Okay, so I'm sitting at my computer and the following happens...

(*For those of you who saw this first bit on FB already, scroll down-- I've got more stuff below it:-)








Okay… so I'm sitting at my computer and the following happens…

***

...An Altoid's box is plunked right next to my computer by my sober-eyed Zoomboy. 

"What is that?"

"Greg. My fish."

"Oh!"

"Well I wasn't going to bring the whole tank out here!"

"Well I would have brought it!"

"Oh."

"Please tell me the mints aren't still in there with him."

"No. I took them out."

"Awesome."

"And be careful. There's a lot of water still in there."

"DUMP THAT OUT IN THE SINK, DAMMIT!"

"Okay." He dumps the water. "Can we bury him now?"

"NOW?"

"I'll go dig the hole."

As he disappears, Squish comes in.

"Where's the fish?"

"In the Altoid's box on the counter."

"Where? Oooh… let me look!"

Zoomboy comes back in with the shovel. "Is it cold out there?"

"Put on a shirt."

A few minutes later: "Mom, I don't know where to dig in the flowerbed. There might be dead rats or cats that I don't know where they are."

So I'd like to apologize to anyone who saw me digging a hole in my flowerbed while wearing my pajamas and no bra. I promise I'll harness the girls shortly, but in the meantime, everybody say a brief prayer for Greg the fish. He was a good fish,a quiet fish, a fish who knew how to swim in his aquarium and make that work for him. He lived for a year and a half, which is a long time for the fish of a boy who got him on his ninth birthday.

Rest in Peace, Greg. You owe me a box of Altoids and my dignity… and… oh gees… somebody let the dog back in!

(BTW-- the death of Greg the Fish happened not two hours after a conversation with Elizabeth on how proud we were that I'd had a fish survive longer than a minute and a half. Gees, tell one story at a dinner table about how you once replaced your daughter's entire tank because you'd been throwing food on dead fish for a week while she was at camp, and nobody will give you a break, will they?)

***
… The kids, fresh from buying not one but two new bettas (the better for one betta  to see the other, fan his fins and go, "Holy shit! It's a fish!", thus extending his life by at least a year) start running back and forth from Zoomboy's room and back.  

"And mom, we're putting this thing in this bowl, and this thing in this bowl and…"

And so on, until my eyes are closing (well, lack of sleep had something to do with that) and I'm all but snoozing at my keyboard.  

I go to take a nap, and when I wake up, the television is still not on.

"You guys didn't watch SpongeBob?" I ask, because that's usually what happens during the hot part of the afternoon when the AC cannot combat the brutal sun on the television/kitchen side of the house. 

"No," says Squish.  "We were watching the fish!"

Had they not just gotten out of school, and probably cooked their little noggins with all of the outside activities that the school put on in the last three days in the heat, I'd worry about those kids.

***
...I find out I've been quoted on Booklist Online!

***

… I WROTE THIS. 

***
… I realize I've trained the dog to jump up onto my body at the count of three.  Usually it's at one and a half-- little bastard can't count for shit!

***

… (And this is a long one-- are you ready?)  I realize that I have accidentally spawned the horror that is THIS ARTICLE.   And I only wish I was kidding.  If you read the article, you will see the author say that she was inspired by "a commenter" from another article who said that "the only thing that differentiates romance from literary fiction is nothing more or less than the idea that love is redemptive."  She links back to my comment on her other article-- the article in which she lamented the fact that women didn't seem to be reading women, and then completely neglected to mention romantic fiction, which is 25% of ALL FICTION published-- when that industry is primarily written, edited, published, and promoted by women.

She was very proud of this-- she replied to my comment with a bright eyed post saying I'd inspired her to gather together an entire other article!

*deep breath*

Forgive her Goddess-- she knows not what she does.

