jen reviews a romance novel

[originally posted on myspace on August 7, 2008, Thursday]

Can't sleep. Let's complain about a book instead.

This post is rated "R."

So, I gave up on reading that one romance novel (the Spanish trillionare or something) via dailylit because, well, it was boring.

Someone donated a bunch of romance paperbacks to Mumbles (imagine my surprise! to Christiany, morally upright, still trying to marry me off Mumbles and she accepted them!). I took one today to read at lunch time, mostly out of boredom (and hoping to find funny passages to read out loud to the kitchen group). So, I picked: Dangerously in Love by Allison Hobbs.

It's essentially the story of a woman (a whiny woman), her husband (a sex freak) and a stripper (that the husband is kinda obsessed with, more on that in a sec).

The wife, Dayna or something, married her husband Reed and really wants to have his baby, even though he's a complete ass during the entire book and seems to never have been remotely nice to her. For some reason (I skipped her sections as she was so annoying), she realizes she needs to divorce his dumb ass, which really ticks him off.

The husband, Reed, likes to go to strip clubs and have sex with other women (preferably dirty, stanky women, which his wife is not). So, yeah, there's lots of talk about variations on him describing his hard ons. Fun. Anyway, he really likes this one stripper but she's not available and he has a crack-head back up that he turns to for cheap sex...but he also has sex with some old lady stripper (with a "reputation" and having sex with her is like making history) and (get this!) in a moment of desparation, the crack-head's great-grandma (ewwwwwwh). When the wife he hates asks for a divorce, he gets pissed (wouldn't he want to be rid of her?) and essentially goes down hill, turning crazeeeeeh.

Then there is the stripper, who is young and stupid and plays out all the stereotypical movie/book stripper mistakes. She loses her job at the club when a co-worker spreads lies about her and ultimately, she becomes an escort (apparently, it's an easy transition) and has all the stereotypical escort run ins (creepy weird guy not into sex, creepy weird guy into dressing as a woman, creepy weird guy who likes it rough, snore). Anyway, somehow she decides to give up that line of work and becomes a waitress. Quickly, she chats up a regular patron, a "nice looking," normal call who calls himself Greg (you see where this is going?). Greg offers to drive her home one night but turns out, Greg is actually crazy ass Reed! He kidnaps her and tortures her (because now he's beyond sex and is all into the power struggle) and, hey, turns out he also kidnapped the crack-head. Who knew? The crack-head somehow escapes and goes to the police.

Stripper gets put into the hospital and decides to get out of stripping/escorting (saying she prayed for a miracle to escape and that crack-head delivered it). Crack-head sells her story to the tabloids for lots of money (seriously). Reed gets arrested or something (who cares at this point?) but whiny wife Dayna? She finds true love! She meets this guy and they eventually have sex...only he goes down on her, he does not (to use proper romance novel lingo) have his own natural, manly release. She worries about this and he tells not to, that this is SACRED LOVE. Um, ok. And again, at the end, he talks some b.s. about sacred love.

Huh?

This book is so confused. It wants to be a thriller, it wants to be preachy. Some of the graphic stuff sneakily borders on American Psycho territory. I just don't picture the stereotypical romance novel reader digging on this (but according to the reviews on Amazon, they did), but props to the author for trying something kind of different.

And I kind of like the pacing. Each chapter is in the voice of a different character but it can be a bit confusing. You are in a scene with one person and she cuts it, akwardly, to another person, in an unrelated scene, but then cuts back to the first person, still resolving his scene. It was a little too back and forth. Overall, it felt like three separate stories smushed into one book...three predictable stories (unloved wife finds real love, stripper with heart of gold repents, and crazy man gets his in the end) that wouldn't have been strong on their own, I suppose...so let's cram them all together.

But my real problem with it is that basically, it teaches that if you enjoy sex, there must be something wrong with you and you will be punished (Reed, the stripper). But somehow, Dayna, who is prudish and just wants to make babies with a husband, any husband, gets rewarded with Mr. Sacred Love and some weight loss induced boost of confidence.

And, just for the record, this is an "African-American" oriented book ["urban romance']...which really meant nothing to me. All it really resulted in was variations of (obnoxious) descriptions of skin colors ("color of coffee with a touch of cream," ugh), some "street" language thrown in for "realness," and some racial slurs towards Italians and Asians. Oh, and the title is referring to a Beyonce song title. I think she'd be proud...

Go Ask Alice, a commentary and distraction from insufferable work conditions

[originally posted on myspace on July 29, 2008 - Tuesday]

And oh, the torture…the water is out (or something) here which means no bathrooms and NO COFFEE. Ugh.

Foreword:

This post sparked my reminiscing about the book. If you never read Go Ask Alice, then I seriously doubt you were ever a pre-teen/teenage girl, as it seems all of them have read it at some point in time. It's essentially the diary of a teenager (apparently, not a real person, but more on that later) who goes through a predictable (now) path of experimenting with drugs to addict destruction to brief redemption back to being given LSD laced peanuts.

