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Posts Tagged ‘popular romance fiction’

Back from the long holiday

Posted in A writer's life, Burn out, Creative passion, feminism and romance, phd, Trying to focus, tagged , , , , on November 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »

We’ve been to Bali, Singapore and drove through Victoria and spent a number of weeks in Tasmania. We tested positive for Covid on arriving in Hobart. Luckily we were still able to do our Terror Australis Writers Retreat because they let us, and we had a sefl-contained unit and our meals could be delivered. I got out of isolation in time to have my fan girl moment with Ann Cleeves.

This is not a detailed travelogue. Something even more exciting to me!

You see for nearly a year now I have not wanted to be in my office. Instead of finding it hard to get me out of there and off my computer, I just didn’t want to go in there. I thought perhaps I had burn out from the PhD. I’ve dabbled and so on. I got a few things done but the joy wasn’t there…just little glimpses of hope when I achieved something.

On Thursday, I decided I was going to work on an academic article based on my research. This has been on my to do list for about 2 years…and it kept getting pushed down the list so far down it wasn’t even on my radar. Along with my PhD novel I might add. I started doing some preliminary work. Reading some articles, checking out the formatting requirements for the journal I want to submit to etc. Today, Sunday, I started on it. I haven’t put a lot into it yet. What I felt, though ,is what amazed me. I felt joy. Absolute joy. And well that surprised me.

This is why only now looking back to I see that it was most likely burn out, now that it has lifted. I think the holiday helped because you know 6 weeks of being away from home, a free routine mostly. We got Bali Belly, I had a cough sore throat (non-covid) before I left and then go Covid for reals and now I’m coming good. I feel really good physically and mentally. I’m so grateful for that.

I’ve got a short window to focus on the article and the novel to be honest as we head overseas to the UK in December for 2.5 months and there’s a lot to do before we go and not as much time as you’d think to write while away.

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Romance survey and PhD update

Posted in feminism and romance, Romance, Romance reader survey PHD, Romance scholarship, Romance Writer Survey PHD, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 27, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I am back on campus after sick leave. I was AWOL for over a month but all good now. This has put back my PhD project timetable unfortunately.

I thought I’d provide an update on the romance survey. It is still running but I will close it off at the end of May as that is when I am scheduled to deliver my confirmation seminar and be confirmed in my PhD. It’s a formality I have to go through. Then I’ll be starting the interviews. So if you are interested in completing the survey you still have time as a reader or a writer. Links below.

Looking at Survey Monkey today I have received 682 responses from romance readers. That is absolutely fantastic. It’s an international survey and I’ve received responses from Europe, USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK etc. Brilliant. I’m so thrilled.

The number of skips. Skip are where respondents abandon a survey or skip questions or miss questions. I haven’t done the analysis yet on which questions were skipped so I’m only giving total numbers here. The skips for readers vary from 14 to over two hundred and some questions it’s about 184 skips. From a quick scan a lot of the responses that required the reader to type a response had the highest number of skips. Overall I don’t have a problem with the skipping. Romance readers have been very generous with their answers and there’s very little abandoning the survey before finishing it.

However, if you are a respondent on the reader survey and would like to send me your thoughts on the survey and any issues you had then they would be most welcome. Overall, it’s an amazing response. Either reply or send me an email through the contact page or use Twitter or Facebook.

Survey responses from writers so far are 377, which is also amazing and I’m very grateful for these. Also international and that’s been mind blowing really. Writers though appear to have difficulty with the survey with a very high number of skips and people leaving the survey.

From what I can see about 136 people just stopped the survey just after the start and I don’t know why. The rate of skips is fairly consistent so the real response rate is closer to 241.

Early reports from respondents indicated that they had tried to use the survey on the phone and had technical issues. Some of those skipping have come back in and completed the survey but as I’m no tech guru I don’t know.

If there was a reason you as a romance writer dropped out of the survey please let me know if you can. It will help me to understand what issues there were and if I can answer your questions then you still have time to participate if you want. The survey can be completed anonymously. I only ask for contact details if you want to be included in follow up interviews. I will not be interviewing that many people so I can’t say who will be interviewed as yet.

The first part of the survey contains the compulsory questions I must include as this is an authorised survey through the University of Canberra, complete with ethics approval. You need to agree to me using the data you provide or you will be exited from the survey at the beginning. All data will be kept in accordance with the University of Canberra’s data retention and privacy requirements. I will not be using any email addresses or contact details other than contacting those volunteering to be interviewed. The only info I see is the IP address, which I’m no guru so I wouldn’t know how to identify you. No unselling or stuff like that. This is entirely aboveboard. There is even a complaints process outlined in the information materials.

So help out if you can.

Let’s see if we can get the overall response over 1000! Come on. We can do it!

Romance READER survey  link to Survey Monkey. Here.

Romance WRITER survey link to Survey Monkey. Here.

