When a man tries to write like a woman...
May. 30th, 2006 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI stopped by Barnes & Noble yesterday with the kids while waiting for Omaha to finish her one moment of Memorial Day shopping. We wandered the shelves without intent when a cover caught my eye. It was in the Romance section, and after scanning through it quickly I came to the conclusion that the writer must have been a man.
The cover was of a buff male torso, from the shoulders to the knees, completely naked but for a towel strategically draped in an arc across one thigh. The towel's bend rose thickly over that thigh as if to suggest the towel was hiding a large, uh, salami. (What is it with romance novels and dick size recently? At least three I've read in the past couple of months have obsessed on it as a major detail.) I know authors have no control over cover art, but that ridiculous.
The title of the thing was "Wild Beasts" or something like that, and according to the back cover it was the story of Anton, Stefan, Keitra, and Xanithra, four werewolves trying to survive and find love in modern New York. It was trashy and only adequately written, but what really made me boggle was the very last line. The last scene is a sex scene written in a painfully heterosexual style but with a gay eye: the descriptions of Stefan's equipment and Anton's lean body are rich and detailed, while the women are given the simple requirements of tits and ass, but when the foursome gets down to actual in&out, the men are opposite each other with the women between them, kissing and petting at each other while the men are kept far apart.
And then finally the last line. This made me wince: "Stefan and Anton collapsed, their women between them, warm in the security of the pack."
It reminded me of Heinlein: "Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."
The cover was of a buff male torso, from the shoulders to the knees, completely naked but for a towel strategically draped in an arc across one thigh. The towel's bend rose thickly over that thigh as if to suggest the towel was hiding a large, uh, salami. (What is it with romance novels and dick size recently? At least three I've read in the past couple of months have obsessed on it as a major detail.) I know authors have no control over cover art, but that ridiculous.
The title of the thing was "Wild Beasts" or something like that, and according to the back cover it was the story of Anton, Stefan, Keitra, and Xanithra, four werewolves trying to survive and find love in modern New York. It was trashy and only adequately written, but what really made me boggle was the very last line. The last scene is a sex scene written in a painfully heterosexual style but with a gay eye: the descriptions of Stefan's equipment and Anton's lean body are rich and detailed, while the women are given the simple requirements of tits and ass, but when the foursome gets down to actual in&out, the men are opposite each other with the women between them, kissing and petting at each other while the men are kept far apart.
And then finally the last line. This made me wince: "Stefan and Anton collapsed, their women between them, warm in the security of the pack."
It reminded me of Heinlein: "Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."