I have seen romance dismissed before-- I have, before I was forced to defend my place in the world, been one of the dismissers.  But having your job ripped away from you because the powers-that-be believe you're writing "porn" makes you evaluate who you are, what you are doing, and whether or not you are using your abilities to their fullest.  Is romance the most I could be writing?  Am I underselling myself by not writing literary fiction?  I mean… it's only romance, right?  

*laughs quietly to self*

You all know the answer to this-- most of you who've followed me for any length of time will know what I'm going to say before I say it.  But, like "the albatross" at the end of Serenity, some people like to hear it repeated.  

Poetry is more important than history or philosophy.

Now that links to two other posts in which I've discussed this idea before, but, well, old posts.  I need to revisit.

Right now, as I type, I'm listening to the Jon Stewart show, and an Egyptian emissary is discussing the inhumanity of the regime.  It makes me want to cry.  It makes me ill.  It makes me angry.  

I want to scream at the screen, because treating people humanely seems to be so very basic, and it's constantly ignored. 

But it's easy for me to sit in my kitchen and ignore that.  It's news.  After a while, we just have to let the news roll off our back or we can't function.

But what if I'm reading a book, and the hero/heroine is in Egypt.  What if he/she is being tortured.  What if, while understanding the political complexities, I'm also understanding what it feels like to be a real, living, breathing human being in that place.  

Well, if nothing else, I might be voting or donating or even writing for that cause.  

Because that's what the power of poetry-- emotional fiction-- does for us.  It allows us to fully empathize with another human being, to take their part, to live their lives.  

And that's why romance is important-- and not in the "It's escapists literature" way that this article implies.  (States openly.)  

Romance allows us to be somebody else-- and becoming somebody else is the only way to change who we are.

It's often been said that artists and writers are the vanguard of social change, and it would be easy to assume that writers like Charles Dickens, Harper Lee, George Orwell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley, Richard Wright, Eli Wiesel, Sandra Cisneros, or Henry David Thoreau have a corner on that market.  Those writers, you may argue, talked about things that were real.  They talked about social structure, they talked about civil rights, they talked about oppression, they talked about the effects of the mass government on the individual.  Those authors aren't romance authors--romance really has no place among them.

Except Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice took Mary Wollstonecraft's ideas and made them human.  George Orwell, Ayn Rand, and Aldous Huxley took ideas they'd talked about in article after essay and gave those ideas a face.  (Even if you don't like Ayn Rand, you have to admit that the only reason her work has lasted as long as it has is because we were fascinated with that face.) Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harper Lee took the world of Richard Wright and made it relevant for the societal class that was as far removed from the oppressed black man as possible.  Charles Dickens took his travails in debtors prison and made them real for people who would never go without.  Eli Wiesel and Sandra Cisneros didn't only give the Jewish and Hispanic communities artists to identify with, they gave the other ethnic communities a way to identify with what they perceived as outsiders.  And these ideas-- these lofty, important ideas about the human condition and government and how we conduct our lives with meaning--have everything to do with romance.

Romance is not just the primary expression of family and the optimism of redemptive love in literature, it is the ultimate expression of civil rights. One of womankind's  first demands as equals in this world was the right to marry for love instead of to be treated as chattel, and that was what Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about.  One of the major conflicts in the works of Jane Austen was the right of a woman to interact equally with a man and not to be judged as an ornament. When Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harper Lee, and Richard Wright wanted to show a society gone horribly awry, they showed what the rules and the oppression did not just to the black men in their novels, but to the entire family who gathered around the men. Charles Dickens showed how horribly romance could go when poverty and social class were allowed to intervene.  The primary relationships that were destroyed by the oppressive governments in the world of Huxley, Orwell, and Rand were the romantic and family relationships. Cisneros and Wiesel show us the family unit, impacted by war, impacted by culture, impacted by the inhumanity that humans inflict on each other-- in the very personal units of the growing individual and the family.

  If the purview of literary and speculative fiction is to show us what is wrong with the "world", the purview of romantic fiction is to show us how the "world" affects human beings with faces and flaws in a very specific, individual way.  

