Trace,

It was great to read your comments about historical romance in last month’s issue. Thank you for your honesty and support of this genre.

As you know, I am an avid reader of romances and even dabble a bit at writing some. It really gets to me when people put down this genre. Literary snobbery is rife and it can be so harmful.

Surely, we should be encouraging everybody to read. Why be so negative about a genre that is so popular? In the United States, over 48% of paperbacks sold fall into the romance genre.

People like romance. If it isn’t your cup of tea? Fine. Look, I am not a big fan of Science Fiction but I would never dream of sneering or putting it down. Why is it so many people feel it necessary to be so nasty about romance? Yes, there are some romance books out there that are not particularly well written. Yet, you can find a badly written book amongst all the genres.

Most of the comments I have had to deal with are not even true of Romance today. Transworld in Australia call their romances “muscular” as they want heroines to be someone a 90’s woman can relate to. And as for the soft porn theory, cripes, even those romances that are classed as erotica will not accept storylines with rape or violence in them. There is a huge difference between erotica and pornography and most romances do not even come close to being erotica.

As for historical romances—take a good look at the credentials of a lot of the authors today. For example, Sherrilyn Kenyon—a PhD in History, and Isolde Martyn—an honours degree in History. These ladies have worked hard to be where they are today and take pride in the accuracy of the information in their novels.

And as for the “sexy” book covers—publishers decide on these because they have proven to sell well, so there must be a lot of people out there who like them. But again, not all romance novels have pictures of couples embracing. Isolde Martyn’s The Lady And The Unicorn won Best Cover at the Australian Romance Writers Conference. It is a beautiful piece of art work and there is only a castle entrance and the face of a woman depicted.

My main gripe, Trace, is that we lovers of romance are sick and tired of the sniggers and put-downs. I don’t expect everyone to like the same books I do. What I do expect is that we treat each other with respect and that if anyone is going to gripe against romance books, at least they have done their homework and read a good sample of today’s selection.

Again, thanks for your comments in last month’s issue,

Your friend,

Frances Grattan.

In your August editorial you stress what seems to me to be an artificial question concerning this sub-genre: is it dead or is it very much alive and growing? To me this is a way of obfuscating any serious discussion of the subject. Rather, I would suggest that we ask ourselves several fundamental questions about Romance Writing.

1 - Why is its authorship and readership so completely skewed to women writers and women readers? Is it an accident or does the sub-genre contain elements that appeal primarily to one gender?

2 - And if the latter, can these elements be identified?

3 - What are the specific different “rules” that apply to the writing of Historical Romance that do not apply to mainstream Historical Fiction, Alternate Historical Fiction, and Detective Historical Fiction?

4 - Is there a statistically measurable slant in Historical Romance writing towards the subjective (r.t. objective), elements of a story, towards love, sex and procreation, r.t. adventure, social change, confrontation of religions, philosophies and ideologies, as well as struggles for power, wealth and intellectual achievement?

5 - And if so, could these differences be related to male/female readers’ preferences.

6 - Why does the Library of Congress, the world’s most authoritative classification system, specifically insist that works of Historical Fiction are those works that focus primarily on institutional change, and that books focusing primarily on subjective interpersonal relations DO NOT BELONG IN THIS CATEGORY?

Boris Raymond

Dear Trace,

I must commend you on all the hard work you do with the magazine each month. I, for one, appreciate the effort. When strolling into a bookstore, my biggest trouble is finding novels that will spark my interest amidst all of the mainstream genre that, in my opinion, has gotten increasingly boring. Needless to say, a rich historical usually does the trick for me, yet it is so difficult to find them. Do publishers not release them in mass numbers, or do the bookstore clerks purposely hide them in the rear shelves behind Oprah’s current rave-of-the-month? Regardless, having a magazine devoted to this important genre is a necessity to me, and I thank you for taking up the challenge. Now I can run to my local stores with a handy list of possibilites, thanks to the wonderful book reviewers who contribute each month to your magazine. You do not know how much that truly means to me.

Thanks from your new pal,

Jensen

Dear Trace,

What a load of #$%! Ms. Edmonds provided in her letter last month. Does she have not a clue what it takes to make a novel come alive? Give me a break! And ignore her—keep up the good work, and that goes to not only you but to all of your contributors as well. Now, excuse me while I go and count the pigeons on my walkway . . .

Denise Rasmuson

Contrary to what one of your readers thinks, I don’t spend 90% of my time thinking how to squeeze facts in—I spend more like 95% of the time thinking how to keep them out. There’s a Latin saying to the effect that “the real art is to hide the art”—I need to know the stuff so that I can see the world I am writing about, and I need to do that to make the reader see it. There are all sorts of things that we take for granted when we read contemporary novels; we know what cars are like, on what side of the road we drive—but if we don’t have some sort of feeling for equivalents in the past, what we get is flat and uninteresting. You, the reader, don’t need to know the details of ancient board games to get the point, but I do; if something is relevant, I’ll tell you, and if it isn’t it will just be there in the background.

P. M.

In response to Ms. Edmonds:

It doesn’t matter what the genre is, there are, and always will be, some writers who are “absurdly impressed with themselves” simply for putting words on paper in coherent sentences, and even more so if it manages to be published.

Unearthing obscure facts, like a restaurant operating in a Brooklyn cemetery during the summer of 1899 (it made the New York Daily Tribune), is part of the thrill of writing historical fiction. Sometimes it is the little known tidbits about a place that make a story come alive, and sometimes those facts supply fodder for a whole new story.

Historical fiction writers are not the only ones who spend months researching their subject. Some fantasy writers create whole sacrificial ceremonies for mystical sects in their special universe when only the name of the ceremony will be mentioned in passing. Science Fiction novelists have to understand the technology used in their books.

Why? To make their world believable.

Yes, it is all fiction, but even fiction has to be believable or else the reader will consider it not worth the time to read.

If I thought writing historical fiction was a waste of my time, I wouldn’t do it. I spend hours sitting in front of the microfilm viewer, unearthing pieces of history I never knew about before, and incorporating bits of what I discover into my writing. And yet, at the same time, I manage to have a life as well.

Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion in this world. So, while you feel historical fiction is a waste of time, to those who write it, it is a wonderful part of life.

Sincerely,

Rachel Hullett

Dear Editor,

How dare that crazy woman offer such nonsense? It seems to me, if she does have writer friends who count pigeons, that she should be spending her time seeking psychiatric help for them pronto and not be contributing such nonsense to your magazine. Certainly, authors who cater to a particular time period research (or should research, if they are worth their weight in salt) the era with gusto, but those who spend inordinate amounts of time studying nonsense—or writing nonsense to magazines—should have their heads examined.

Keep up the good work!!! Historical fiction lovers do unite!!!

Sally J.



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