Cross posted from N³:

Over at Smart Bitches a few months back, Sarah wrote about re-reading Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten and how much she loved it. It started a lively and, as always, intelligent and thought-provoking discussion. Some people loved Bitten, others threw it against the wall. People in the second group tend to hate the book because of either the heroine, or the hero, or both.

That’s what – or whom – I’ve been thinking about.  Bitten isn’t a complex story, but it features two complex characters, and I think Armstrong was very brave in writing such characters her first time out. It’s easy to write characters that all readers will love, but such characters run the risk of being boring. Armstrong didn’t do that with her first novel. She took a lot of chances, challenging the reader to try to understand a hero who sometimes comes across as reflexively brutal and a heroine whose behavior ranges from baffling to really fucking annoying.

A lot of readers don’t like Elena because she’s an emotional pinball, going from passive, to passive aggressive, to petulant, to ass-kicking aggressive, back to passive – and then doing it all over, again and again. I find her exasperating, but I think her flaws make her an exceptionally believable character (aside from the turning into a wolf thing).

Ten years ago, Elena was bitten by her then-fiancé, Clay. She didn’t know Clay was a werewolf; she didn’t know werewolves existed. Clay, a brilliant guy with a U-Haul’s worth of emotional baggage and very poor impulse control, loved Elena so much he wanted to turn her into a werewolf so they could stay together – even though no woman had ever survived a werewolf bite and even though he didn’t give Elena any choice in the matter. He’s sworn ever since he didn’t mean to do it and, given his self-control issues, that might be true.

Elena, defying all odds, survived. Now she’s the world’s only female werewolf, and she’s never fully accepted it.

The orphaned Elena grew up in a series of foster homes. All she ever wanted was to get married and have a family of her own. When he bit her, Clay destroyed her dreams of a normal, human family life. But even if marriage and kids is now out of the question, Elena still longs to settle down (somehow – she never quite explains how she thinks it will work) with Philip, her sweet, patient, oblivious human boyfriend. Even as she returns to the Pack’s home base to help deal with a crisis, starts sleeping with Clay again, and goes days without phoning home, Elena insists her future is in Toronto with Philip.

But in Toronto, Elena is perpetually hungry and claustrophobic. She’s starving with Philip, both physically and emotionally. She can’t ever eat enough to satisfy her werewolf’s metabolism, because she can’t let Philip know she’s not normal, and she never has enough room or enough time to give her werewolf side the freedom she needs. She has to sneak out in the dead of night to Change and run, trying not to disturb Philip and lying to him when she does. Still, she insists, this is the life she wants.

Bullshit.

She’s lying. She’s lying to herself, so she’s lying to us. Once we realize Elena’s an unreliable narrator, her annoying behavior (if she loves Philip, why’s she jumping Clay’s bones? if she’s still so pissed off at Clay, why doesn’t she do something like, you know, yell at him a little? how bad does she miss Philip if she never bothers to call?) makes sense. Elena may love Philip, but she’s in love with Clay. She wants to want a normal human life with Philip, but what she really wants is to stay in Bear Valley with Clay and the Pack, the family she never dreamed of.

She can’t let herself want that, though, because she hasn’t forgiven Clay for destroying her chance at a normal life. If she lets herself have what she really wants, then Clay gets what he wants – i.e., her. Which means he’ll be rewarded for his unforgiveable act of betrayal. In short, making herself happy means making Clay happy, and she doesn’t want to do that. Nose, face, spite. Given what she’s been through, I don’t really blame her.

Then there’s Clay. Oh, Clay. I love me some damaged alphas, and Clay is very damaged and very alpha.

Like Elena, Clay is a bitten – as opposed to born – werewolf, and he’s even more of a mess than she is. If he were human, we’d call him a sociopath.

It took me a while to figure out, but I finally realized who Clay reminds me of – Carol O’Connell’s New York City detective, Kathy Mallory. Like Clay, Mallory is brilliant and like Clay, she suffered childhood trauma of a type and severity that can’t ever be truly healed. While they can function – they feel, and love, and (mostly) refrain from preying on people weaker than they are, which is everyone – they’re not ever going to be anything close to normal. Expecting a Clayton Danvers or a Kathy Mallory to understand the normal rules of human behavior and human morality, much less adhere to them, is simply unrealistic.