Now yes-- some romance is escapism, and gloriously done, may it live forever.  But even in the most glorious escapist romance there is a noble and important subtext:

The family unit is important.  Two individuals falling in love in spite of the obstacles the world has set before them is important.  The belief that redemptive love can save the individual is important.  

Yes, men dismiss this idea-- particularly literary men who point to the artists I've listed above--and say, "But a simple 60-120K work of pulp fiction will never recreate the social impact of a Dickens or a Wright or a Cisneros."

They don't understand that it already has.

When I was teaching, my readers, often girls but not always, would devour romance by the bucketload.  And when we ate lunch together or talked during lulls in class, they would repeatedly ask me questions about what they read:

Why do some authors make the women act so silly?  Why do the male authors always kill somebody off at the end, do they think that makes them literary?  Are there really relationships where women can claim equality?  Don't the men leave when the women make more money?  Why would this character go back to school in her thirties? How come the character is always a loner?  How come the girls don't put out immediately, isn't that what we're supposed to do?  The men never hit the women in these books even when they're mouthy-- is that realistic?  Did they really have sex before marriage back then?  But those people are our parents' age!  Do men really marry girls when they have other men's children?

The questions went on and on and on.  Some of them are disturbing-- many of them are disturbing--and some of them should be a warning to some authors to take their craft more seriously, but all of them pointed to one thing.

These girls, living in a depressed socio-economic area, with often confusing (at best!) choices of gender and family expectations to choose from, were looking at these romance books as a blueprint for their own behavior as they entered into adulthood.   They wanted to know if they could be strong, independent, educated women like the ones they read about.  They wanted to know if those relationships are real.

What could possibly be more important to a successful economy and an educated populace than women--and men--who believe that one half of our population should have the same rights as human beings as the other half?  Yes, the school curriculum suggested all of those other canonical writers, and we the teachers taught those books as we taught critical thinking and language skills.  And our growing citizens took those critical thinking and language skills and applied them to a topic of personal interest to them: What kind of person can I be, and what kind of personal future can I have when I reach maturity.

And the romantic relationship is one of the key pivotal relationships.  

They wanted a blueprint.  And the romances they read-- the ones with strong, educated, powerful and equal partners who weren't too stupid to live (a fortunately dying trope)-- were that blueprint.  And the adults who read those same books-- the divorced teachers (there was a terrifying number of them)-- were reading those books for hope.  They hoped that the jungian choice of companionship vs. loneliness had not yet passed them by, and that they, too, could find a relationship in which they could be the strong, educated, powerful and equal romantic partner, who could find someone who would love them for exactly that.

This is our youth.  This is our adult citizenry.  These are the educated and the self-educating.  And they are turning to romance to see if society has a place for personal happiness.

They are turning to romantic fiction for hope.  

There is nothing trivial in that.  That concept is not subservient in the the arena of human rights.  The people being imprisoned and tortured in Egypt want nothing more than to walk down the street with the people they care about, and to be allowed to be strong, educated, and equal.  The LGBTQ community wants nothing more than to have equal civil rights with their heterosexual friends and family, and to walk down the street with the people they care about, and to be allowed to be strong, educated, and equal.  The people crusading for the environment or against gun laws or for a change in government fear that these issues will affect the health of their loved ones, or their partners, or children, and when they speak against their government they have faith that they are strong, educated, and equal, and that their families will be respected.

God(ess) may have created Adam and Steve-- and more power to her if she did--but she did not create a parent and a child, or a president and an advisee, or a pair of platonic friends.  God(ess) created romantic partners who were equals, and who made mistakes and forged a life together.  That is (whether we're Christian or not) one of our society's first stories, one of our touchstone mythologies as humans.  

And, ultimately, it is a romance.  

And romance is important.

