I Just Found Out - I’m A Prude!!!

It’s true. Imagine my surprise.

What brought this on is a bit of overexposure to discussions on the Amazon Romance Discussion Board. For some reason my novel, The Old Mermaid’s Tale, seems to be considered a romance on Amazon. I’m not real upset about that, there are gazillions of romance readers and if they buy my book that is fine with me but I am continually shocked — yes, shocked! — by the tone of some of their discussions!

I wrote a week or so ago about their discussion about books featuring heroes who had huge appendages. That discussion is still going on and is quite lively. There have also been a number of discussions about how far the sex scenes should go, etc. Well, gentle reader, I broke down and bought two of the romance novels they were talking about and I have to tell you , I’m a prude. I must be.

I won’t tell you the titles of the books — they’re pretty generic anyway — but the first one is a romantic thriller. I picked it because it was set in New Orleans, one of my favorite cities. The heroine is a beautiful (naturally), sexy (naturally) photographer with a disappointing romantic past (naturally). The hero is a devastatingly handsome (naturally), seethingly virile (naturally) hunk whose beautiful and beloved wife up and died on him (naturally). I am almost 200 pages into it and so far these two sexual paragons have not managed to do more than look at each other without blushing but every encounter provides us with pages and pages of throbbing descriptions of their reactions to each other. She can’t take her eyes off his butt, he can’t stop sneaking peaks at her perfect breasts, she blushes when she catches herself looking at his groin, he savors the curve of her butt — on and on and on and... I want to throw the book across the room and scream, “Will you two just do it and get it out of the way???”

Plus, in addition to all this pre-pubescent sexual agony, we are treated to the internal monologue of the killer they are after who savors in excruciating detail all the things he is going to do to his next victim. Meanwhile his victims writhe in their bonds imagining all the perversions he is going to inflict upon them — this to the point of outright silliness.

And this book was on the Best Seller list a few years back.

The second book is considered a historical romance. Oh good lord. If the people throughout history spent as much time trying to figure out how to get laid as the two main characters in this book do it’s a wonder we don’t still live in caves and go around clubbing rabbits for dinner!

This one I also chose because it was set in a place that interests me — Scotland. In fact a village quite close to the one where my great-great grandfather James Valentine was born. I have to give this one credit for some decent descriptions of the country-side and the local folks but, again, the hero and heroine spend page after page after page lusting after and longing for the body of the other. I am only 60 pages into it and have already been treated to 4 descriptions of the hero’s bulge and, predictably, three references to what Scotsmen wear (or don’t) under their kilts.

Well, Baptiste and Clair, I’m sorry for getting you lumped in with these sexually inept nitwits. When I wrote your love scenes I thought they were pretty luscious but I didn’t realize I was supposed to spend half the book describing your endless panting and fantasizing. I wasted all that time trying to make you believable people. I’m embarrassed and I think my career as a romance novelist is over before it began.

Maybe I’m just not old enough to read those books yet.

Thanks for reading.