You writers? You’ve somtimes felt like writing somethng like this.

There’s a new article on All About Romance about male POV, specifically in romances. I’m actually rather shocked at a few of the replies.

I find this interesting because, yes, I have found completely unbelievable males in fiction. (Cozy mysteries are a culprit more often and more egregiously than romance in my reading, but maybe I just read the right romances and the wrong cozy mysteries.) However, I was a little…nonplussed at the incredible simplification of the male psyche that seems to be the general consensus in this article. (Not by Nora, but by two of the men!) I’m 100% woman, but I would never say, “A woman would do X in Y situation” as a blanket kind of statement. Because it simply isn’t true. It’s not that women don’t say such things–in fact, in today’s culture, both sexes tend to make blanket statements about their own genders more often than the opposite–but that doesn’t make them right.

I often find, in fact, that books that supposedly portray Real Men (I feel like I should add a TM after that or something) simply portray male stereotypes. Stereotypes men *in our culture* are comfortable associating themselves with and that women recognize. It’s like watching the beer commercials about Man Law: This is what REAL MEN are like! YEAH! WE’RE REAL MEN! (We are real men, aren’t we? Wait! I’m feeling an emotion! Not supposed to feel emotion! WILL QUASH IT NOW WITH WAVE OF TESTOSTERONE! YEAH! REAL MEN!)

To that, I say: Oh, please. If that were the only man in the world, you could keep him. I wouldn’t be interested.

A good half of my friends have been men, and they have every ounce the feeling that women have. Sure, they feel it for different reasons, and they express it differently (in our culturally-defined ways as much a naturally-defined ways) and are a lot more likely to, say, punch a hole in the wall when upset, and sure they have different preoccupations and obsessions and tend to rank things differently in value than women do. But there’s amazingly little difference between hugging a female friend who is crying her eyes out because just got dumped and just listening as a male friend curses the evil b— who just dumped him.

As just one example: Men are uncomfortable with the l-o-v-e word? I wouldn’t say that about men as a blanket statement even in our culture right now! I was cornered a good half dozen times in my single life (which ended only 4 years ago) and subjected to fervent declarations of love, devotion, and a generally anachronistic (and wholly mortifying) desire to defend mine honor, etc., etc. I was ready to sink into the ground, and they were imagining sword duels or maybe even drawn pistols at dawn to avenge some slight that has not, as a matter of fact, even happened yet. No, that’s not a WOMAN’s version of gushy emotion, but it certainly does still happen, even though if the men would have never bragged about to their friends. (And trust me, they WERE sincere, and I’m hardly the only woman who’s endured this from men, though I seem to have an odd kind of magnetism for “protect and cherish the wee woman” types…) And yet I, the touchy-feely emotional woman, was the one thinking, “Oh, dear God, this is so HUMILIATING get me OUT of here he’s making a FOOL of himself…”

To me, this definition-by-gender smacks of the same kind of attitude that declares that men are unconstitutionally unsuited to writing emotion (shrivels the testes) and women can’t handle SF or complicated plots (hurts our little brains).

The problem with gender-based overgeneralizations is that it turns every man and every woman into The Proto-Man and The Proto-Woman, which are usually tell us virtually nothing about biology or even the way flesh-and-blood men and women live but a lot about the expectations of our own culture. And they are usually not very pretty.

Before we can say “Men would do X,” we first have to decide, WHICH man? A very devout Jew, a Catholic priest, a frat rat, a man who’s had a brush with STDs, a guy who tends to look suspiciously upon things that appear to good without a reason, and a rich playboy…each would have a different reaction to the starlet-in-his-bed scenario. Are some of them Y-gene deprived because of it? Of course not. They are thinking human beings who don’t follow a rule book to determine whether their behavior is officially recognized as following the code of the gender but behave according to MANY variables, of which gender is only one.

WHEN and WHERE are the other key components. Tony K. states: “Throughout history, to be a man is to be anti-romance. For the most part, love is a four-letter word best left to the opposite sex to utter and define.”

To which I go…huh?

Have we forgotten the courtly love of the High Middle Ages?

Or how about that virtually every great dead-white-male author has written heavily, if not PRIMARILY, of love and emotions. (Yeah, that Shakespeare, you know how he couldn’t write about emotions or anything…) Dickens, Tolstoy, Henry James, Hardy, Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo–they were obsessed with love, lust, and their interplay.