So I appreciated the writer of the article.  I appreciate that she used my comment and tried to address the thing I said in there.  But I will stand by my literature, and I will stand by my genre.  There is more going on here than the mating rituals of the 21st American denizens, and more going on in the genre than guilt free fantasy escapism.  

You just need the eyes of a world citizen to see it.  

Poetry, History, and Philosophy

Poetry is more important than history or philosophy.

Aristotle

This is Andrew and Ariel-- they went to Book Expo of America for my publisher, Dreamspinner, this year, back in May. While they were there, a friend of mine from the Paranormal Romance Guild, another writer, Marianne Morea, saw my name, and said, "I know Amy!" and Andrew and Ariel said, "So do we!" and this picture was taken.

They're holding my titles.

This picture means a lot to me.

Besides the obvious--and most important--thing of finding friends in an industry that is, by nature, isolated, there's that whole "holding my titles" thing.

When I taught high school, I had quotes ALL over my room, including the one by Aristotle, up by the clock. It's got some interesting ramifications.

Back in the day--you know, when Aristotle roamed the earth and everything looked like the Houses of the Holy album cover by Led Zeppelin--poetry didn't strictly refer to the short lyric poem that everyone thinks of today, and it didn't just refer to the big, scary epic poems of Homer or Virgil or even Ovid, either. Back in the day, poetry also referred to the plays, both comic and tragic that were the core of the Greek Theatre (upon which the Renaissance theatre was based, and therefore, much of what we know about theatre now!)

One of Aristotle's crowning achievements was his "manual for writing and understanding fiction", Poetics. Some of his stuff, we take it upon ourselves to ignore--his insistence that a play only cover the span of twenty-four hours, for example, we feel free to wreak havoc with--but that doesn't mean it's not still with us. Some people think that the reason Romeo and Juliet meet, get married, get it on, and get dead, all in the span of a week was that Willy-boy was trying to follow the rules. He ended up breaking the in a big way with a lot of his other works, but remember, R&J was one of his early creations, and he hadn't quite found a way to tell Aristotle to piss off, he had his own voice, by then. The rules of Epic Poetry and the rules of a Tragic Hero and the Satiric Hero (I capitalize these concepts because I love them, and they are my friends) were Aristotle's, so we can all concede, boyfriend knew his shit. And boyfriend's shit was related to poetry. Today, when we're not talking about lyric poetry (which, granted, we hear more in music today, although there are some perfectly magnificent actual poets out there) we're talking epic or historical poems (fiction books) or plays (movies or theatre).

So, while that quote seems to apply just to hearts and flowers and Cavalier poets talking out their peen, what it really is talking about, is fiction.

I had the hardest time getting this idea across to my students.

See, here's the thing. How many of us watch the news and memorize parts of it? Hands up? Anyone? There's just too much to know, isn't there? How many of us have lived through actual warfare? Some of us, I know--there are veterans out there, to whom I am grateful every day--but in actual numbers, compared to the everyday citizen? Not so much.

Now how many of us remember who was the leader of the Department of Defense when the war in Iraq began? How about the Speaker of the House? Which countries are we occupying right now? Who are the leaders there? Do the populations in those countries support us or not? What is our personal philosophy regarding these occupations--do we have it sorted out for each political cause and are we sure we know which political cause is which in the Middle East? (Someone reading this probably has their shit sorted and their deets documented for this one--and I salute you. Hell, I kiss the ground at your bloody feet for it--because every time I try, I get the same mental block that I get when I try to remember which of the cube-like buildings in the Intel complex my husband works in. I don't care if it's the only two story one--they all look the same and my eyes glaze over and I end up driving to the wrong one on principle!)

Now how many of us watched The Green Zone, or The Hurt Locker, or The Messenger and cried, raged, tore our hair out or bit our nails in response to what the characters went through and the basic injustices

That is the difference between History, Philosophy, and Poetry.

History can inform, Philosophy can debate, but Poetry, and Poetry only, can create human beings out of information and opinion and give them life and make us feel for them and make us root for them and make us take their history and philosophy and internalize it and make it ours.