Clay (like Mallory) has to use someone else as a moral compass because he never had a chance to develop one of his own. His moral compass is Jeremy, his Alpha and adopted father. Clay doesn’t think in terms of good vs. bad, or right vs. wrong. He thinks in terms of what Jeremy would approve or disapprove of. While he knows that what he did to Elena was wrong, it’s pretty obvious he only knows it’s wrong because Jeremy said so and because it made Elena leave him. He doesn’t truly understand what a violation it was. He still thinks of Elena as his wife, and he always will.

For people who don’t like Bitten – or who absolutely loathe it – the wall-throwing moment comes when Clay chases Elena through the woods, ties her up and rips her clothes off. She demands he release her, and he replies, “Since you can’t fight me, you can’t be expected to stop me. It’s out of your control.”

Now, that’s all kinds of fucked up. But Clay’s the survivor of a childhood werewolf attack who spent his formative years living alone in a swamp, subsisting on small animals and other children. He thinks he’s being chivalrous. Clay’s not evil. He’s not even malicious – he’s broken.

I understand why some readers don’t read past this scene, why some – especially those who’ve experienced actual sexual assault – find it offensive and infuriating. This type of sex scene was quite normal thirty and forty years ago, in what the Smart Bitches call Old Skool romances, but nowadays I think a lot of editors would tell an author they have to take it out.

Then it gets worse.

Clay proceeds to…what? He thinks he’s making love to Elena, but we can’t call it that because she’s freaking tied up. Still, it’s not rape, and we can’t be sure exactly how nonconsensual it really is.

“I won’t force you, Elena. You like to pretend I would, but you know I won’t. All you have to do is tell me no. Tell me to stop. Tell me to untie you. I will.” And then he repeats it, just for good measure: “Tell me to stop. . .Just tell me.”

Elena doesn’t say a word. She refuses to let herself come –  that’ll show him, Elena! – but she doesn’t tell him to stop. This isn’t rape. I’m not even sure it falls under “forced seduction.” Despite her physical powerlessness, Elena could stop Clay at any moment, and she doesn’t.

No matter what she says, or thinks, Elena’s ambivalent about this episode even as it’s happening. The reader is left with the impression that at least part of her welcomes the loss of control Clay offered, just as he thought she would. That’s a risky way for an author to write a scene nowadays, and I think Armstrong had a lot of guts to do it.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but I’m near the end. Elena still hasn’t admitted that it’s Bear Valley she belongs in and Clay she belongs with. I know they end up together, both because it’s a romance novel and because I’ve read about the later books in the series. But even though I know they’re gonna get their HEA – or, since this is Clay and Elena we’re talking about, their Happily For The Most Part – I’m still enjoying reading two characters who aren’t entirely likeable right at first.

And I’m wondering if I have the nerve to write characters like that.

Cross posted from Nine Naughty Novelists, our inaugural Thursday 13.  Here are my (current, at least) favorite 13 Internet videos, in some vague semblance of order from most loved on down:

1. The First 5 Seasons of Lost in 10 minutes – The Reduced Shakespeare Company specializes in boiling classics like Shakespeare, the Bible and Lost down to their essential elements. This vid includes an intro by Lindelof and Abrams. If, like me, you’re struggling to get caught up before the end of the series, this video will be of no help whatsoever. It’s a lot of fun, though.

2. The Supersizers Go Regency – This is actually a series of 6 videos, from the BBC series where a couple of very funny food critics spend a week dressing, living and eating in the manner of various historical periods. If you read Regency romances, you need to watch this:

3. Mike Rowe reading Tiger Woods’ dirty texts – Doesn’t really need commentary, except to say I love Mike Rowe. Rowr.

4. A trailer for every Academy Award winning movie, ever

5. Where the Wild Things Are (trailer) – I haven’t seen the movie yet, and I know some people were disappointed, but this trailer is absolutely magical and I watch it constantly.

6. The 4:00 Inspection of the Queen’s Life Guards – Despite the YouTube title, it’s not the changing of the Queen’s Life Guards – it’s the 4:00 inspection. One day over a century ago, Queen Victoria passed through Horse Guards (which was, for many years, the HQ of the British military) and found the Queen’s Life Guards either drunk and/or passed out. She was so angry she ordered that thenceforth, and for 100 years, there would be an inspection of the Guard at 4:00. It turned into a treasured institution, as things British are wont to do, and they still conduct the 4:00 inspection to this day.