Even examples of times and places that are now, for whatever reason, held up as examples of male stoicism and passionlessness were often the exact opposite. The English male was considered to be a wildly romantic soul by his French counterparts from the 1700s onward.

Defining men as somehow inherently crotch-scratching, gob-spitting creatures reflects only upon a PARTICULAR class of men at a PARTICULAR time in a PARTICULAR place. Think the perfumed fobs of the 1700s would do that? Unlikely. Yet they would share a brand of humor WITH THE WOMEN OF THE COURT that would be considered phenomenally crude, puerile, and unfunny even by a good percentage of the fans of The Man Show today. Are those men unmasculine? Those women unfeminine? No. They simply conformed to different standards of masculinity and femininity.

For example, this statement of what it is to be male: “Denial is fused into the male DNA, I think. Denial of wrongdoing. Denial of intimate emotion. Denial of forsaking ourselves in any way for the greater good, whether it be societal or marital.”

I cannot imagine anything as completely opposite to the assumption that the fuedal system of vassalage and mutual obligations was built upon! (Which was, of course, a male-created, male-centered system.) Debt, duty, responsibility–all of those things were SO forged into the culture of the times that they STILL resonate with entire classes in England. In fact, even today, I’ve met wholly selfish and irresponsible men, but I’ve met *more* overprotective, overresponsible, smothering men.

Being a faithless jerkwad isn’t inherently masculine any more than being a heartless, backstabbing virago is inherently feminine. And neither are a credit to their gender.

Claiming that men are “the way they are” in 20th-century American society (whatever that means, pick your man…) because of “evolution” is no more or less accurate than claiming that men were the way they were in 5th century BC Greece or in the culture of the Barí Indians of Venuzuela today.

Yuck. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

Oh, and BTW? I asked my DH the question, and he gave the exact answer I thought he would: “Scan the room.” That is, for the trick/practical joke/guy with a garrote.

My father would be shocked into speechlessness and then throw her out.

My brother would completely and totally freak out and run away and not even tell anyone until someone found him vibrating in the hallway and dragged it out of him.

I found this article via PBW:

Of course you like your protagonist: you are writing about him or her, after all. They dominate your thoughts, you can’t bear to have anything bad happen to them, and it’s satisfying to give them every single witty remark you ever wish you’d ever made, all the physical or moral courage you wished you possessed, every good thing that ought to be the reward of virtue.

Is this bad? Aren’t there many books selling right now with protagonists like that? Yes. But they are not great books, or books that will live past their print run. While there is a place for fantasy fulfilment novels, they are seldom considered “well written” because they lack the grittiness of reality. There are no James Bonds in real life. Readers enjoy a fantasy now and then, but their hunger for story is satisfied only by lifelike protagonists dealing realistically with the fabric of life. An inflatable doll, however curvaceous, is not a human being.

I won’t go so far as to say that these books won’t sell, as she does. Dan Brown’s Langdon is not only a too-perfect character he loves hugely–handsome, supposedly very intelligent, with women sighing all over him (of course TONS of co-eds–exactly HOW many professors have you had whose lectures were “standing-room only?) and everyone else in awe of his brilliance while he, of course, is modestly embarrassed by the attention–but is an obvious Mary Sue character, as well. And look at all the money he’s made.

However, it’s still bad writing.

I have a longer post up today at AccessRomance called “Porno horn-dogs versus repressed fuddy-duddies.” Come on! It’s fun!

When you’re absolutely miserable with food poisoning and barfing and running a fever and other unfun things, it’s bad enough. But when you have a condition that ensures that just about every nerve ending in your body will take this as an opportunity to scream in agony…well, it’s even less fun. My JAW MUSCLES cramped. My FEET cramped. The only muscles in my body that I was aware of that were not cramping were my fingers and toes.

As soon as I could keep water down, I grabbed the Vicodin DH was perscribed when he had his appendectomy last year. Oooooooh, what sweet relief! Not complete, but enough that I was no longer on the verge of begging my husband incoherently to just please shoot me.

That’s made the second one I’ve taken in the past year. I don’t need it often, and I generally try to avoid ANY type of painkillers as much as possible (with the various risks of even the most common OTC meds), but when I get to the point where I’m making little involuntary whimpers of pain, it is so, so wonderful to have a bottle of Vicodin in the medicine cabinet.