Poetry is the humanizing force behind the other two--and perhaps the most difficult to achieve. The Historian documents, and the Philosopher argues--Poetry does both. Poetry incorporates the time, the place, the pressures, the pain, and using characters, gives the cause voice. It's one thing to hear news reports about "casualties resulting in the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction"--but unless you were there, you don't see the crushing frustration, anger, confusion, and sheer, stinking rage that come with the blurb on the news, do you? Well, not unless someone turns that situation into poetry.

Pilgrim's Progress, the allegory my daughter was subjected to when she attended parochial school, is all about the Christians turning their histories and philosophies into literature. My daughter may not remember her Bible verses, but you can bet your ass she remembers Pilgrim's Progress--because that is the power of poetry.

I remember, back in the early eighties, I bought a lot of the Harlequin Presents romances, and the Silhouette ones as well. They were short, they were sweet, and I read some of them ad infinitum, even though the heroine was always virginal, the hero was always older, and the girl's virginity seemed to be of paramount importance to the entire transaction of falling in love. In the early nineties, I told Mate that the romances took a shift, and those same once-virginal girls were now divorcing the controlling bastards they'd fallen for when they were nineteen and marrying a guy who wouldn't mind changing diapers once in a while. The times had changed, and so had the romances. By the late nineties, the girls were not just not guarding their virginity like it was plutonium (thank Goddess!) they were also kicking ass, being spies, being Slayers, being tough, being smart, being whatever the fuck they wanted, including stay-at-home mommies if they were so inclined.

That poetry right there--and I know a fuckton of men who would laugh their balls off at the thought--changed the fucking world, and it changed it for the better.

Now, there are writers like me, who write about "non-traditional" families. It's not just the straight men and women getting laid who get to have the happily ever after. Now, the gay men and women get to have theirs too.

Still. Fucking. Poetry. Still important. Still the unstoppable combination of history, philosophy, and humanity to change the goddamned world.

So I'm bringing this up why?

I mean, my actual 'history' this weekend was pretty intense-- we had soccer opening day yesterday, got to watch my daughter officiate her first (three!) games, and watch her father give her "whistle blowing lessons" at the end of the first one because she needed to blow that thing with POWER, right? Got to watch Squish run around in a knot with a bunch of other kids, and got to watch Zoomboy get his pants beat off by ten year olds when he's only seven. Got to come home and be exhausted and knit and stare blankly at the screen and try to write. And that was just yesterday! Today there was Sun Splash, a water park with waterslides, where I went with my family. I wasn't planning to go, because I've got a deadline and the kids were tired, and we were going to chill, but at the last fucking gasp I changed direction and took the little kids with me and my husband and my friend and the big kids, and go we did.

I went to Sun Splash because this morning, I had one of those painful family conversations where you try to tell your parents something and they don't listen, and they tell you that you're wasting your life and your talents and you don't know what the real world is all about. After that conversation I didn't want to sit home and sulk when i should have been writing because I've got a deadline coming and I need to get my ass in gear.

My parents were telling me that writing fiction was not important. I needed to do something "important" with my life, and it would be one thing if I was writing "important" stuff, but what I'm doing isn't "important."

You can't bring Aristotle and Shakespeare and Homer and Virgil and The Hurt Locker and The Green Zone and old Harlequin Romances and Buffy the Vampire Slayer into an argument with your mother. You just can't. She'll accuse you of changing the subject.

She just doesn't get that those things ARE the subject, and that they ARE important, and they ARE changing the world.

Because those things are Poetry. And Poetry is more important than History or Philosophy.

And Poetry (of the modern, fictionalized sort!) is what I write--and what my friends write (waves at Ariel and Andrew)--and it is iron in my blood because I think it drives the world.

And what we do is important.