Note: in London last week, I offered to clear a weekday from my sightseeing schedule and take Diva to the sights I thought she’d enjoy, namely the Tower and Horse Guards. But it would mean she’d have to miss a day at the camp in Surrey she was attending with her cousins, and she refused. She loved that camp, wouldn’t miss a day of it. So we had to do the Tower and Horse Guards on Saturday. And as it turns out, there are no Guards on horses at the entrance to Horse Guards on the weekend. She was tired and cranky after doing the Tower and then being dragged through Trafalgar Square, partways up the Mall, and then down Whitehall to Horse Guards, only to get there and see guards, but no horses. “Mom! You made me walk five miles just to see a bunch of horse poop!”

But, as it turned out, they had a lovely museum, and we got to peak through a 2 way mirror to see into the stables, and the museum includes a replica of the stables with items of the Guards’ uniforms which you can try on. So Diva did:

Diva wearing some of the uniform of the Queen's Life Guard (commonly known as Horse Guards). It was her own fault we couldn't see the guards on horseback during the week, but we saw the museum on Saturday and got a peek at the stables.

7. Adam Ant, Goody Two Shoes, from 1980something – This is why I love YouTube. People are archiving my youth. This is the original MTV video (disappointment warning: the video cuts off before the end. I can’t find it in full length). After 25 years, I still love this song. And please note: emo boys weren’t the first ones to wear lip gloss. Nor were eighties pop stars. I think it was David Bowie, actually…

8. Dramatic chipmunk -Yeah, I know, but it never fails to crack me up.

9. Behind the scenes of a porn soundtrack (ADULT CONTENT (DUH), NSFW) – I’ve included two videos from Cracked.com. The Hub and I are addicted to this site:

10. Bea Arthur’s Sex and the City parody – You MUST watch all the way to the end (if you’re under 40 this might not mean so much to you):
11. The Evolution of Dance – This guy is amazing. You can never tell if a guy’s a good dancer just by looking at him. But most of the time, you can tell if he’s good in bed by watching him dance. Or so I’ve been told.

12. Three guys doing aerobics – More 80s cheese. What will future anthropologists make of Western civilization in the 80s? My favorite gossip blogger, Michael K of Dlisted, calls this “the out gay’s version of learning how to walk.”

13. A really, really good soccer game – watch till the end (ADULT CONTENT, NSFW).

Londoners Jaywalk – Oh Holy Hell, Do They Jaywalk!

I am by no means well traveled – my lack of well traveledness is kind of pathetic – but I have been in several large cities, and I have never seen a town where pedestrians jaywalk like they do in London.  But the really amazing thing is….motorists abet them in their jaywalking!

It’s true. A pedestrian will strike out across a street, not a crosswalk or traffic light within ten feet, and drivers will STOP and let them pass.  To be fair, I didn’t see this happen on major thoroughfares. But even on the busy streets, where the crosswalks are marked off by the flashing globe lights that I never really understood – does flashing mean go? or don’t go? – and certainly on residential streets and byways, drivers would come to a stop in the middle of the street and wait for pedestrians to pass.

And even in the busiest major streets, like King’s Road or Parliament Street or High Holborn, crowds don’t wait for the little man to flash green. If they don’t see a car right there, right then, they take off across.

I guess it makes sense when you consider that London streets predate London cars by a couple thousand years, so it’s a city that naturally respects foot traffic, but still — I was awed. I come from a town where cars are the dominant life form. In Houston, if you are struck by a car or a bus while crossing a street – and you were crossing at a designated crosswalk, and you had the right of way – then people will sympathize with your injuries or mourn your death, as the case may be.

But if you were jaywalking, don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for your ass.  Call it Darwinism or divine justice, but stupid people die, and Houstonians understand that.

If you have nothing to compare it to, the London Underground is AWESOME

So I’m 46 years old and I’d never been in a subway before I went to London a week ago. ( I told you my lack of travel experience is pathetic.)

Now, lots of Londoners told me that while the London buses are a marvel of dependency and efficiency, the Underground, or Tube, is a sorry mess of breakdowns, delays and inconveniences.

Whatever.

Look. Inner London traffic (I spent all my time running around between Chelsea in the west and the City in the east) is a BITCH. Remember how I said London roads predate London cars? There are lots of nice wide streets, but there are also lots of crooked, curving, narrow lanes. Traffic is bad all the time and in the early morning and late afternoon rush hours, it’s really, really bad. Buses are reliable and plentiful. You can be assured that the bus you want will be along within 10 minutes.

