flashing gif midway through issue!
CABIN READING ROUNDUP
I worried in my last newsletter that I wouldn’t have as much to report regarding my reading, given that it was a working vacation—in the past few years my 9-5 had been occupied by sitting on the deck and generally loafing, but this time I had actual stuff to do. Still, I was aided by an excellent selection and read eight books. (Technically, I read six novels and finished two that I’d started before I left.) Here’s the full list:
Five Broken Blades by Mai Cortland
The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon
The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski
The Takedown by Lily Chu
Hannah Tate, Beyond Repair by Laura Piper Lee
A Fate Inked In Blood by Danielle L. Jensen
At First Spite by Olivia Dade
The Serpent & The Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent
My absolute favorite read of the trip was At First Spite by Olivia Dade. It was a late entry to the Vacation Reading bracket—I purchased it on Saturday at a new-to-me Knoxville bookstore called Fable Hollow and read about two hundred pages of it at lunch later that day, and couldn’t stop reading once I’d gotten back to the cabin. Olivia Dade is great at writing well-rounded, believable characters, put into slightly insane situations that in real life would have you screaming at them to run for the hills. Heroine Athena Greyson gets dumped before her wedding because her fiance’s brother has convinced him they’re not a good fit; jobless and adrift, she has to move into the spite house she bought her fiance before the split. And then she realizes that the brother lives next door. The brother, Matthew, turns out to have had very different reasoning behind urging his brother to break it off, and the two enter into (at first) a tentative friendship that deepens into something more. While it was a little bit slower of a burn than I normally like, the way Dade portrays Athena’s restlessness and depression and Matthew’s feelings of responsibility for his brother made this a truly immersive and fun read. Plus, when they finally do get down to it, steamy hot. (It’s also always nice to see a plus-size protagonist for whom their size isn’t a plot point!)
There’s a lot of what the girlies are calling “romantasy” on this list (And by “the girlies” I mean the Big Five.) My favorites from this list are The Hurricane Wars and A Fate Inked in Blood—I had read The Hurricane Wars back when it was Reylo fanfic and loved it, and I thought Guanzon did such a great job with translating the world building of Star Wars into something original and unique. For A Fate Inked in Blood, the slow buildup of attraction between the protagonists was burning hot—and housed in a plot that felt urgent and fast-paced.
One of the reasons I wanted to read so much of one particular genre—longtime readers know that I usually have a mishmash of genres and categories on my vacation lists—is that in the time I’ve spent away from the industry publishers are no longer afraid of having some canoodling (or heavier) in a fantasy novel. There were times earlier in my career where a little romance made fantasy a harder sell; too much romance, it was thought, would make the book unappealing to fantasy readers, and too heavy an emphasis on the fantasy elements would make the book unappealing to romance readers.
I’d like to thank the pandemic for taking genre expectations and running them through the blender. Yes, there is an element of “it doesn’t need to be good writing, it just needs to be a vibe” in some of the stuff that we’re seeing published. That will all straighten itself out eventually. What I’m hoping is that non-romance publishers recognize what romance publishers (and readers!) have known all along: romantic and sexual relationships are parts of life for many people, and those experiences would occur in these speculative/fantasy scenarios. This has been happening for a while, even in genres other than “romantasy.” I’m thinking particularly of an example from horror, specifically Gretchen Felker-Martin’s brilliant debut Manhunt. That’s a heavy book, about a found family of trans people in the apocalypse fighting off murderous TERFs and feral men, but Felker-Martin makes time for scenes of tenderness between the characters that I genuinely feel wouldn’t have flown even four years ago.
I don’t have a grand unified theory of what makes a book romantasy versus fantasy with romance in, but I sure would like to find some to have on my list.
RANDOM RAMBLINGS
I had a whole plan—well, half a plan, where I was going to talk about the pernicious evil of the constant growth mindset required by private equity, but honestly: that’s depressing, and I don’t have a unified theory on that, either. (Other than: it’s bad, and I hate it, and I don’t think private equity should be involved in housing or health care.)
Instead I’d like to talk about Robert Gottlieb again. I wrote last year about the memoir of his I’d read, Avid Reader. If you didn’t read that issue, Gottlieb was a legendary editor at S&S, Knopf, and The New Yorker. He acquired Joseph Heller and edited Toni Morrison, and was Robert Caro’s longtime editor. He died last year at 92, and this week, the New Yorker published a lovely article about his widow and his daughter getting ready for the first estate sale of his belongings, live this week at iGavel.com. Gottlieb was one of those characters who seemed destined to be in the arts somehow. My favorite anecdote from the article involved his time at summer camp:
They moved to the living room. Piled-up furniture was everywhere. Lizzie performed some minor bouldering to reach a box. “Letters from camp,” she said. “He somehow got the Times delivered.” Gottlieb made one camp friend, Eddie—E. L. Doctorow, it turned out. They read together in the cabin and avoided the lake.