I Do Not Write Porn

I've joked about it-- a lot! I'm self deprecating about my writing--I called Vulnerable"my smutty vampire novel" when I was finished with it. When I was working on Jack & Teague it was "gay werewolf porn". I mean, we bloggers, we tend to be a self-deprecating lot, right? It's as though we feel that just putting ourselves out there online, that's a big enough act of hubris. We don't need to do anything else to offend the gods.

We can do amazing things--I have met people online who have DONE amazing things--knit an impossible scarf, or put out a phenomenal number of quilts for charity, or make rumballs for many, many friends, or brave the hazards of cursed yarn, or juggle the demands of a beloved faith and an obsession with fiber, or learn how to sew in order to please an adored child, or earn a degree in a subject way too complicated for me to even remember, or balance a difficult job and a serene, positive outlook on life.

I have met all of these women on the web, and all of them, in some way, shape, or form, take away from the things they have done. "The scarf only looks impossible. Double-row lace is really easy once you get the hang if it," "Rumballs are really easy--here's my recipe. See?" "Well, yeah, it was a project for church, so I sort of had to do it," "Yeah, I'm a science geek," "It was a simple pattern--really easy to do!" or "I really doubt that yarn had it in for me. Mostly." I read your blogs, I boggle at your accomplishments, and I understand what goes into that job, that classwork, that scarf, that recipe, that manuscript, that pattern, that weight loss, that serene outlook, that whatever, because I am a woman, and I try hard not to make too big a deal out of my accomplishments too.

So I get minimum sleep, agonize over my manuscript, my readers' wants, the things pushing at my heart to be written, my genre, my word choices, and my place in the universe and whether or not I'm making the most of what the Goddess gave me to forge a better one. And when someone asks me what I'm doing with all of that sweat and blood, I say, rather shyly, "You know. Writing fantasy or some dumb shit like that. Me and porn, heh heh heh, don't you know it!"

I do not write porn.

Nothing I've ever written or ever shall write will ever fail The Miller Obscenity test. My stories have plot, characters, theme, socially redeeming value, a message, literary devices and some really lovely passages of description. My characters make people cry, make them angry, make them hurt, make them think, and my themes appeal to a truly diverse span of the population, if my fan mail is anything to judge from. People tell me that my stories haunt them, and that my characters feel like family.

I do not write porn.

So what is it do I write?

I write romance--fantasy romance, urban fantasy romance, contemporary m/m romance, you add it all up, and it's romance, and while puckered angry white men (and women--I've been watching the political arena, there are some REALLY puckered angry women out there who have lost all perspective about what they do or do not need to care about in terms of other people's sex lives) will tell you that romance is not particularly important, I would beg to differ.

Hell--so would the entire publishing industry.

25% of the entire publishing industry is made up of romance. Now, again, puckered angry men and women will tell you that this simply indicates the prurient nature of a decaying society.

I think they're full of shit.

People reading great literature for the first time are often startled at the amount of sex in it--and not just in Brave New World or 1984. Patrick Henry told the Virginia Convention that they were laying on their backs "supinely" and getting screwed by hope. Thomas Paine used the idea of German troops coming into frontier houses and raping the women and getting an entire generation of Prussian offspring on them as a goad to keep people fighting. Ben Franklin talks about why you want to shag an old mistress instead of a young one, and Walt Whitman... *whew* brother was bi and proud and descriptive about it. So was Lord Byron. Hell--so was Shakespeare.

It's just that people always assume that great works of literature and the people who spawn them are above sex, and I don't know why. (Well, I do know why, but let's save my rant for why we can expect puckered angry white people from the Puritans, because any people who thought the Dutch weren't white ENOUGH are BOUND to stir up some stupid ass shit for later, shall we?) But assuming that literature is above sex is overlooking the entire nature of humanity, and so, for myself and any imaginary puckered angry white people who would land on this site (and I like to imagine them bursting into flames if they do.  I do have a streak of pettiness in me that I have tried valiantly to hide, but it keeps getting away from me!) I'm going to remind us of why that's not true.

