Interview & Giveaway: Jill Sorenson

Credit: Florin Gorgan

Welcome to a Romance Around the Corner interview, where the questions are longer than the answers. Our guest today is Jill Sorenson, one of my favorite Romantic Suspense authors and a long-time friend of the blog.

Q. Hello and welcome back, Jill! Your new book, RIDING DIRTY, is a bit of a departure from your usual work, both in terms of story and the way it’s been published: it’s a Motorcycle Club book, it’s an electronic-only release, the tone is darker, and the sexual content is higher. You have been very open and frank about your struggle and desire to sell more books, and you recently talked about how the upcoming Aftershock book, WILD, has been dropped by the publisher and your plans to self-publish it. How much of this new direction you’re taking with RIDING DIRTY is motivated by the market and what currently seems popular, and how much of it is driven by inspiration and the desire to explore a new side of your writing? Is it hard to balance the business aspect of writing with the artistic and creative process? 

Jill: Hi Brie! Thanks so much for having me. These are such great questions. I’m not going to pretend that my motivations for writing this book were purely creative. I’ve struggled in traditional publishing and romantic suspense has been a tough road. I wanted to go digital-only to keep the price down, and I wanted to capitalize on a hot trend. But I was also more inspired by this story idea than I’ve ever been before. For me, it’s all about a good concept. I can’t write something I don’t believe in. I also think that MC romance is a subcategory of romantic suspense. Some of my previous books have been dark and gritty, so it’s not that much of a departure.

Guest Post: Writing in Color by Jill Sorenson

Credit: Jain Basil

ETA: There was some wonky formatting that made it look like the last paragraph was Jill's, when in reality it was part of the Jeannie Lin quote. I apologize for the confusion it might have caused.  

Jill Sorenson, one of my favorite Romantic Suspense authors, is here today to talk about her experience writing multicultural romances and about what we can do, whether we are authors or readers, to put our money where our mouth is and help to no only make the genre more diverse, but to bring attention to the diversity that already exists. 

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As a long-time regular in Romanceland, I’ve participated in many discussions about race. Whenever the subject comes up, I see the same types of comments. Readers call for more diversity but seem unaware of the multicultural romances already published. White authors of multicultural romance are praised and mentioned more often than authors of color. White authors who don’t include characters of color express concerns about getting the details wrong.

The fear of being criticized for racism or cultural appropriation is strong—and it’s not unwarranted. Portrayals of non-white characters are scrutinized on a different level because stereotypes of minorities are incredibly common and damaging.

Guest Post and Giveaway: Solace Ames on Asian Sex Symbols and BDSM

Image credit: Jain Basil Aliyas

Our friend and awesome author, Solace Ames (who also writes under the Violetta Vane pen name), is here today to tell us about her new book (co-written with Heloise Belleau aka Heidi Belleau) and to talk about sex symbols, sex stereotypes and race. As you can see, we’re kick-starting the year with a bang. Also, stick around because there’s a giveaway at the end of the post.

Let’s give it up for Solace!

Asian Sex Symbols and BDSM by Solace Ames

I like to think there’s a big difference between a sex symbol and a sex stereotype. Symbols are unique, and potentially infinite, like stars in the night sky. Stereotypes are the same, flat, and dehumanizing. As an Asian-American woman, I’m sadly familiar with sexual stereotypes. My race is a porn category, after all. But while it’s important to criticize stereotypes, I think it’s equally important to celebrate the positive. And today, there are an increasing number of Asian sex symbols.

Guest Author and Giveaway: Megan Hart

Credit: Jain Basil Aliya

Megan Hart is here today to tell us a bit about her new book, Tear You Apart. Remember to stick around because there’s a giveaway at the end.

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Sometimes, You Turn Around

“I came in on the train and then took a cab, but that didn’t stop the late March drizzle from destroying everything I’d carefully put together at home earlier this afternoon. My hair hangs sodden against my forehead and cheeks. My clothes cling, damp and heavy and chilled. I stripped off my dark, soaked stockings in the bathroom and wrapped them in paper towels to tuck inside my purse, and my legs feel glaringly pale. Instead of the glass of white wine in my hand, I’m desperate for a cup of coffee, or better yet, a mug of hot chocolate. With whipped cream. I’m desperate for the taste of something sweet.”

