It’s Wednesday! Are you ready for the weekend yet? I know I am. I have so much cleaning and unpacking to do (I was at a wedding last weekend) and I just haven’t been able to get to it this week. Hopefully, you have better weekend plans on the horizon.
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Sarah: Tomorrow, 13 September at around 11am ET, NPR/WAMU’s 1A is doing a segment on romance, with Alisha Rai, Alexandra Alter from the Times, Leah Koch from The Ripped Bodice, and me! You can tune in or listen live at the 1A website: https://the1a.org/
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Love bookish podcasts? BuzzFeed has a list of thirty-one of them and we’ve made the cut! Thanks to all the readers who let us know about it.
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If you missed the Romance Writers of Australia conference, Kate Cuthbert’s keynote address is available to read online:
If we want to call ourselves a feminist genre, if we want to hold ourselves up as an example of women being centered, of representing the female gaze, of creating women heroes who not only survive but thrive, then we have to lead. We can’t deflect and we can’t dissemble. We need to look to the future and create the books that women need to read now. We’ve been shown our potential. To rise to it is our obligation.
And this is where it gets tricky, because as a community, we have to do the one thing that romance has never taught us how to do: breakup.
What do you think of the speech?
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Check out the Royal Service Dogs: Advocacy and Art Facebook page. The artist, Arien Smith, wanted to increase awareness of individuals with both visible and invisible disabilities by portraying Disney characters with service dogs.
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Orbit has a really fun graph on the different kinds of mages and where to find them. I’m definitely feeling the Witch Queen.
Bringing back a fave to celebrate the launch of MAGEFALL this week – the fantastic sequel to @SteveAryan's MAGEBORN! Here's the Orbit Guide to Mages and Where to Find Them: pic.twitter.com/6GYIicKJyf
— Orbit Books (@orbitbooks) September 6, 2018
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Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Chaos mage all the way. Air conditioning is the secret sauce that keeps chaotic neutrals from going full evil.
Kate Cuthbert’s speech is spot on, but there is too much money on the table in this industry to realistically expect conscience to prevail. You can’t even talk about WRITING CRAFT in an open forum without the discussion being derailed by the “quality doesn’t matter, just crank books out fast and rake in the cash” crowd, and only personal satisfaction with a job well done is at stake there. Obligation is an alien concept to those people. For every writer who feels a sense of responsibility toward what they put out into the world through their art, there are (insert made-up enormous number here) who are just mass producing widgets they only care about in terms of the revenue they generate. And then there are the women who simply aren’t on board with all this newfangled women-being-treated-like-humans nonsense who get irate when they’re “beaten over the head with PC garbage,” which generally means even the slightest reference to consent or equality or men being called out for shitty behavior. Progress isn’t universally embraced. In many cases, it’s actively opposed.
The ship WILL turn because it will be a “trend” the industry can profit from (please refer to all the straight, white, able-bodied people appropriating gigs denied forever to own voices authors since diversity rep has been deemed newsworthy and therefore profitable), but the juggernaut moves slowly, and a lot of its “progress” is for show. There will be lots and lots of “feminist” books written by people who hate feminists but want their money, and their failures to get it right will be used to further ridicule the genre and the women who publish and read it.
Romance is far from the happy, fluffy sorority the PR engine makes it out to be. We often feel attacked from outside the genre, but a great deal of the time, the calls are coming from inside the house.
Looking forward to the Romance discussion on “The 1a” tomorrow! This week has been a mess of planning for a hurricane that looked like it was going to come close to me, and now maybe not so much, but we still might get way too much rain! I will happily take some time to listen to what I hope will be a great discussion.
Re Kate Cuthbert’s speech.
I am not deleting any of my Melanie Milburne backlist, but it is true that I was well past formative age when I began reading them, so I knew lack of free agreement – via financial coercion most often – was unacceptable. It helps that the characters vocalise their objections. They’re usually about the transgressions against moral and social codes, though, only occasionally the legal code.
Milburne was however an important voice in how strongly she wrote against parental abuse – and gaslighting cover-ups of it. I’ve seen less of that in her very recent work.
Not that she okays terrible parenting, no way, but not-quite-good-parenting kind of gets a pass. I remember one where the heroine thought of her relationship with her disengaged mother as being stuck “at two bars of cellphone reception”. (Ms Milburne, ever the mistress of metaphor and simile.) For me, that did not bode well for the future, but Milburne endorses the idea that the two-bar mother can be way better as a grandmother.
Assumptions like that have the potential to do, and tend to, do great damage to the children and grandchildren. And even where the questionably-parented adult does not hold with that assumption and stops the shortchanging dynamic in its tracks, there is social damage because ill-informed family, friends and associates and frankly, randos feel free to attack responsible decision-makers in disunited or estranged families.
Milburne should not be giving the randos and co fuel by having indifferent parents do an abrupt turnaround when grandkids come along. Even when SOME errant parents do “come good” it’s not that smooth a process.
Content warnings on consent issues to the electronic backlist would be worth wrangling for, half-measure or not. If it requires truly terrible, manipulative parenting that places the heroine in prime position to be financially coerced into a relationship for her parents to get the boot, I’m kicking it old school until all the horrors get neutralised as a threat.
Believe me, Calling the Old Man/Woman Out is a trope with widespread appeal. Say to the 40% of people with unsupportive parents (Gery Karantzas: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/parents-and-adult-children-estrangement/8895286). Content warnings could have a reach just as wide