Typical Romance Writer!
I will be a good girl in one respect—I will step off of my soapbox for a little while. I am going to try to stay out of Internet and office discussions of politics. This will be exceedingly difficult in that I coach debate, attend a Unitarian church, and am almost physically incapable of keeping my opinions to myself, but I’m going to try. I just get really frustrated anyway.
So I’m going to make this topic a nice romance writer’s topic—stereotypes of romance writers.
In the summer of ‘04, I was traveling around and signing store copies of INTO HIS ARMS, and a nice bookseller in Minnesota made a comment that I’m quite sure he meant as a compliment. He said to me, “You can’t possibly be a romance writer. Romance writers are dumpy, middle-aged women.” Ouch. Okay, he was obviously saying that I didn’t strike him as dumpy, which was very nice of him to say. I am middle-aged, but I assume that he meant I didn’t look it. That was nice, too.
Here’s the thing: I know a number of beautiful romance writers. I know a number of young ones, too. Furthermore, I think that the “dumpy, middle-aged” stereotype comes from the assumption that romance writers have non-existent sex lives, that they write about fantasy because that’s all they have. Well, I know some romance writers whose sex lives exist mainly in their books. I also know a lot with very active, healthy sex lives. Guess what else? (Teen readers, you may want to skip this, as it could be traumatizing.) I know dumpy, middle-aged women who have healthy, active sex lives. Shocking, isn’t it?
I have another stereotype for you. I’ve had some feedback that my blog doesn’t seem like a romance writer’s blog—not because I stray from the topic of writing romance novels occasionally, but because I appear to be intelligent and well-informed. Say what? Romance writers are dumb and oblivious? All right, I deal in fantasy, and I do it mostly to escape reality when reality gets too complicated or icky. (Oh—I admit, I soapbox some about current events in my books, too; just in metaphor.) So do sci-fi writers. So do fantasy writers. So do mystery writers. So do the writers of some literary fiction. I don’t know why horror writers write what they do. Maybe complicated, icky reality doesn’t seem so bad after they’ve written a chapter about someone’s gruesome death, but I would NEVER assume that they wrote horror because they were oblivious to the real world. Maybe some writers are; I just wouldn’t make assumptions, and certainly not assumptions based on their genre.
So here’s to all my smart, informed, sexy romance writing sisters! (And I have a lot of them!)
"Rachel Scott was well known for reaching out to misfits and had been
friends with Dylan Klebold."
I wouldn't say they were close friends. Perhaps it would have been more
accurate to say they were on friendly terms. My experience with Rachel was
that she counted people she got along with and participated in activities
with as friends.
I'm interested in learning about columbine. I've been doing research about
it to see if there was anything going on between the shooters and the
victims. It was said that Rachel was the one mentioned in the basement tape
and she was the target. There were rumors about Rachel having a
confrontation with Dylan and Eric before the shootings.
I have heard about a possible reference to Rachel in the basement tapes,
but I haven't seen them. I mostly saw Rachel in the context of Forensics,
and even when I helped sponsor the spring play, I didn't pay a great deal
of attention to backstage stuff during tech rehearsals. The kids all got
along well during director's notes, laughing, joking.