lazy day…

Pages written (sorry, Larissa): 9
This is a large number for me.

It might be a female thing, but I don’t have much energy today. I also don’t have anything particularly original to say (other than the above) so today I’m going to be sending you to interesting blogs I’ve been reading:

Poor Alison Kent. Chick can’t open her mouth without someone jumping down her throat. She posts an innocent musing about her reading preferences and the romance writing blogosphere reacts like North Korea just had a suspicious “seismic event.” Everyone responds with “Well, if you don’t like romance heroines, maybe you should stop writing them!” Ou-ooch. I really don’t think Kent meant any harm in her post. She did title it ‘Write What You Enjoy Reading” and then wrote that she didn’t enjoy reading romance, so unfortunately anyone who skimmed over the first sentence of her blog might have missed that the whole point of the title was to introduce her ongoing conundrum. I think this might be another example of ultra-sensitive romance writers and readers who are so used to defending themselves that they do it at the slightest provocation, and they fear Kent is one of those writers who is about to jump ship and claim she never did like the genre, anyway. She’s not, I assure you. The real tragedy here is that Kent has been so disappointed in her in-genre reading choices that she goes elsewhere, which is a shame, because there really is some good stuff out there. After all, Alison Kent keeps selling, so there’s obviously a market out there for the stuff she likes, and likely other writers who are doing it. (Alison, hon, when you read this, maybe you should think of branching out from the RITA entries. If I judged the genre based on the GH entries I read every year — even taking into account that they are unpubbed — I’d throw in the towel, too.) 😉

Next up, we’ve got Kathleen O’Reilly, whose post on Story and the state of film reminds me very much of the ideas put forth in the amazing essay F/X Porn by Mr. David Foster Wallace. I love this essay. I refer to it all the time when I complain about Hollywood movies, and the term “[BLANK] porn” has made it into the household parlance. For those of you without the time or inclination to read DFW’s whole essay (and I suggest you seriously reconsider your stance, he’s a brilliant writer and literary critic), I will sum up: F/X Porn refers to those action movies in which the plot seems to exist solely to set up the long action sequences [cough, cough, carchaseinsecondMatrix, cough cough], just like in porn movies, the premise only exists to set up the extended sex scenes. So Sailor Boy and I talk about romantic comedy porn, reality show porn, fried chicken porn… I love our relationship, by the way.

Finally a quick change of gears from writeroriented blogs, we’ve got Overworked and Underf*cked. People who say my heroine’s are unsympathetic and slutty? Read Avatar, and you’ll see that my audience is not the soccer mom. Man, is this chick hot (and the pic of the — is that caviar? — hot.