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Thursday News: eReatah subscription site launches; Marilyn Monroe and Ella...
eReatah E-book Subscription Venture Launches Beta – “eReatah” is a new ebook subscription site that will offer books from “Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon & Schuster, Workman, Sourcebooks, Ingram...
View ArticleMonday News: Pinkingwashing books for your kids; 3D printed organs; Bad sex...
Child-Proofing ‘Harry Potter’ – When I first saw this article I thought it was satire. A mother changes words when reading a book to her child. She calls it pink washing. For instance, she was going to...
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The not-so-fine lines between critiquing and policing
There was much discussion this past week about critiquing and policing in online communities. Robin’s post last week kicked off a lively discussion in the comments and on Twitter, and I started to see...
View ArticleTo warn or not to warn, and is that even the question?
As some of you may know, Riptide author Amelia Gormley recently stirred some controversy on her blog regarding book warnings. Her dubcon f**ck or die m/m erotica (or erotic Romance, depending on your...
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Wednesday News: Women keeping boys from reading, men reading Romance, Comcast...
Note from Jane: We’ve been having a number of server issues for the past few months related to spambots. At the advice of our host, I’ve installed a simple math captcha. If you want to bypass the...
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Revisiting Reader Consent
These two pieces were originally published in 2011. The first, by Jane, is on general reader consent, and the second, by Robin, is on reader consent and sexual force in Romance. The reader consent...
View ArticleAlpha, Beta, and Reading Against Type
One of the things I enjoyed most about the essays of Michelle Sagara and Elizabeth Vail on the alpha and beta heroes in Romance was the range of comments and interpretations of both heroic types. How...
View ArticleThe Isolated Romance Heroine
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Romance and life philosophies, and during the vibrant ensuing discussion, Liz Mc2 made a great point about how the more Romance novels narrow their focus to just the...
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Tuesday News: Dropbox drops files; YouTube stars getting book deals; SFF...
Heads Up: Dropbox Bug is Eating Files – So apparently Dropbox is actually deleting files, and while the company is trying to remedy the issue (and is offering a year of Dropbox Pro as compensation),...
View ArticlePoisoning the Well
For better or worse, I have always been a fighter. For the people and principles I care about most, I will go to the mat, and the more unfair a situation becomes, the more energized to set things right...
View ArticleBeing crazy: An insider’s view on ableist language
Kris used to review and blog on book related things before RL intervened in big, scary ways. Now she tends to somewhat vaguely hang out on Twitter, comment *very* infrequently on reading matters that...
View ArticleRomance and Emotional Justice
So I recently saw the movie version of Gone Girl, which had some provocative differences from the book, even though both were written by Gillian Flynn. Those differences, which include a reversal in...
View ArticleDeserving love and our own genre expectations
One of my favorite things about blogging here is that I can write about a germ of an idea and see it grow and blossom in many different directions and to places I had not even anticipated. Last week’s...
View ArticleWhat does it mean to be a “good” reader?
Last weekend delivered a hat trick of essays on critical reading, two on KJ Charles’s m/m novel Think of England, and one on Deborah Fletcher Mello’s The Sweetest Thing, in which Liz McCausland also...
View ArticleRomance is not a feminist genre – and that’s okay
As a genre celebrating love and largely written by and for women, I think it’s easy to view Romance as an inherently feminist genre. I have felt this way myself at times, and I’ve seen many other...
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Thursday News: on the contemplation of women, genre fiction, and life in general
Yet More on Female Characters in Fantasy – Rhiannon Thomas responds to Robin Hobb’s Facebook post on female characters in fantasy. Hobbs argues, among other things, that “I do not feel that gender...
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Friday News: upcoming romance conference, fake memoir pulled, sexist internet...
Library to Host Conference, “What Is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age,” Feb. 10-11 – Next month Harlequin will be sponsoring a conference on Romance at the Library of Congress. Conference...
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Monday News: RIP Cathie Linz, how to read books via Overdrive, a Romance...
RIP Cathie Linz – Cathie Linz, who was responsible for RWA Librarians’ Day and who advocated for Romance and librarians, in and outside of RWA, passed away yesterday from colon cancer. She wrote more...
View ArticleGenre Exploitation or Unreasonable Reader Expectations?
Last week I linked to an essay by Remittance Girl for the DA news, in which she argued extensively against the Clean Reader application, which replaces so-called “dirty” words with “clean” versions....
View ArticleWhen classic Romance novels don’t remain relevant to readers
This past weekend I was involved in a great email discussion about the question of whether Romance fiction faced a unique challenge that other types of fiction, including other genres don’t. Namely,...
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