When I get a new doctor when I go to Maryland, I’m going to see if I can get him to prescribe me five pills a year, just to have on hand. That’ll be a definite improvement to my quality-of-life….

Supposedly, you can get high on the stuff. Or something. I wonder if that’s only true if you’re not hurting like crazy, because it just takes me from a mewling-and-irrational-with-pain state to one in which I can function, more or less. Either that or one pill isn’t enough for a buzz. *shrugs*

I am absolutely terrified of getting an illness that leaves me incapacitated for more than a week or two. I don’t think I can go through it again. If I end up killing myself when I’m 70 or so after coming down with an incapacitating chronic illness, no one will wonder why.

It may be that short boys are held back at a statistically significant rate higher than taller boys simply because of height.

Here is an author with a quick and dirty summary of historical underclothing.

As a writer who has read an ENTIRE book on corsets and another on men’s shirts, 1840-1920, I quite enjoyed it!

A bit on terms that she didn’t make clear:

Shift, smock, and chemise all mean the layer closest to the skin at different (and overlapping…) periods in history.

Your medieval French or Norman noblewoman would wear a chemise (or camisia)–so would the man, actually, but to avoid confusing readers, I tend to prefer shirt for men and chemise for women. (The root for chemise is the same as the Spanish camisa or…shirt. So you really aren’t taking the liberties you might think!) If she is Saxon rather than Norman, she’d call it a smock. (And so would the hero, but again, for clarity’s sake…)

“Smock” became gradually transcendant over chemise (and specifically feminine by the 1600s) with time.

It isn’t until the 1600s that “shift” appears to replace “smock,” and at first, it was also unisex. By the end of the 1700s, “smock”-as-underclothing was done for.

Then, “chemise” was magically resuscitated in the 1800s as the more ladylike and delicate term for the garment (men were excluded from this term this time around!). My Victorian upper class or educated characters use “chemise” without thinking–my lower class, uneducated ones still think of their undergarment as shifts.

The chemise was also shortened as the 19th century progressed. In the 1850s and 60s, it would typically descend to the knees, but by the 1870s, camisettes had appeared, and by the 1880s, combinations were fairly common.

Now, on undies for your Victorian woman…

By the time Victoria came to the throne, the pantalettes of the fast set in the Regency were dead. So women wore no “panties”! Such garments came back into style for the upper- and middle-classes with the crinoline because of, er, practical necessity. First of all, crinolines keep the fabric of the skirts away from the body, and so they tend to be breezy even with a couple of petticoats underneath. Secondly, those swinging cages can have accidents, exposing far, far more than a bit of “ankle” (which, in the days of crinolines, was politely extended to anytihng below the knee). Pantaloons (worn UNDER the corset with slit crotches for going to the bathroom or even made in two separate pieces) became commonplace. However, the lower classes adopted them slower–1870s or even later.

You shouldn’t use the term “bloomers” for an undergarment in the Victorian era–they were reform outerwear.

I really love the 2-part metal busk that Kalen mentions. It makes getting the heroine naked take much less time. *g* She mentions that it was introduced in 1829–I’ll add that it wasn’t common until the mid-1840s. If you have a heroine on the cutting edge of fashion, though, 1830s is just fine.

I’ve heard the claim that some women have had ribs removed for corsets before, but I haven’t ever found it in a primary source, and since I’ve seen the claim applied to the 1860s, the turn of the century, and even the 1950s, I’m rather suspicious of it, especially considering the kind of risk it would have been in the 1800s, the likelihood of death, the level of disfigurement, etc. I suspect that it is an urban legend about the vanity of women, though I could be wrong.

Please note that there are several SHAPES for Victorian corsets, too. In addition to the hourglass, there is the pipe-stem (later 19th-century, never terribly common) and then, in the Edwardian age, the straight-front or S-curve.

On her corsets page, she mentions that men demanding that their wives not wear corsets was unheard of. Well, sort of. Some men demanded that their wives wither forego stays or very lightly lace during PREGNANCY–I’ve read a number of period documents attesting to this starting in the 1600s.

She also has a page on men’s shirts. They alter a *bit* more than she lets on. The opening lowers by the 1840s to about the navel, and then the shirt must be pulled over the head the rest of the way as before. The shaped, tailored shirt appears roughly mid-century (before that all poof) and gets more complicated as the century progesses.