And moving on:

I was a bookworm as a child. I read everything in the "Young Adult" aisle (was it even called that back then?) from Judy Bloom to Christopher Pike. I remember when I bought Go Ask Alice. It was a now defunct bookstore, in a mall that still exists but is empty and due to be tore down soon (as soon as the economy recovers). It was towards the middle of the YA row, on the top shelf. It's dreary cover, it's song reference title, it all immediately appealed to me. And once I read the plot synopsis (for some reason, I was deeply interested in fiction about troubled youth – drugs, runaways, etc), I had to buy it.

I'm not sure how old I was at the time, probably late junior high/high school freshman.

And, oh, I bought this book, hook, line and sinker. I remember it scaring me, to think that this all happened to a real person, that this could happen to me or someone I knew. It was similar to the time I watched the pilot episode for Beverly Hills, 90210. It premiered during my first week of high school (possibly even the evening after my first day at high school) and I remember thinking, alternatively excited and petrified, high school is going to be like that??

Sadly, I didn't fully understand fiction, escapism or exaggeration for the sake of ratings back then. But I digress.Like any morally preachy book, this book freaked me out. Drugs were bad. Drugs would make you go from normal teenager to addict to whom all sorts of bad things happen to (again, referring back to long ago post, there is yet another example of the "bad" girl getting punished). And after she tries to clean herself up, she gets sucked back in. And though, I never babysat before and never planned on babysitting ever, even as cool as the Babysitters' Club made it sound, I was paranoid forever about ever babysitting after reading the LSD laced peanuts scene. Essentially, the lesson (though I guess I didn't listen) is that even if you try something just one time(even inadvertently), you are DOOMED.

I remember reading a few times back in the day but haven't thought about it much sense. I kind of thought it was cool that an ex of mine had a copy of it a few years back (and now, looking back on it, geez, the was kinda lame on his part). I didn't find out until more recently that an author (a biased, pro-Establishment author…apparently, a Mormon youth counselor) wrote it, that it was not the work of a "real-life" teen. Finding that out didn't upset me greatly (or much at all), though apparently, there has a ton of backlash about the book's author when others find out that revelation (just look the book up on amazon or read above referenced somewhat bitter/angry post).

Sadly, my copy (my well worn, much read and loved copy) is in storage somewhere now. After reading the above mentioned post and thinking back on some of the passages, yeah, it was corny. It was a bit heavy handed and, in hindsight, preachy and absolutist. The prose did seem, at times, very un-teenager like (but since I was reading it in the 1980s/1990s and it was written, I guess in the 1960s/1970s, I assumed teens back then were more formal and stuffy sounding anyway). But, through all the books (and books and books) I've read, it stuck with me. And I remember where I bought the thing, I remember a majority of the scenes (especially the scarier ones), that's got to be some sort of testament to the impact it has on it's audience (young and dumb and not aware of preachy authors with agendas).

My point is that it served its ultimate purpose – scare preteen/teen aged girls from (temporarily) getting mixed up in that crazy (yet swinging) scene…and I'd much rather have that than the current state of Young Adult lit – brand name brandishing, famous for no reason celebutard adoring Gossip Girl fluff. The fact that you can read it now, as an adult, and obviously see that it was written by an adult and not a real-life teenager…who cares?

Interesting note – Go Ask Alice is (was?) a banned book. I assume it was written to scare kids but yet, it gets banned out of schools so they can't read it…hmm.

chick lit (part two)

[originally posted on myspace on Monday, February 4, 2008]

[I was dreaming when I wrote this ... again, another case of when I wrote this in my head last night, it made sense, but now...eh...]

Judy Blume turns 70 next week.

Yeah, wow, mull that one over.

Anyway, in a recent interview, she says she wrote Forever (one of the few Blume books I didn't read…I was probably too hung up in the Babysitters Club) because her teenage daughter asked her to do "a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die."

And it is so true. Especially the young adult/teen fiction of my generation, if the girl had sex, she was a slut and/or it resulted in pregnancy, a disease or death. Same for drugs/alcohol/smoking cigarettes or anything "bad" (fighting with your parents resulted in your running away and becoming a hooker that landed a mean pimp and got you strung out on drugs).

And I think it's true of most current fiction aimed at women, when not hung up in consumer trappings (see my last blog entry rant). The main character (sometimes an accessory character if we don't want to ugly up the heroine) will learn a lesson and have an epiphany and change her whole life. That's fine. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to wake a person up. But why does a person (in fiction) always have to have something major and bad happen? That's not reality.

Case in point: I've written (and rewritten, but that's another entry) two "novels." Written about five or so years apart.

In one, the main character is male and possibly crazy. He kills people (possibly). Yet, he has no real epiphany. Nothing bad really ever happens.

In the second one, the main character is female and, for all intents and purposes, "normal." She is a very, very loose interpretation of me (mostly, I took stuff that happened to me and stretched it extremely far, for story purposes). The girl drinks and has sex. No big deal. But I have worked on and off on this story for years and over time, over many edits, in several failed attempts to move the story along, the heroine has been through everything (dying estranged father, dead sibling, mentally ill sibling, drug habit, rape, abortion, DUI and resulting detox treatment, I can't even remember what else). I thought that was a necessary plot device, action to move the story along. My intentions were that she needed to have something "major" happen in order to change her life.

