Hello there! It’s Wednesday! We’re also a week away from Halloween? Are you excited? Or is it just another day for you? Maybe you’re just biding your time until you can get your hands on some discount candy. What I wouldn’t give for a huge, cheap bag of Reese’s right now.
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Election Day is coming up and The Washington Post has a great interview with Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Be warned that this article may be behind a paywall:
Q: How has writing romantic suspense novels prepared you to run for — and hold — office?
Leadership requires the ability to engage and to create empathy for communities with disparate needs and ideas. Telling an effective story — especially in romantic suspense — demands a similar skill set. Effective storytelling takes the reader into a life that is both familiar and foreign, enough of both to make space for others to feel empowered to tell their stories.
When I began writing novels, I read Aristotle to learn how to perfect structure, Pearl Cleage to sustain tension and Nora Roberts for characterization. Good romantic suspense can never underestimate the audience, and the best political leaders know how to shape a compelling narrative that respects voters and paints a picture of what is to come.
Be sure to vote in November!
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Electric Lit has an article on what your favorite Shakespeare play says about you. What are your results?
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There’s a new foodie docuseries in Netflix called Salt Fat Acid Heat, inspired by the book of the same title. I keep seeing so many wonderful write ups on it. Here’s one from Buzzfeed News:
Nosrat is not seeking cool as a “bad girl” of cooking — there are no leather jackets or exciting motorcycle road trips, and she’s not here to tell any non-English-speaking people how they’ve been doing it all wrong. She is already well-respected and -regarded by her industry and amateur home cooks alike, and she does not appear to be seeking kudos. What is left, then, is pure pleasure and excitement. And that is what we, the flushed viewers at home, respond to. Even with all other things being equal, we turn to food TV to educate and relax us, but in the roiling hellscape of 2018, Salt Fat Acid Heat produces feel-good endorphins that manifest as something close to peace.
Food’s primary function is fuel, but pleasure is a close second, and Samin Nosrat is having a great time teaching viewers about what makes food pleasurable. The final package is a curious mix of luxury and gravitas, swirled together with unfettered joy. It is wholly seductive. Salt Fat Acid Heat is a sensualist’s dream.
You should be watching, even if only to have a reason to light a cigarette and exhale lustily afterwards.
Have you watched it yet?
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Just a reminder that we have a Goodreads group! Starting in the new year, we’re hoping to have monthly read-alongs (kind of like a super casual book club). We’re currently taking suggestions on what books to consider!
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As someone who loves fantasy romance, I was completely nodding my head along to this Frolic.Media piece on why high fantasy romances might be the next big thing in romance. What do you think?
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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!
If you need an escape from, well, anything, the Farmer to Farmer podcast is simultaneously super soothing and super inspiring. Plus I’m pretty sure you could get a whole range of romance novel plots out of all the different stories. Perfect for dreaming about running away from it all and starting your own homestead while also making you super glad you haven’t yet.
I loved the article about high fantasy romances and I really think the authors are on to something.
I have been… not doing well, with the election coming up.
I found some respite here – https://doctorbeth.tumblr.com
Looking at the soft toys entering and leaving the toy hospital was extremely relaxing. Highly recommended.
OF COURSE the thing that’s most fun to write will become trendy when I can’t afford to write anymore. Ah, well. It would be nice to have a greater variety of adult high fantasy romance to read if that prediction came to pass.
I really hope that predication about fantasy romance becoming the next thing is true. I love it, and am always on the lookout for new books, but whenever I see recs for it, it’s always full of books I’ve already read.
It’s weird: high fantasy has always been my favourite genre, and romance is my next favourite, so you’d think that fantasy romance would be my favourite thing ever, right? But… it’s not. In fact, it almost never works for me at all. Fantasy written by women and with romantic subplots: yes; fantasy romance: nope. I try them occasionally, but I’m pretty much always disappointed.
Salt Fat Acid Heat is awesome! I’m halfway through and can’t get enough of her infectious personality. She comes across as someone I would love to sit down at a table with.
I loved the Salt Fat Acid Heat Netflix series, so much that I checked out her audiobook from the library. I’m really loving the way she talks about food for utter beginners.
If you need some high fantasy now, usually with good romance!, Sharon Shinn has got you covered. The original trilogy of Archangel series is best plus Summers at Castle Auburn, of course! Her current series is good, too. (Can’t remember name…)
@Anonymous— yes, I concur. I rarely find a romance that’s also a good fantasy novel (recent case in point, Of Fire and Stars, billed as a YA fantasy centered on a f/f romance; the romance was quite nice but the other elements of the novel were mediocre at best and I wound up displeased with the sum total). Most likely, if an author thinks of themself as primarily writing a romance, they’re too easily tempted to hitch it to a by-the-numbers fantasy novel (or worse, unthinkingly import some of the racist aspects of traditional fantasy settings). Whereas if they think of themself as primarily writing a fantasy novel, there is a somewhat higher chance that they’ll put some thought into making it original, and carefully think about the implications of the world they’re writing.