What you can’t be certain of is when you’ll get where you’re going. Because the bus is at the mercy of gridlock.

But the Underground isn’t. Hope on the Tube, and WHOOSH, next thing you know, you’re across town.

Yes, there are delays and yes, there are accidents and okay, so yeah – sometimes there are fires and bombings and stuff. But dude. I rode the hell out of the Circle and District Lines, and I spent some time on the Jubilee and Picadilly lines as well, and I have added the London Underground map to my store of mental trivia that I don’t need but will never lose. I was never afraid to strike out in some direction I’d never been, unsure of my destination, because I knew that if I got tired, or truly lost, I could just jump into the next Underground station I passed and get back to some place familiar.

I’d Always Heard the English Can’t Abide Queue Jumpers, And Now I’ve Witnessed It

There’s a Boots (huge pharmacy chain, like CVS – awesome skincare line, they sell it at Target, you should try it) on King’s Road near my sister in law’s flat. I had to pop in there several times because I always seem to be lacking some basic toiletry item when I travel, even though I keep a packed toiletry bag specifically for travel purposes.

Anyway.  I was standing in line at the pharmacy counter because I wanted to purchase 200 mg. Ibuprofen and the solons of the British government, ever mindful of their subjects’ wellbeing, have decided that people can’t be trusted to purchase Ibuprofen on their own, so you have to take the empty box to the pharmacy and get a staff person to hand you an actual box, as if it were a video or something truly dangerous like that.

So I was standing in line, and this very pretty, well dressed, British sounding but un-Britishly loud woman was at the counter with a full hand basket of stuff, and she was asking the pharmacist about some stuff she couldn’t locate, and he pointed it out in the store, and she left her basket on the counter and went to get the stuff and went back to the counter. And she did this several times, so she was basically continuing to shop even after she’d gotten to the counter, and she was seriously holding the line up.

And these two old English ladies behind me – I couldn’t have told you the part of London they came from but their accents were English, not Scots or Welsh or anything – began to talk, just loudly enough to be overheard but not loudly enough to be confrontational, that people are not supposed to do their shopping once they’d reached the cash register. Find the items you need, fill your basket, THEN get in line. What that woman was doing was just rude.

And when a woman approached the pharmacy counter after being directed there by another pharmacist, the two old English women informed her sternly that there was a queue, and she, abashed, got in it.

That was cool.

I Am a Sucker for the Worst Excesses of Victorian Faux-Gothic Gingerbread Crap

Shameful, but true.  The Victorians thought, “if it can be done, it can be overdone.”

And I’m from Texas, so that totally makes sense to me.

However, I Also Really Love the Simple Tudor Style

You don’t see a lot of original Tudor wood and stucco in London because most of it burned in the Great Fire of 1666. Next time I go, my sister in law says, we’ll hit some villages where I can get my fill of Tudor stuff. I did see a marvelous Tudor front on a building on High Holborn and my SIL thought it was authentic.

If it Doesn’t Predate The Fire of 1666, Londoners Don’t Really Consider It Old

I just love that.

Also, Diva Had a Good Time and Looked Really Cute

So here are some pictures.

Diva and her cousins in front of Buckingham Palace. No one was real happy here. I wanted to leave them but my sister in law reluctantly objected.

The Tower was Diva's primary sightseeing target. At the last minute she chickened out of the torture exhibit, which pleased me because I wasn't going to let her see it anyway and this avoided a fight.

Diva wearing some of the uniform of the Queen's Life Guard (commonly known as Horse Guards). It was her own fault we couldn't see the guards on horseback during the week, but we saw the museum on Saturday and got a peek at the stables.

…as I was writing the post (below) on orgasmic wombs and the penises that poke them: Ecstasy (1894), by Władysław Podkowiński. I found it in the Wikipedia entry on orgasm. Interesting depiction of la petite mort, no? The whole sex and horses thing has always intrigued me. Of course, it’s been done unto death in the romance genre.

Has anyone else noticed the way uteruses have been featured in the sex scenes of romance novels lately, especially the historical ones? I don’t read as much romance as you’d expect a romance novelist to do – I read mostly urban fantasy and SF. Maybe clenching wombs have always been popular in romance novels and I never noticed.