But, why should she?

Why can't my girl be happy drinking and liking boys? I'm not saying that the heroine should magically find herself in a fairytale setting, but, hell, she's been through the fictional wringer, while the male character in the other novel kills people and has no real aftermath. Yes, a person can make bad choices and yes, sometimes things occur because of it, but it doesn't mean that the worst possible scenario will automatically happen (i.e. the kids having sex resulting in disease, pregnancy and death).

So, yeah, I gotta go do some editing…

chick lit (part one)

[originally posted on myspace on Monday, February 4, 2008]

I don't remember if I've gone into this before or not (so I'll be brief on this point): chick lit today sucks.

I know this because of the books I had to endure during the short lived work book club. The storyline was almost always the same: cute yet quirky (but not too quirky) heroine is all happy with her cool job (usually as a magazine editor), with her cool friends (always one slutty one and one quirky/weird one), with her label obsession (brand name drop here) that involves shoes, purses, and/or Starbucks. The only thing missing is a man. Romantic snafus ensue and lo and behold, at the end of the novel, she's got herself a man. I blame Sex in the City.

The women at work that love these books (ranging in ages from 25-55, all married, most with kids –young to adult) also started raving about the show Cashmere Mafia (I'd make a joke about this being the poor woman's Sex in the City, but since SITC is now syndicated so you don't need cable to see it…). I tried to watch it (as I tried to also watch Grey's Anatomy…oh, but save that for another entry). It was awful. Again: high powered jobs (can a woman not have a job as a lawyer/doctor/magazine editor anymore?), SITC stereotypes, the worst dialogue/lines ever, same plot lines (ooh, one might be lesbian…how racy…in 1994, thanks).

So, why do the women at work love these shows and books? They certainly aren't a mirror to their own lives. Why do they want to watch/read about label-centric women rushing around trying to get a man?

That's when I came to realize – it's their escapism (their porn, if you will).They are working boring office jobs and drinking boring generic coffee in the kitchen. No personal assistants to make Starbucks runs here. They spend their money on kids/medical visits/mortage payments/boring stuff. No burnable income to spend with hot but not gay husbands on trips, Prada bags, shoes costing a few hundred dollars a piece, no weekly visits to the hair salon to stay current and blown out. So, why not escape and pretend?

And that's well and good, at times (seriously, one of my favorite guilty pleasures is a bad Jackie Collins novel). But it's quickly killing off any good, legit chick oriented literature because when only the crap sells, the crap will only get published.

I miss Judy Blume books.

I have more to this rant, but I'll continue in a second entry (as it kind of changes subjects).

writing exercise one

[originally posted on myspace on Monday, April 30, 2007]

I found this website with a list of writing exercises/starter sentences. Once suggestion was to write a scene about being in a waiting room and only describing the other people's shoes. This is what it turned into.

4/30/07 - Untitled

Based on your resume, it looks like you've held a variety of jobs in the past," she says.

I can't stay in a job for longer than a year because I am predictable. At every job I have held, I am enthusiastic for month one and two, start to hate coworkers at month three and four, and start to question my existence at month five through eight. By the time I get to month nine, I am strolling in late, not muting my IM sessions, and making up excuses to leave early (my parents have each died about twenty times).

I answer something and it must have been the right something, as she is nodding her head in agreement and moving on to the next question.

I want to ask what the dress code here is, but that's an after the offer type of question. It's hard to tell. The guy out at the front desk was in a polo and jeans, with visible holes in his ears, nose and lip where he must have recently removed all his piercings. This lady was in a black suit. She started to tap her foot against the aluminum chair frame. Her shoes were ultra-pointy, neon yellow-green patent flats. I wanted to ask her where she bought them, but that's an after the offer type of chit chat to establish a positive bond.

"There is a person in the office that we have had issues with." She tilts her head, as if thinking how best to phrase this. I lean forward in my chair and then pull myself back, not wanting to look eager to hear office gossip about an office I wasn't even in yet. "She has made it a habit to come in late and she takes long lunches."

She's complaining about behavior I aspire to. Maybe I really don't belong here. Maybe her bringing this up in the interview is a sign. I glance over her shoulder and out the window. She has an unobstructed view of the city skyline. I wonder what she must have done to land a view that good.

There is a knock at the door behind me, but I don't turn. I stay focused on her precision cut, dead even bangs.

"Good." She stands up. "This is my husband, David. You're interviewing to be his assistant."

I twist to see the person behind me and am about to offer my hand. I see the faded scar that cuts across his left cheek and before I can say anything, he stops me.

"Karen," he says.

"You two have already met?"

I turn back around to face her. I frantically think of something to say. He enters the room and stands next to her. Stands next to his wife. He has a wife?

He smiles that obnoxious, cocky half-grin and replies, "We actually know each other quite well."