@Vasha: My usual source of disappointment is either the fantasy or the romance feeling superimposed on the other. You mention the fantasy wallpaper slapped on a romance priority, but there’s plenty of lousy romance painted over what could have been decent fantasy, too. Neither fantasy nor romance should be prioritized when writing fantasy romance — there’s no reason not to holistically develop a story with a world that created and shaped the characters and the situation that puts them in conflict they must overcome to be in love, other than the writer being uninterested in half of the job.
@Vasha/@Ren Benton – Yes, that’s my issue with it exactly. They never seem to strike a good balance, so either you get great world-building with a lousy romance, or you get bad world-building with a good romance, OR sometimes you get both bad world-building AND a bad romance. And if it’s a series, you sometimes get a decent if imperfect first book that then unravels later on because the author needs both the overarching fantasy plot and the romance plot(s) to move along but can’t get them to come together in a way that is organic to both.
There are other common pacing issues too, with the author sort of abandoning the larger plot to focus on minutiae of the romance (e.g. the larger plot is escalating around our couple but we’re entirely focused on them having sex for four chapters) or having the characters in the final act make Romance Novel Decisions with Romance Novel Logic that do not make sense at all for fantasy novel characters in a fantasy novel plot.
I absolutely agree with Ren that there’s no reason you can’t produce a holistic fantasy romance that doesn’t do these things, which makes it particularly frustrating.
I love high fantasy/romance, as well.It mostly seems available in YA, as the article says. I admit I became aware of the possibilities when I was reading and writing Harry Potter fanfic and saw what combining fabulous characters, cool world-building, and grand passion could produce. But when I went looking for books similar, I wasn’t finding them.
A reviewer on another blog recommended three writers to me. I devoured Shana Abés Drakon series [starting with The Smoke Thief]]. There’s another series she recommended that I had more mixed feelings about, loving the first book but losing interest in it later. And I don’t remember the author or any titles so that doesn’t do anybody any good.
I imagine anybody who is interested in fantasy romance is already reading Namomi Novik’s current books, which are amazing.
I almost offered anybody who sees this a free digital copy of my own fantasy romance trilogy (This Crumbling Pageant, Volume One of The Fury Triad) but got nervous about my publisher reacting if that became a very big number, so I’ll say if anybody already in the this conversation who wants it, email me at pooks at furytriad.com and let me know which app or reader you use. And then the next 15 people who do the same can also have copies.
I’m thrilled to think that maybe the market for what I love to read may be opening up and we’ll all have more.
@Patricia
There’s definitely a lot more ya books like this, and I think a good number of them are balancing the fantasy and romance than adult ones are. I think part of it is that they let the relationships build over the course of the series whereas adult books are more likely to switch to a different couple with each book. This makes it more difficult to develop the overarching plot because the authors have to “hand it off” to a new couple and keep that moving forward while developing a whole new relationship from start to finish. I think they work better when either one couple is followed throughout the series or the books are even just given bigger page counts to accommodate everything.
I’ve read read both Uprooted and Spinning Silver and thought the romance was pretty underdeveloped in both. There were a couple moments in Uprooted that I liked, but I was never sold on it, and I liked Spinning Silver’s couples better but still thought they could have used more development.
And I have your first book on my kindle, so I’ll have to move that up in my tbr 🙂
@Lulinke, what a great find. That Grover!
For anyone who might need them, resources here for domestic violence:
https://www.change.org/p/reauthorize-the-violence-against-women-act-2/u/23478819?cs_tk=AZmJNfUOS7NKMuzz1VsAMJfQnydW2UF8Jp_Yxsw-Ww%3D%3D&utm_campaign=009c3dd73ef34714a607626f35255599&utm_medium=email&utm_source=petition_update&utm_term=cs
You can also sign the petition to renew and extend the Violence Against Women Act, which is set to expire in December, here: https://www.change.org/p/reauthorize-the-violence-against-women-act-2
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@Emily I think the reason YA does a better job of balancing story/romance is because if you don’t include Twilight, the trailblazers–Hunger Games, Harry Potter, etc. all managed to have romantic subplots that captivated readers even though the main story was about characters ‘doing something’ that force romance to take the back seat. But you’re definitely right. I still find more YA to read and that I like than adult.
But I did finally remember the other author that was recced to me long ago that brought me into fantasy romance, and that was CL Wilson.