Posts by Writer Unboxed

No bloggers in the world of online book reviewing have carved out such a distinct niche in so short a time as Sarah and Candy of Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels. The duo are legendary for acute observations on the world of women’s fiction, and romance in particular, delivered with unbridled snark and a liberal dose of profanity. Recently, the two indulged Kathleen and Therese’s curiousity about reviewing books, what readers are looking for, and why man-titty covers are here to stay.

Q: Where did the concept for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books come from?

Sarah: Well, there was this tsunami.

The short answer is that Candy used to comment on my personal site (at LENGTH – you have never met a person in such dire need of her own blog before) and I mis-remembered her as being from Indonesia. So after the tsunami of Christmas 2004 I looked up her email address in my archives and sent her a message saying that I hoped her family was ok.

She responded kindly instead of pointing out what a geographical moron I am, and we got to emailing back and forth. Somehow we ended up on the topic of romance novels, and how much it drove us nuts to pay so much money for a book that ended up blowing donkey butt, and how few honest reviews there are of romantic fiction. Then one of us said, “We should do a website all about romance novel reviews.” And whichever one of us didn’t say that also didn’t say, “You’re nuts, freakshow,” and instead said, “Yeah! We should!” We bought a domain, made a design, and started posting reviews and random bits of stuff about romance novels.

And Smart Bitches, Trashy Books was born.

Candy: Ohmigod, yes. I left many monstrously long comments on poor Sarah’s blog. Oh dear. Anyway, we wanted to start a romance novel review website that was irreverent and independent and scrappy. One that allowed us to say whatever the hell we wanted to say, even if it was completely non-politically-correct, and even if it was offensive.

So, that decided, we tried to think of an appropriate title that would reflect our sensibilities. Sarah initially suggested “Chink and Jewy’s Romance Novels.” After I picked myself up from the floor, I suggested that if we wanted to make fun of her race instead of her religion, maybe we could try for “Chink and Round-Eye’s Romance Novels.” Another idea we bandied around was “Man-Carrot and Chowder,” which…yeah. Heh heh. Somewhere down the line, “Smart Bitches who Love Trashy Books” came up, and it just felt right. We were both reasonably intelligent women who’ve gotten a lot of shit about our love of romance novels, and we decided, what the hell, instead of cringing in shame, we’d fling those words back in their faces. Taking the term back for empowerment, if you will. Or something like that.

Q: Describe your review process. What makes a satisfying read? What’s a wall-banger? Do you think you’ve had any impact on an author’s sales?

Charlotte Dillon’s website, Charlotte’s Web, has been named one of Writer’s Digest’s top picks, and her listserve, The Romance Writers’ Community (RWC), is a great asset to ~2,000 romance writers who want to connect. Therese and Kathleen recently chatted with Charlotte about the importance of building associations in an otherwise lonely profession and how she got her start as web mistress extraordinaire!

Interview with Charlotte Dillon

Q: How important do you think it is for writers to seek out other writers through different forums?

A: Writing is a solitary activity. Often the people around us who we normally count on for support, like family and close friends, really have no idea what we are going through when we get stuck in that sagging middle or get a rejection, or even win a writing contest or an award. Other writers get it, they’ve been there, they sympathize and celebrate with us in a way only another writer can.

Q: When did you decide to go from being Charlotte Dillon, writer, to Charlotte Dillon, writer, web mistress and Yahoo group queen? What was your journey like?

In the writer’s blogosphere, Ray Rhamey has carved out a unique place. His blog, Flogging the Quill, is one of the most-linked-to writer’s blogs and tops every blogroll. His observations regarding the craft of writing fiction are spot-on and mostly inarguable. When Ray edits a writer’s sample and modestly types “FWIW” at the end, the smart novelist knows to pay attention to his suggestions. The rest of us scurry to our current WIP’s for surgery. Kathleen and Therese had the great pleasure of interviewing Ray to get his perspective on editing, writing, and the crazy business of selling fiction.

Part 1: Interview with Ray Rhamey

Q: How did you get started in professional editing?

A: The “start” was 15 years as an advertising creative director. A big part of my work was to direct (read: edit) the work of writers to make their copy communicate the best it could, because time and space is very limited in television and print.

Then, somewhere around novel number three, I joined a critique group in Seattle. We met weekly and shared up to 10 pages of manuscript to do line editing and then critiquing on the spot. That was my first experience with editing of that kind.

After about a year, one of the members, himself a nonfiction editor, asked me to edit his manuscript (I’d only seen half of it). He was delighted with the result.

A second member asked me to do the same thing with her novel. Same result. I learned that I liked doing it, and that I could help people. I investigated editing on the Internet, and hooked up with A-1 Editing, a service operated out of Oregon. After passing an editing test, I joined their staff and did several edits for them.

Then I started my own Internet editing business at editorrr.com, and have been slowly building it.

My qualifications, then, are decades of tight focus on making language do its best, sentence by sentence and word by word. That and a natural talent and ear for language. Plus years of studying the craft through how-to books published by the likes of Writers Digest. Plus years of writing and editing my own novels.
So I came to book editing through a combination of experience, study, talent, and inclination. But doing the work of editing in that critique group was the catalyst.

Q: What’s the most common mistake you see?

Recently, Kathleen chatted with bestselling romance author Lydia Joyce about career and craft. Enjoy!

Interview with Lydia Joyce

Q: Your successful debut novel THE VEIL OF NIGHT and your equally-successful follow-up, MUSIC OF THE NIGHT, have been described as having a gothic quality. Was that intentional?

A: Yes! I love the Gothics of the mid-1800s through the early 20th century, and I wanted to play off that trope in my first book, sort of stand it on its head while still honoring the tradition. I didn’t want to rewrite the books of the past but bring something new to them.

The second book was also a Gothic because my publisher specifically requested one. Now that they know that my voice can still be strong without being dependant upon genre definitions, and now that I’ve earned enough of a publishing history that my publisher isn’t as dependent upon high-concept words to sell me to buyers and distributors, I can move more freely and can maintain the same voice and atmosphere without restricting myself to the standard features of the Gothic genre.

Q: How long did it take you to find your voice?

A: It took me three years to really find what voice I wanted Lydia Joyce to be. The journey was sometimes painful and frustrating, and the voice I settled upon is not easy to write, but it was completely worth it in the quality of books that I have been turning out now compared to before I was published.

Q: What was your process for deciding on voice?

A: I sort of fell into it at first, and then I really cemented it as I worked. I wanted to write a sort of homage to the 19th-century Gothic, and as I began writing, things began to feel really right. Then I sat down and thought about what I was doing and what I wanted to be, and it all clicked.

My recommendation to writers (from what I did on a less formal basis) is to make a list of all their favorite authors and books in their genre. Then group them by flavor. Make a list of adjectives that describe the books that follow your favorite (usually largest) flavor—this is the “taste” factor. Next, make a list of trends that are currently hot in romance—this is the “marketability” factor. Finally, choose adjectives that describe your writing—this is the “you” factor. (If you can’t easily find adjectives to describe your writing, it isn’t special enough. It’s too mundane. That’s a big problem! But we’re about to fix that…)

Now, make taste, marketability, and you meet. Decide how the traits you love most from the “taste” column can meet with one or more things listed the “marketability” column (you only really need one hook!) that you could see moved to the “you” factor during your writing.

Q: Can you go into some depth about your journey? How was it difficult?

A: First, there were life-related frustrations when I wasn’t getting published. I’d decided to change my major away from engineering because I loathed working in the corporate world and didn’t like even how routine and repetitive class work was. After playing in the physics department for a while, I grappled with the realization that what I truly wanted to do with my life […]