Imagine the kind of kid who finagles a New York Times delivery at camp—what else was that kid going to do with his life?
This article (and the auction, which I’ve been browsing covetously for days since the listing went up) made me think about a conversation I had last week with our two new summer interns, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed youngsters looking to break into the industry. A coworker and I were talking with them about our publishing journeys, about how we started out in the industry and how we continued and made it work. One of them asked me if I thought there could still be the kind of industry crossover that I experienced when I moved from theater into publishing.
I confidently said that I thought there could, but in the days since I’ve wondered if that’s true. I think it is, to the extent that you can make anything work if you work hard enough at it—I don’t have many connections left from my theater days, and those I do live largely on a mostly-neglected group text thread. I find myself wondering more and more about the feasability of publishing workers building the kind of rich, full life that Robert Gottlieb was able to build for himself, even before he ascended to rarefied heights. Going to the movies and to the theater nearly every day as he did is an impossible ask for anyone without family money these days; you can’t join the board of a dance company, as he did, for anything less than $15,000. (And that price has probably gone up—that was the price in 2008, when I worked for a theater company.)
Like I said, this is random rambling. I don’t know where I’m going with this. Just that it used to be easier to be interesting in New York; it used to be easier to do cool things and meet cool people and develop a rich life full of art without a trust fund. That’s all.
WHAT I’M READING
This week I finished Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan’s first novel for adults—it was such a fun book (shoutout to Tiana at Orbit for the ARC!) It’s a transmigration novel, which I’d only ever encountered in books from Asian authors. Transmigration (or isekai) is when someone from our world is pulled into the world of a novel or play or movie. Rae, at the start of the book, is dying—and when she’s offered the chance to live if she can complete a certain task in the world of her favorite fantasy series, she doesn’t hesitate. Trouble is, she hasn’t actually read all the books—her sister was the real fan, and most of Rae’s knowledge was absorbed by osmosis. (If you’re familiar with The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, it’s as though Shen Yuan transmigrated into the Proud Immortal Demon Way world without being an obsessive reader.) And when she wakes up, she realizes that she’s woken up in the body of the story’s villain. Long Live Evil book is funny and heartbreaking by turns, and I highly recommend preordering it if you can!
PUBLISHING QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Ema left this comment on the last issue:
I'm curious if there's any "mainstream" market for erotica (not porn). Fifty Shades spawned a successful series, but didn't exactly open the market for the genre. Erotica is what I write, but I've always gone straight to Amazon, assuming the brick-and-mortar publishers wouldn't be interested. Thanks.
I find this question a little confusing, because Fifty Shades of Grey was published thirteen years ago—it was maybe the first book published by a mainstream imprint to emphasize BDSM and heavier-than-average heat levels, but it wasn’t the only thing in that vein being published. Romance imprints have always had spectrums of heat (a lot of people call it “spice” now, which I kind of hate.) Are you talking about erotic romance? There’s definitely a lot of it out there—much of it originating on KU, to be sure, but it’s being picked up by mainstream publishers right left and center these days. Just like Fifty Shades of Grey, which was self-published and POD before it was picked up by Random House. I also don’t quite understand the delineation between erotica and porn—to me, porn is anything that’s sex-focused rather than plot or relationship focused, but maybe you have a different definition?
In any case, publishers want to publish stuff that will make money, and they don’t really care where they find it. If it’s on KU or Amazon and it’s selling like gangbusters with a XXX rating, they’ll find a way to make money off it. (I’m looking at you, Ice Planet Barbarians.)
THIS WEEK IN HOCKEY
Pals, IDK what to tell you. This playoff series has felt interminable. But the Edmonton Oilers are good again, and Connor McDavid is probably going to win the Conn Smythe even if they don’t win. The man who for years has looked like a haunted Victorian doll, trapped in a crumbling team in a desolate Canadian wasteland might actually be able to carry his team to a Stanley Cup. I’d love my ancient king Sergei Bobrovsky to goaltend his way to a Panthers victory, but if McJesus wins, I’ll be happy for him.
HOUSEKEEPING
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I think I get what Eva is asking. I don't know of porn novels, but I do know of erotic fiction that isn't romance: Tiffany Reisz's THE SIREN. Suzanne Forster's TEASE. Erica Jong's FEAR OF FLYING. Is what I call "erotic fiction" what Eva calls "erotica"? Possibly. But I really can't think of any "porn" novels - at least not from any of the Big Four (or whatever number it is now) publishers.
My way to delineate is each genre/subgenre is about a character's...
Erotic romance: Relationship with another character.
Erotic fiction/erotica: Relationship with self.
Porn: Relationship with reader. (More about titillating the reader than interpersonal or self relationships.)
Just came up with this on the spot, so feel free to correct.