 

Couple Love Beach Romance Togetherness Concept

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Testing clickable images

Posted in feminism and romance, Romance reader survey PHD, Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 9, 2017| 1 Comment »

I was trying to come up with a nifty way to encourage romance readers to respond to my survey for my Phd. So I’m putting this here so I can test it. Smile!

survey ad readers

 

So here is the one for writers.

writers of romance fiction

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More on those passive heroines with a focus on Georgette Heyer

Posted in feminism and romance, phd, Regency romance, Romance, Romance scholarship, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 15, 2016| 4 Comments »

Since my previous post I’ve mulling over the so-called ‘passive’ heroine in romance novels. The stories I mentioned that didn’t have passive heroines in the previous post are fairly recent, say from the 1990 onwards. Also, the heroine I believe must be considered in context. The heroine in the Barbara Cartland novel discussed was an historical heroine. Would that account for her apparently passivity? Maybe. Then I thought of Georgette Heyer’s work and thought not so.

I have a weakness for Georgette Heyer’s Georgian/Regency romances.(Heyer died in 1974 so her works are much earlier than 1990s)  They don’t have sex scenes all, but they evoke a period in time reminiscent of the great and wonderful Jane Austen. A fantasy world, I suppose, with particular tropes. (I am equally weak at the knees for Scottish historials with Lairds in them. Totally non-realistic. Yes, I know it’s all fantasy, right?).

So four books that I have been listening to on Audible a lot lately are, Venetia (abridged), Sylvester (abridged), The Quiet Gentleman and the Grand Sophy. I have lots of Heyer’s books in print, but these just happen to be on my Audible account and I replay them a lot. Venetia and Sylvester are read by Richard Armitage. Enough said. He does a brilliant job. Those two books got me breaking my Audible rule. I set out not wanting to buy books on Audible that I own in print. I confess I spanked myself thoroughly when I broke the rule, but you know…Richard Armitage!!%$$$###???

Then I decided I didn’t like the abridged books, so I bought The Quiet Gentleman (almost romantic suspense) and The Grand Sophy because they were heaps longer and I could go away into another world while driving long distances.

I thought about the heroines and about whether they were passive or not. There is definitely a spectrum here. Sophia Stanton-Lacey is the strongest, least passive and positively feminist heroine, in some regards. She is the centre of a whirlwind. The first time I read this book I quite missed that it was a romance, or meant to be. I had to read it again. I missed something. It’s quite a wonderful satire. Now more recently listening to it many times. I can’t  count them. I’m weak. What can I say? Sophy stands up for herself. She locks horns. Charles her cousin gets quite riled with her. He is probably the most aggressive out of the heroes in these four novels. Mind you he has to be or he’d be pulp on the bottom of Sophy’s shoes. I could go into the plot a bit more but why spoil it for you. Just read the damn thing or listen to it.

Venetia on the other hand has lived a very retiring life. She pretends to be passive but she’s got steel in her, resisting the boring neighbour who wants to marry her. She falls in love with a rake. Who might be a libertine but is not overly aggressive. They form a lovely friendship until they are separated by interfering relatives. But when she finds out about her past, which has been kept for her, she just goes for the goal. She makes the rake propose to her, against his will. I wouldn’t call that passive.

Sylvester features Phoebe, who runs away when she thinks she’s going to be forced to marry Sylvester, a duke, who snubbed her. I wouldn’t say she was feisty exactly but she’s very unusual and when they are thrown together her magic explodes. She laughs at the duke, tells him what she thinks (a bit like Margaret in North and South) and she’s quite clever. They have an accord. Sylvester is not aggressive at all. He’s a gentle man, but very capable of fixing mishaps. Phoebe also has courage and gets into scrapes trying to do the right thing, to right the wrongs she has done.

In The Quiet Gentleman there is no aggressive hero. He’s so laid back, he’s almost effeminate. In fact, he doesn’t think much of Drusilla at all. She’s quite plain, short and plump. She isn’t trying to win him either. There’s is a slow and gentle coming together.Drusilla is practical and also quite determined to prevent, St Erth being murdered. It is really quite interesting really. I have listened (as well as read) this story and I don’t know when the transition occurs. It’s just a slow warming of him to her. Apparently he’s so gorgeous he was out of her league in the romance stakes and yet…without trying in any way to fix him, he falls for her. While Drusilla seems a bit laid back, she rears up at the end and tells them all what’s what. I don’t consider Drusilla passive, but realistic. This story is also an excellent satire and Heyer is great with her character descriptions. What a gifted writer.

So I don’t think historical heroines in romance novels are passive either. Of course, there are some. But don’t say they are all PASSIVE. You’re wrong!

If you are a romance reader or writer, please consider taking my survey. It’s for my PhD on Feminism in popular romance fiction. Just click here for more details.

 

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The not so passive popular romance fiction

Posted in Paranormal romance, phd, Romance fiction, Romance reader survey PHD, Romance scholarship, Romance Writer Survey PHD, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 11, 2016| 3 Comments »

I’m back on the PhD with a vengeance lately. This means I’m reading some academic papers that get me angry with their generalisations.