Heroine Week, Day 7 – Shooting Yankees and Pink-Martini Friends: Women's Friendships in Romance by Shelley Ann Clark

I met Shelley on Twitter (this has been a great year to Twitter friendships!) and I anxiously wait to read her books. In the meantime, we can find her over at her virtual home, Wonkomance.

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Shooting Yankees and Pink-Martini Friends: Women's Friendships in Romance by Shelley Ann Clark

Friendships among women are tricky things.

They’ve been fetishized, idolized, idealized. They’ve been demonized. We have Steel Magnolias; we also have Mean Girls. Women are competitive, we’re told. Women friends are for life, we’re told. It’s normal to have a frenemy; but your BFF should be closer to you than your husband.

Like nearly everything else about being a woman, ideas about our friendships are presented in a swamp of contradictions, all of them designed to make us feel insecure, to wonder if we’re doing it wrong.

Heroine Week, Day 6 – Fanny Price: Physically Weak, Mentally Strong by Ros Clarke

Once Upon a Time, Ros Clarke wrote a book about a Sheikh who fell in love with a woman. Nothing new, right? Think again! It turns out that the woman was a tycoon. Need I say more?

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Fanny Price: Physically Weak, Mentally Strong by Ros Clarke

Strong heroines are popular right now. Readers, mostly, like women who'll fight their corner, make their choices, and determine their own destiny. Which is great, but in my reading experience, all too many of those kickass heroines turn out to have an inner core of marshmallow. Faced with the right guy, they go weak at the knees and weak in the head.

Heroine Week, Day 6 – The Contrasting Strengths of Mary Balogh’s Lauren and Freya by Jennifer Lohmann

Jennifer Lohmann isn’t afraid to make risky decisions, something that reflects on her unique, interesting heroines. These women feel real because they go get what they want, make difficult choices and sometimes, they get angry and want to be left alone.

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The Contrasting Strengths of Mary Balogh’s Lauren and Freya by Jennifer Lohmann  

Whenever I am asked who my favorite heroine is, I have a ready and easy answer—Lauren Edgeworth from A Summer to Remember by Mary Balogh. In a Historical Romance sea of feisty heroines, Lauren is quiet, calm, and (dare I say it) timid. But she is not weak. Bedwyn after Bedwyn makes the mistake of believing her politeness is a sign of weakness and she demonstrates her backbone, while remaining polite. Her family presents her with safe futures in the form of safe husbands and she rejects the easy path. Lauren wants what she wants. She won’t be loud about it and she wouldn’t be rude about it, but neither will she be pushed around. And she may be afraid of swimming, riding horses, and climbing trees, but her kindness means she’s not afraid of difficult emotions. When faced with the messy and unhappy Butlers, Lauren looks around and thinks, “I can fix this.” More than being willing to participate in wrenchingly emotional conversations—she’s willing to start them. Lauren ends the book much as she begins it. Her journey requires her to learn that she can be imperfect and still be loved—that she is loved—but she doesn’t take this knowledge and become a different person. She becomes a bigger version of herself.

Heroine Week, Day 6 – An Un-Heroic Heroine: Dorothea of Middlemarch by Amara Royce

Amara’s bio says that she “writes historical romances that combine her passion for 19th-century literature and history with her addiction to happily ever afters.” I think we all approve of this. Her contribution to Heroine Week is particularly interesting because it comes from the perspective of someone who is both an English scholar and an author.

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An Un-Heroic Heroine: Dorothea of Middlemarch by Amara Royce

As I prepared to write this contribution to Heroine Week, I started out with a very clear and confident focus: the heroism (or is it heroine-ism?) of Dorothea Brooke from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (one of those “loose, baggy monsters” of a Victorian novel that you may have been assigned in high school or college).  So, of course, the very first thing I did was go back through the novel to remind myself of why she is my favorite literary character. And that’s when I got all discombobulated.