I just find it weird, and a little disturbing. I know how hard it is to keep coming up with new and lyrical ways to describe the mechanics of orgasm. You want to give your readers something besides the technical description of moving parts – his hand went there, her leg did this, he got hard, she got wet. You want to describe your characters’ emotions and their internal sensations.

But since when is the womb part of the orgasm package?

I think I’ve read that during orgasm, the womb contracts a little. It helps the sperm get where it needs to be. But I don’t think it’s something you’d really notice, what with everything else going on. I mean, it’s been eight years since I had a womb, but my orgasms aren’t noticeably different from the ones I had back before the doctors erased my hard drive.

I did run across a Wikipedia entry for “uterine orgasm.” I can’t decide if it’s a joke entry or not, but I suspect it’s not, and that’s actually very funny. You can read it here . The sentence I found most interesting was “Uterine orgasms are subjectively experienced as deeply and purely emotional, as they involve no rhythmic contractions of the pubococcygeus muscle.”

A purely emotional orgasm? That doesn’t sound like much fun. If it’s purely emotional, then how do we know it’s a uterine orgasm?  It might as well be a fallopian orgasm, or an ovarian orgasm.

And why do so many authors describe the hero’s penis bumping up against the heroine’s womb? Yes, your typical romance hero is well hung, and yes, it is physically possible, if a guy has a really big penis and is thrusting really hard, for his cock to reach her cervix.

But — ouch.

Some of the braver and more idiosyncratic authors – I’m thinking of Crusie here, but there are others – will sometimes write scenes where the heroine and hero have bad sex.  This is realistic, and it’s a welcome change from the formulaic romances where the hero and heroine light each other up right from the get go. (And, for the record – I’ve never had the guts to write an unsatisfying sex scene.)

But I’m not talking about realistic, unsatisfying sex scenes. In all the sex scenes I’ve read where the cock is knocking on the womb, it’s supposed to be hot. I’m thinking “ow!” and the heroine is screaming “ooh!” I like big schlongs as much as the next girl, but there is such a thing as too big, and if a guy’s dick is bumping into your cervix, then it’s too big. Or else he’s going at you like a jackhammer, and that’s not gonna feel good, either.

The womb is a sexual organ, but it’s not an erogenous zone. Wombs are for babies. Penises belong in vaginas.

Next up: Five Sex Scenarios That I Never Want to Read About in a Romance Novel Again, Ever, Because We All Know They’re Uncomfortable or Impossible So Why Do Authors Still Write Them?

I have a feeling I won’t get Christmas cards out this year. It will be the first time since Diva was born, I think, when I haven’t sent out a card with at least her picture, if not a family photo. But honestly, I’m already exhausted and I’m in hyper-penny pinching mode, and I’m thinking maybe this year I’ll let it slide.

Got my sister’s card in the mail today, with a beautiful picture of my handsome, handsome monsters:

First, the free reads:

The Samhellions (of which <Miss Piggy Voice>moi</Missy Piggy Voice> is proud to be a member) are offering free reads almost every day in December. This is a great way to sample authors whose work you’ve never read, or to get a quick fix of characters you love until their authors get around to writing more stories for them.

And speaking of which….my freebie will run this Saturday, December 12.

It stars Nick and TJ. (I’m working on a full length book for them, I swear!)

Next – (more) free stuff!

We’re also running a scavenger hunt all month long.  This site will be one of the stops the week of December 25th.

Head over to the Samhellion contest page to read all about the rules, then start clickin’. You could win a ebook or a grand prize of either a Sony eReader pocket edition or an Amazon Kindle 2!

When I got my first royalty check for Kiss and Kin, I bought myself an eReader, and I got one for each  of my sisters in law (because I would never have written the book without them). One of my SILs has always been vaguely repulsed by the notion of electronic books, but she agreed to give it a try. Now she loves hers as much as I do mine. Neither one of us can imagine giving up paper books completely, but the Sony is a lot of fun. It’s small and lightweight and fits easily in your purse. You can carry hundreds of books with you wherever you go, and you can read the scorchinest smut right smack in the middle of a crowd with no one the wiser.

Until, that is, someone gets intrigued with your nifty toy and plops themselves down next to you, peering with delight over your shoulder. Maybe it’s someone from your church. Or your daughter’s school.  And they had no idea you liked to read Sasha White. Or that you could blush neon red. Don’t ask me why I bring this up, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.