“bargain

“To sell a bargain; a species of wit, much in vogue about the latter end of the reign of Queen Anne, and frequently alluded to by Dean Swift, who says the maids of honour often amused themselves with it. It consisted in the seller naming his or her hinder parts, in answer to the question, What? which the buyer was artfully led to ask. As a specimen, take the following instance: A lady would come into a room full of company, apparently in a fright, crying out, It is white, and follows me! On any of the company asking, What? she sold him the bargain, by saying, Mine a—e.”

Ah, yes. The famous British wit….

Book #4, VOICES OF THE NIGHT, will come out in 03/07.

I wrote 26 pages today, and it was EASY! I’ve got my groove back! I’d lost it for years, but it’s BACK!

And the best part? I’m writing better than ever. *G*

Man, writing the Lydia Joyce voice was agony at first. I’m sososososo glad that’s over now.

Why was she so hard to get used to? (Okay, YES, I’m talking about mself in the third person, THANK YOU.) Well, I’ve been writing stories–with a beginning, middle, end, plot, characterization, etc.–since I was eight. That’s eighteen years now that I’ve been writing. From the age of eight until the age of twelve, I struggled with learning narrative control. Backstory info dumps, excessive descriptions, endless stage directions, needless details, plots wandering off into the corner and then staying there–I had all these problems. From the age of twelve until the age of seventeen, I polished my basic storytelling ability–and it worked pretty darned well. Then, at seventeen, I decided that it was time to Grow Up, and so I did no writing at all for two years.

When I restarted, I had two problems. First of all, I decided to write historical romance instead of fantasy and straight historical with romance thrown in. Romance takes a kind of writing that I hadn’t done before. It’s really, really HARD to portray someone’s emotional life interstingly and convincingly. Before, I’d had motivation plus mad/sad/glad/bad emotions, and that was it. For romance really to WORK, that’s simply not enough. Second, I was horribly, horribly rusty. My writing skills had degraded to a humiliating level. Things I could effortlessly conjure up before were simply painful now, and writing anything was a terrible chore.

Anyhow, I gave up pretty quickly in complete digust because my writing sucked so much. I picked it up again a year later, at the age of 20. I played with it for a while but didn’t get really serious until I’d turned 21. I managed to get some of my skills back by then, and I finished a pretty decent manuscript that garnered mediocre enthusiasm but didn’t exactly get anyone terribly excited.

Now I was determined, so I hunkered down and started writing two mss simultaneously. One is the first version of VOICES, of which I am currently using precisely NOTHING except the character names, and the otherwas called HEARTSEASE, which was actually quite good but may never see the light of day anywhere because it’s really unusual.

Both of these were pretty hard to write. I was still dealing with the whole inner life thing, and HEARTEASE was really the place where I began to make my prose something special, with depth and meaning and life. No one bought either of these mss, and when I graduated from college, I immediately started to work on THE VEIL OF NIGHT.

Which was agony.

First, I felt like I’d been using plot as a big crutch, so I decided I’d write a story were the relationship was the plot, period. That was AGONY. Second, I decided to make it uber-dark and sensual, and writing the atmosphere into every scene and writing so much intimacy was like a saw across raw nerves. It was incredibly, incredibly difficult to manage, and when things went wrong, I often didn’t know why. It was torture. It took and entire year to write, and I am normally a very fast writer. I nearly died.

MUSIC was frightening to write because Sarah was really scary for me to deal with. She was so *quiet,* so contained, that it was like trying to hold onto a slippery fish–she didn’t even want me to know her. But once I got a handle on her, things began flowing pretty well for that book.

Then I wrote WHISPERS, and everything clicked. FINALLY. The second half of WHISPERS took practically no time at all to write. It was an amazing experience, and the last two chapters were written in one sitting and barely had to be edited.

THIS is where I used to be with my writing. Except now, everything was just so much better…

I started off in the wrong direction a couple of times with VOICES (my current WIP). But then I “got” the story, and now everything is flowing again like at the end of WHISPERS. I’m in a groove, and it’s a GOOD groove, where I’m writing really good stuff.

It makes me so happy because I hate getting in fistfights with the muse. I win eventually because I’m just that stubborn, but it’s not a fun experience.

Have I mentioned that I love writing lately?

There’s a really good, clear, and concise outline of some of the fundamentals of Buddhism here.