oday, I was forced to think about methods of authentication. I have a scene or two in my book in which my heroine heads to a bank to make a withdrawal from an account. When I originally wrote them, I did a little bit of research to see where banks were and what interest they paid and that sort of thing, but the research I found did not give me any details about the actual practice of banking in London in 1836. Feeling to lazy to delve further, I made a mental note to do Actual Research (namely, hoping someone on the Beaumonde knew better) later, and I made the rest up. (For those of you who are cringing at this lackadaisical attitude, I have to say that there are some historical details I find endlessly fascinating–like, when did the courts of law and equity merge? And what happened to cases pending in Chancery when they did? There are others, like, say, everything to do with finance that I find immeasurably boring.

This, I thought, fell in to the latter category. It turns out I was wrong. Well, wrong about some of the details I’d made up, but also wrong that the details would be boring. It turns out–and this is oh-so-topical–that problems of authenticating identity have always existed. My biggest problem in thinking about banking in 1836 London was this. By the time 1836 rolled around, London was a large enough metropolitan region, and the larger banks had sufficient clientele, that authentication by recognition was simply not much of an option. That is, the banks had lots of clients, and while they probably knew the wealthier ones (or, more like, the solicitors of the wealthier ones), they probably didn’t know Farmer Jones and Grocer Bob. How did Farmer Jones and Grocer Bob go about keeping a banker? In other words, even setting aside questions of bank failure, how could Farmer Jones walk into a bank and trust them not only to keep his money, but to give it up to Jones–and only Jones–on request? And these mundane details that were of actual plot-significance for me–who would actually bother to write them down?

After all, there are so many aspects of our life today–how an ATM card works, for instance, and the manner in which checks function, and the financial web that allows us to walk up to a bank in the Netherlands and withdraw Euros from the American Dollar salary direct-deposited by our employer–I mean, all of those words today, if you had no idea what they meant, wouldn’t even explain how the system works. Enter this incredibly detailed description of how banking works. It is essentially a comprehensive manual, describing exactly how to run a bank, with everything discussed in both minute detail, with a running commentary about the purpose of all the things that are required. It discusses things I would never even have thought of researching, but that I got wrong, including the method in which debits and credits were entered into an account (I shoulda known that they did double-ledgered accounting–of course they did double-ledgered accounting–my brother taught me better than that!), and the manner in which debits and credits were entered (they were not, as I had thought, entered as 3l 5s 2d, as sums were so often written–that takes too long. Instead they were £ 3-5-2.

I also learned that when people talked about a holographic draft, they meant a draft in the account owner’s own handwriting–a historical detail that I suspect can’t be used since the word “holograph” would only confuse the modern reader who attributes a very different meaning to the word. They also had a signature registry, which they used to match signatures on drafts. In any event, I feel suitably chastened. I thought I was going to be searching after arcane details, but it turns out that I was actually searching after intelligent solutions to an extremely hard problem.

I had dreaded it for so long, and it was fun! It was like going to the dentist and getting a book instead of a teeth-cleaning!

  don’t demand perfection from my books; I read because there are enough truly magical books–transportive and transcendent–out there that one out of ten or twenty really rocks my world.  At the rate that I read, that means I get one or two a month.  And of the books that don’t hit the magical mark, well more than half of them are enjoyable and interesting.  So reading is a lovely lottery; I almost always win, and sometimes I win big.

But there is a level of book beyond the magical.  These are the books that don’t just take over my conscious mind.  Once I pick them up, they seem to conquer the farthest reaches of my nervous system, from my brain stem down to the nerves in my toes.  They go beyond mere transport.  And the amazing thing, afterwards, is that I cannot figure out one thing that is wrong with the book.  Not a single thing.  This is a perfect book, and there are not so many of those in this world.  I think I find one once every three or four years.

To give you an idea how picky I am about applying this label, I want to talk about a book that I think is utterly magical, brilliant, incredible . . . and not perfect.  Loretta Chase’s “Lord of Scoundrels”:  Not perfect.  Almost, but that bit at the end with the fight for the Macguffin is just a little over the top, and while I think Jessica is a fantastic heroine, she has almost no character arc.  All the growth is Dain’s.  Or Susan Elizabeth Phillip’s “Ain’t She Sweet?”  Smart, sassy, funny, clever, heart-warming . . . but Sugar Beth wanting the painting for the mentally-challenged daughter of her former husband always struck me as just a tad too saccharine for the rest of the book.  I’m not trying to criticize either of these books–I’m just saying that in my nomenclature, even the books at the very highest pinnacle usually miss the mark of perfection.

But there are perfect books.

The Chosen, by Chaim Potok.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams.

Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett.

Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart.