‘the ideal heroine in a romance is passive…’ Mary Ellen Ryder

‘Romance’s generic requirement that the hero should be volatile in his affections and sexually intimidating…’ Doreen Thierauf

These are throw away lines in articles that have some good in then but the stuff mentioned above makes me scribble ‘bullshit!’ in the white space.

Ryder in particular made me growl this week.I get strange looks from other PhD candidates. Ryder read some Barbara Cartland. Each to its own I suppose, but her greatest flaw was saying that because Cartland published 24 books when she was 93 she obviously wrote to formula…’which means that examining just one of her books should reveal a great deal about the whole romance genre.’ For godssake, the whole fucking genre, really? I wouldn’t say one book from any author would allow me to talk about all their works, let alone the whole genre.

Her actual analysis of the text was really quite interesting but why put that tripe at the beginning of her paper?  And it was a gothic bloody romance to boot.

I pull my hair out and shout why, why, why?

Luckily there were some good articles, like from Mairead Owen and possibly Laura Struve (I’m still pondering it). I guess I’m learning to be critical. Step one for me.

Also, I find that when academics talk about Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey they lose their shit when it comes to romance. They may be blockbusters but that doesn’t mean they are the typical romance novel.

Actually, I don’t think there is a typical romance novel. There are key features of a popular romance novel but I won’t go into that. Others like Pamela Regis have already done that.

My current fiction reading though has run counter to what these people are saying about passive heroines and violent and volatile heroes. I’m reading some vintage, retro if you like, Amanda Carpenter. I’ve mentioned her before in past posts. The Great Escape (1984) and The Passage of the Night (1990). (Amanda Carpenter writes as Thea Harrison these days.). These book are examples of her early works. She’s a damn fine writer and I think has a great mind to boot. I can certainly tell she had the chops for paranormal writing in those early days. (I’ve read four of her books so far. They have been very different from each other!)

(possible spoiler)

The Great Escape features a 17 year old protagonist. She’s an heiress, unhappy but quite clever. She escapes from her guardians and is pursued by a PI, whom she outsmarts. In this book, she drugs the PI, she punches him, she seduces him and then after they fall in love, she gives away all her money without consulting him once about it. She hates the money. It defines her too much. If this book had been published later, I suspect it would have been a romantic suspense because someone is trying to kill the heroine.

So in this 1984 story, the heroine is not passive and has agency.

The Passage of the Night is also very interesting. The heroine kidnaps the tycoon hero at gunpoint, she drugs him and then takes him to a mountain top in Vermont. The reason she has kidnapped him is to save her sister, but the hero isn’t anything like her sister said he was. He’s angry at being kidnapped, of course, but he is never aggressive or violent. He chops wood continuously to ‘sublimate’. He’s not going to have her charged. He voluntarily stays with her and then she flies him back because she can’t justify her actions anymore. She’s a helicopter pilot and plane pilot and her family has a bit of money. She’s also loyal and brave.  He’s on seven figures. She sees his life and doesn’t like the long hours etc. She doesn’t demand he change his lifestyle but she’s walking out until he sorts his priorities. In the end, he gives up his job.  I think that about reverses the tropes.

I’m not done with the Carpenter read through yet. It’s fascinating.

Other fiction reading, Full Moon Rising, Keri Arthur. I’m sorry. Riley Jensen kicks butt. It’s urban fantasy on the’ boil the coffee over’ end of the spectrum but mmm…not much passivity there.

I’ve started rereading JD Robb’s …In Death series. I’m on book five so far (it’s been a week?) and there’s no sign of passivity there.

The In Death series is harder to peg. It’s futuristic urban fantasy with romantic elements or romantic suspense or just SF crime with romance. The heroine and the hero are the same couple all the way through (very well done by the way) and for me the series discusses child sex abuse all the way through, even peels it back to a very stark and dark root that makes me blanch. But I applaud JD Robb for doing it (JD Robb is Nora Roberts btw) and I think she’s brilliant.

In my reading of retro Mills & Boon, there are occasionally passive heroines and other times not. I’ve not read everything. No one will be able to. I’m not as well read in romance as people I know, but I know enough not to generalize about it.

But I’m happy to get angry at people who do and blog about it…maybe…

 

BTW I still have my survey going for my PHD study. If you write or read popular romance fiction, please check out my survey. I’d really appreciate the contribution. See blog post here.

Articles cited

Owen, M, Re-Inventing Romance: Reading Popular Romance Fiction, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 20. No. 4, pp.537-546, 1997

Ryder, M. E, Smoke and mirrors: Event patterns in the discourse structure of a romance novel, Journal of Pragmatics, 31 (1991) pp. 1067-1080

Struve, L, Sisters of Sorts: Reading Romantic Fiction and the Bonds Among Female Readers, The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44, No. 6, 2011.

Thierauf, D, Forever After:Desire in the 21st-Century Romance Blockbuster, The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2016.

 

 

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