There are four basic human relationships. Four.

There is the filial, the platonic, the romantic, and the divine.

So, there's your relationship with your parents and children, your relationship with your friends, your sexual relationships, and your relationship with the God/Goddess of your choice. (Or all of them--whatever your conception of the divine, well, theryago. Jeff, god of biscuits, hear my prayers, right?)

Only one of these relationships has an age taboo, and that's mostly a physiological thing, right? You don't want to explain sex to your six year old because he thinks it's just naked wrestling, and as long as it's happy naked wrestling that only grown-ups do, you're pretty happy with that. But your teenager? Your young college student? Well, you assume they will grow into the romantic relationships in great literature just as they will grow into their own, and good for them!

But the romantic relationship is actually bigger than the age/sex taboo, and that's something that people forget. The romantic relationship SPAWNS the filial relationship. That John Mayer song, "Fathers be good to your daughters?" Absolutely-- the parents' working partnership (romantic relationship) helps to set the tone for the parent child relationship. It's the alpha--and the omega--of the holy trinity of parent/parent/child. Ah ah ah...

Wait--the romantic relationship just took over a whole other quarter of the relationship building, didn't it?

Because many people see the divine in their families. The other parent or the child--well, that's proof that God/Goddess exists, for some of us. Some people existed in a lonely void, until a beloved's voice or touch awoke them to the possibility of a warm presence in the universe that just might have some use and comfort for those of us in a lonely void. A friend to hold hands with and keep us warm in the night, right?

And there you go. The fourth wall of the relationship cottage, firmly usurped by the romantic relationship. Because our partner is supposed to be our best friend, right? I mean, I'm not about to go all Christian on the diversified and faintly pagan lot I know lurks out there, but isn't that in the marriage vows or something? Our spouse is our friend?

So there you go--this one relationship, this one side of the relationship building, well, it's not just the wall, it's the foundation and the cornerstones for a lot of us, isn't it? Sure, it's POSSIBLE for the human race to accomplish great things without the goad of romantic love... but why would they? Why would they even want to.

Notice, by the by, that there is no room in our little house for government? I don't know... anybody out there, no matter WHAT the outcome of an election, getting the electric buzzy sexy tingles for whoever is wearing Uncle Sam's stilts?

Yeah. Didn't think so.

So there you go. The romantic relationship--25% of the publishing industry, but even more than that to the human race! (And, of course, that "25%" number is completely overlooking those other genres that CONTAIN romance but are not LABELED romance--yet another reason I dislike labels intensely, right?)

And yes. There is sex in romance. There are things that people say to each other when their skin is bare and the world is night-dark and private that define who they are, and what happiness is to them. In order to write successful romance, very often, a writer must needs write successful sex.

But to call it porn is more than self-deprecating. It's damned near a criminal insult to something that I know I have labored over--and that a lot of other people that I know now, have also labored over. Romantic literature is age old, and it's important. No one reads about King Arthur because he wrote political law and set it in stone. They read it because the tortured triangle of Lancelot, Gwenyfar, and Arthur makes our hearts hurt to this day. That terrible angst set in motion wars that killed and treaties that saved and boundaries that defined a people. Even if it never happened, the story itself defines us, and it is not porn.

So the world seems to be crumbling around our ears, and I'm here, in my hole, writing romance and hoping that my words make a difference. Is it futile? Does it make me hopelessly naive?

I'm going off the classics again.

Aristotle said that poetry is more important than history or philosophy. That's because if you change the way someone FEELS about something, you have done something infinitely more important than recorded what has happened or delineated the rules of thought that the world operates within. If you change the way someone FEELS about something, you have CHANGED history, and you have CHANGED the rules of thought that people believe the world operates within.

My romance has the potential to change the world. People have written me and told me that this is so. My work has changed the way they think, and they, in turn, will go out and change the way they treat other people, or think about important issues, or even vote. And that is the power of romance.

And it is not porn.