And I am now delighted to be add another book to the list:  The Host, by Stephenie Meyer.  I was expecting this book to be interesting and engrossing.  I had hoped it would be magical.  I got perfection.  Absolute, utter perfection.  So go read this one.  It might not sound like something you want to read–it’s a semi-dystopian science fiction for adults, with something that is either a love triangle or a love quadrangle, depending on whether you count bodies (3) or souls (4).  And it is utterly, completely, heart-stoppingly brilliant.

here are a couple of so-called rules that exist in romance novels, all of which can be broken. But there are some things that I suspect looked like rules ten or twenty years ago, but which we might scratch our heads about now, or even roll our eyes when the execution is too ridiculous.

For instance, I’m suspecting it used to be a rule that the girl had to be a virgin. Unless she was a widow, and then–MAYBE–fifty percent chance, she was a virgin. It also used to be a rule, I think, that the girl had to resist the idea of sex as much as the man pursued it with single-minded zeal. But I think the new generation of readers is breaking those rules to bits. I don’t have a problem with sex, and I don’t have a problem with virgins, but I have to roll my eyes at the convolutions that used to crop up to keep those rules inviolate.
Now I’m beginning to wonder whether there’s another romance trope that’s going by the wayside. You know what I’m talking about: the hero and heroine hate each other on the surface; they’ve spent well over a hundred pages fighting; but that rage boils up into physical attraction and then they can’t keep their hands off each other (or he kisses her to punish her or prove his dominance) and next thing you know, he’s lifting her skirts and bam–he plunges inside and she has the first orgasm of her life. Even though we’re all reading it and thinking–no WAY. If she were that sensitive, wouldn’t she have noticed it before when she touched herself? And who is that sensitive? Seconds? Really? They were just yelling at each other half a minute ago! There’s only one conclusion: The hero has a magic schlong. Everywhere it touches, orgasms burst forth. (This is not to be confused with the other romance trope, the glittery hooha, which I suspect is going nowhere).

So I was thinking about the last two debuts that I read (see previous post), and I realized that although both books had a sensuality level that was burning hot, neither one featured a hero with a magic schlong. Sex–good sex–takes work and an emotional connection. The sex isn’t always good in both those books, and that fact makes both books stronger. In a way, that made the sex that was good even hotter, because it felt more real. And they aren’t the only ones–Eloisa James writes heroines who don’t always have orgasms with their heroes, and I’m sure she’s not alone.

So what do you think? Trend or aberration? Is the magic schlong going by the wayside? How do you feel about magic schlongs–in your fiction reading and writing, of course; we’ll leave the TMI for Tessa on Tuesday.

he problem with (a) reading really fast and (b) being willing to stay up all night finishing Harry Potter is that when you finish the book at 4:30 in the morning, there’s nobody to talk to about it.

Sigh.

o in 26 hours and forty minutes, the next Harry Potter will come out, and I will read it, without stopping for anything.

I have decided to make predictions (I’ve been dodging the Harry Potter spoilers right and left, so these are virgin spoilers).
Ron will die, and it will have something to do with Harry’s wand, Dumbledore’s death, and the phoenix feather core in both Voldemort’s and Harry’s wand.
Snape will die. Snape is good.

And Draco Malfoy will save Hermione’s life; Kreacher will somehow be involved.
How’s that for out there predictions?  Anyone want to add a few of their own?

f you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you should go buy a copy of Ericka Scott’s Crystal Clear, which just came out today. I just finished it. It’s fantastic–suspenseful and hot and beautifully written. I’m in awe, and I hope that this is the first of many from one of my favorite FanLitters.

ome people have muses. Some people have girls in the basement. I don’t have any of those. I have dog biscuit gods.

See, you wouldn’t know it to look at — well, to look at my resume, for instance, but I’m actually not very smart. It’s all an illusion. Since, I’m, um, pseudonymous, you can’t actually look at my resume, so I’ll just have to sketch in the details and hope you understand that this isn’t supposed to be boasting. Ever since I figured out how to channel the dog biscuit gods (approximately age 20? who knows these days?), I have been alarmingly successful. It’s alarming to me because success is supposed to come only to those who work hard and are smart, and I am lazy and stupid.

Due to this alarming success, I have accidentally managed to do things like, um, get the highest grades in . . . um . . . all my classes. I accidentally got a double major in two hard sciences, and I accidentally went to graduate school and got a graduate degree in one of those, and I accidentally went and did another graduate-level degree after that, both degrees at places that would reasonably be considered reasonably competitive. I’m using the word accident a lot, but in any event, somehow or other I managed to accidentally end up with all this stuff on my resume which pretty much amounts to a golden ticket for whatever I want in my other profession.
The truth is that I am a fraud. I am not very smart. I don’t work hard at all. In fact, throughout school, my secret to success looked like this:

Step One: This is hard. I have no clue how to do it. I am doomed.
Step Two: I give up. I shall go read a romance novel.

