort of a claim. Some on the Right do seem pretty callous, cruel and oppressive, certainly (*koff*gaymarriage*koff*southdakotaabortionban*koffkoff*), but then so do some of the Left.

One of the things that struck me as I was reading the exchanges on Left and Right values, is how we’ve gotten to the point where political ideologies have become synonymous with moral or character qualities (no wonder we’re so embattled in this country, politically speaking!).  We’ve essentialized what should basically be ideas about how our government should operate into intrinsic reflections of what kind of person one is.  I know some politically Right folks who are very rebellious and I know some politically Left folks who are pretty conformist.  And politically speaking, I think we need some kind of blend of continuity and innovation if we are to have a society that both survives and thrives.

I see the same kind of thing happening in Romance with these little tag elements—career/job, gender, race, culture, historical period, etc.  They’ve become these highly essentialized markers for character, rather than the building blocks of characters who (whom?), IMO, we shouldn’t be able to identify and peg quite so quickly in Romance.  Because even though Romance can be somewhat allegorical, and even as certain archetypes are generally present and funcational in the genre, I think the tendency toward essentialism is not necessarily aiding our escapist fantasies—it’s contributing to a larger, and IMO more disturbing trend toward laziness in our approach to issues, ideas, differences, etc. in many areas of our reality.  I just don’t think escapist literature needs to be mindless—it doesn’t have to strain the intellect, but I think even the most entertaining of books can be quite thoughtful and even thought-provoking on occasion.

Oh, and Candy, WHERE in the HELL is that quote from MD?  Why don’t I remember that???? OMG, give me a page number!

You’re absolutely right, Robin. I’m definitely been guilty of this, and I’ll be more vigilant in the future.

Although I wasn’t thinking of the posts in this thread when I made that comment, I do think it’s something we ALL do, Candy, to greater or lesser degree.  Sometimes I think we’re just grappling for a shortcut way of identifying something quickly, and sometimes we’re confronted with people who seem to lack character and who have such strong political views, that the two things get merged in our minds.  What I think is too bad, though, is that societally, we have gotten so dependent on convenience, that I think we’ve let this desire spill over into our thinking, as well, both public and private.  And I think that’s why we’re finding that more and more complex problems are being met with shallower and shallower solutions.

I just want to say, by way of explanation,  that the stuff I’ve published so far—the stuff that’s germane to this discussion—is quite honestly more pornographic than it is romantic. I make a distinction: porn is writing that whose sole purpose is sexual titillation and arousal. Romance deals with more subtle feelings.

Because my stuff is quite frankly porn, I haven’t been as concerned with character nuance and depth and reality, and so I’ve tended to fall in with the usual career cliches—political ones too. I guess the right thing to say is that so far I’ve dealt in caricatures rather than characters. Porn itself has been described as sexual propaganda, and I think that’s pretty accurate. As in all propaganda, people and emotions are simplified almost to the point of transparency in order to let the message show through.

This is expecially true in BDSM, where exaggeration of character and use of cliche is almost like a signal to the reader that this is fantasy and not to be taken too seriously. There’s nothing especially sexy about someone being whipped, but set it in Lord Ravenscroft’s torch-lit dungeon, and it becomes kind of fun. The cliche lets the reader know it’s safe.

It’s late (for me) and I’m rambling, but this topic kind of reminds me of a discussion I had once about just how much a romance (or porn) author should be expected to imitate reality in his or her writing, and whether it isn’t possible that, by trying to make things too real, we actually destroy the very elements that make a romance romantic or porn sexy. In other words, if reality is so great, why do we need romantic literature at all?

“isn’t [it] possible that, by trying to make things too real, we actually destroy the very elements that make a romance romantic or porn sexy. In other words, if reality is so great, why do we need romantic literature at all?”

If this were true, I think it would be very sad. It would imply that one could never find romance or sexiness in real life, just as one can never find a unicorn or mermaid in real life. And I don’t think that’s the case. Literature can intensify romance and sexiness, by focussing on certain parts of the experience, but I think if the story becomes too much of a fantasy, it also loses its humanity.

In fantasies, people’s clothes can fly off them at convenient moments, and money is no object when it comes to planning the most ‘romantic’ white wedding ever. But when clothes fly off people, or magically disappear, one misses out on the humour, the absurdity, of sex, and one loses the intimacy that comes from standing in front of someone and being loved and accepted, big underpants, saggy flesh and all. When money is magically forthcoming, one misses out (a) on the socialism, obviously, but also (b) on the human touches which happen when people have to work out what really matters to them. Buying in ‘the best money can buy’ means people buy into an ideology or a mass-produced fantasy. When they spend a less but work out a way to express their own personalities, it’s about that unique couple.

I think it is possible to give enough realism to remind the reader of the romance and sexiness that is present in real life. Too gritty and the novel becomes full of despair and difficulty, too much fantasy, and the novel no longer connects with real lives, or celebrates the beauty and love that does exist all around us.

One you’ll never see: Undertaker/mortician.

Kellie—it’s been done.  Pamela Morsi had a mortician hero in her historicals.

Aha!  I finally remembered the name of the Morsi book:  Wild Oats, and the hero was the town undertaker.