Step Three: That was lovely. Wait — now I get it! This is what’s going on.

As I’m sure you can tell, I am lucky enough to have a direct channel to the Dog Biscuit Gods. What I do is lay out problems for them, basically chucking the whole problem into my subconscious as if I were tossing dog biscuits into a dark yard late at night. Then, I shut the back door and let them alone by reading novels.  While I’m otherwise occupied, the gods come out and snuff out the dog biscuits. And then, when I am finished with the romance novel in question, I go back and look, and lo and behold, someone has eaten my dog biscuits and left me answers instead. Yay! Thanks, Dog Biscuit Gods.
The Dog Biscuit Gods are equal-opportunity eaters. They don’t care if the problem is physics or metaphysics. They’ll eat anything. And you have to be very, very careful about what you feed them. Sometimes, you’ll really really want to figure out your homework, and so you’ll go and read a romance novel, and then you’ll discover that what you were thinking about in the back of your mind was how hungry you were, and so when you finish your romance novel and go check for a solution to your homework, what you have instead is a really awesome recipe for pasta that uses all the leftover stuff in your fridge. And then you have to go read another romance novel just so you can get your homework done. After you eat, of course.
(I’m really not kidding about this. Also, the Dog Biscuit Gods named themselves. I had nothing to do with it.)

In any event, the Dog Biscuit Gods are going crazy over this whole writing a novel thing. They’re just yapping up a storm. They love it. But it’s really annoying, because sometimes I really, really need them to deal with my Actual Job. You know, the stuff I get paid for. I ask them these questions very politely. “How can we satisfy X and Y?” I ask. Or “Can Z possibly be true?” And “What shall we do about epsilon?”
What I get back are these really kick-ass titles for new books, complete with major plotlines and omniscient crabs. I shake my head in despair.

ow did you get started reading romance novels?

I was a late-bloomer, at least as far as reading went.  Yes, six years ago (I know I’ve told some of you that it’s less than that, but I really sat down and counted.  Gosh.  I had no idea so much time had passed!), I thought that romance novels were dime-a-dozen grocery-store interchangeable books.  And some of them, I have to admit, are.  But . . . .  But!

I read my first romance novel when I was visiting my then-boyfriend’s family over Christmas.  We’d been together for two years, and there was a huge snowstorm, and so we were stuck in their house.  His mom had stored a bunch of novels on the shelves, and one of them was a Georgette Heyer (I forget the name now, but it was the one with the incredibly stupid girl that would run off with anyone who offered to buy her a purple dress).

I read it because I was a desperate devotee of Lois McMaster Bujold (and still am–I regularly have to stop myself from using her phrases.  I’ve read her books so many darned times–and by “so many darned times” I mean, in some cases, well over fifty), and because Bujold dedicated one of her books to “Jane, Georgette, Dorothy, and Charlotte–long may they rule.”

Jane I had already read, and loved, of course.  Charlotte Bronte I wasn’t too fond of.  Dorothy Sayers had been a riot while the books lasted.  And that left . . . Gerogette Heyer.  So I read the Heyer.  And then I read another one–The Black Moth, I think.  And then I was out of Heyers, and not yet out of snow, so I picked up a regular old romance novel.  It was “Thunder and Roses” by Mary Jo Putney, and boy was that a different read.

Sex.  Not just sex, but some of the most incredible sexual tension I’d read.  (Later, after I’d read substantially more, I’d realize something I haven’t said before:  I think sexual tension, rather then sex, is what really makes romances great.  Some authors confuse the two;  Putney does not, and “Thunder and Roses” is the most incredible proof thereof that I can imagine.  It’s still one of my favorites.)  And real characters, characters I cared about.  Characters who were smart, and interesting.  I was hooked.  I was beyond hooked.  As an underestimate:  at the rate of approximately 6 books per week (underestimate–fewer this year, of course, but way more a year or two ago), times fifty weeks (assume that I take some time off), times six years.  I’ve read almost everything Georgette Heyer has ever written (thank you, large lots on eBay), everything by Putney since.  And Jo Beverly, and Loretta Chase (everything of hers I can find, that is), and Edith Layton, and Julia Quinn, and Eloisa James, and Christina Dodd, and Teresa Medeiros, and way too many others to mention.

Too many others except Diana Gabaldon and Nora Roberts—I’ve read three Roberts, and haven’t liked it, and barely managed to bull my way through Outlander, which I found boring.  So go figure.
How about you?  What was your first romance novel?