Heroine Week, Day 5: Can Romantic Suspense Be Feminist? By Jill Sorenson

One of the reasons why I love Jill’s heroines so much, and this is something I've never had the opportunity to comment on before, is that they know their bodies well and know what gives them pleasure and how to get it. It seems like a silly, inconsequential thing considering how many other virtues her books have, but in a genre where the heroes seem to have all the answers to the heroines’ sexual fulfillment, books like hers always make an impact.

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Can Romantic Suspense Be Feminist? By Jill Sorenson

There have been a number of discussions online about feminism and romance. Some people think the romance genre is inherently feminist because it’s written by women, for women. Others think it’s inherently non-feminist because the heroine finds happiness (and self-worth, perhaps) through her relationship with a man.

Narrowing the genre down into categories further complicates the question. Are some subgenres more feminist than others? Fans of m/m say they enjoy the gender equality and lack of sexism. Paranormal romance readers discuss problematic themes such as “fated mates” and captive heroines. Alpha males run rampant across genre lines.

Heroine Week, Day 3 – For Colored Girls Who Can’t Find Themselves Between the Pages by Rebekah Weatherspoon

Rebekah was one of the first people who joined Heroine Week. When she told me that her Happily Ever Afters came in every color, I knew her contribution would be interesting and invaluable. I was right, and you're about to see why. 

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For Colored Girls Who Can’t Find Themselves Between the Pages by Rebekah Weatherspoon

I talked to Brie briefly about Paula Deen and how it was affecting my headspace as I put this piece together. I wanted to leave Paula out of this cause really fuck Paula, but then something else happened. Rachel Jeantel took the stand in the George Zimmerman trial. I think Rachel did her absolute best. A murder trial is not an easy thing to participate in. I don’t know what I would do if I had to speak on behalf of my dead friend, under national pressure to tell the truth and additional pressure to bring an accused killer to justice. Rachel testified for hours. Both the defense and the prosecution handled Rachel poorly.

They handled other witnesses poorly as well. Jennifer Lauer, the neighbor whose 911 call picked up the sound of the gunshot, was asked the same questions over and over and was even accused of following George Zimmerman’s brother on twitter by the prosecution who didn’t understand how twitter works. She was not following the brother. Twitter had just suggested she follow him, probably because they are both associated with the case. In the following 24 hours I didn’t hear much about Jennifer Lauer, but I heard A LOT about Rachel Jeantel.

Heroine Week, Day 3 – Heroine First by Mary Ann Rivers

I met Mary Ann before she published her first book (it actually took me a while to realize she was an author). Her comments and blog posts are touching and insightful, and she can wear hipster glasses without looking like she's trying too hard.

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Heroine First by Mary Ann Rivers

My favorite time of day is right before I fall asleep.

I’m a practiced, lifelong, devoted daydreamer, but it’s this half hour or so, sometimes much longer, after I’ve put the book I’m reading away, after I’ve put most of the day away, that I am able to see new characters for books most vividly.

Hear them, too, small verses lifted from their story. As if I enter this space where I am the Studs Terkel of my own imagination, my microphone light glowing green on a table between us, an author and her character, and I’m not asking questions, not exactly, maybe I’ve suggested a prompt, and then she’ll talk to me, at least a little, and that’s the first time, then, I’ll pick up on some mannerism – maybe it’s tucking her flyaway hair behind her ears, or a tendency towards a stray tear when she talks about her mom, or how she taps out the salient points of her story on the table with her index finger.

Heroine Week, Day 2 – Flawed Heroines and the Likeability Standard by Rebecca Rogers Maher

No one better to join Heroine Week than an author whose heroines and their journeys are always at the core of her books, and sometimes that journey exists outside of the romance itself, which make her stories even more compelling and rich. 

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Flawed Heroines and the Likeability Standard by Rebecca Rogers Maher

In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman insists that the most important thing in life is to be likeable. “Be liked,” he says, “and you will never want.”

Is this true? Is likeability what we all should be striving for? In a recent interview about her novel, The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud was asked whether anyone would want to be friends with her angry heroine, Nora. Messud responded with an outraged, “What kind of question is that?” She suggested that it would never be asked of a male author, about a male character, and that it was not necessary to be friends with a character in order to be moved by her. The question of likeability, or the “critical double standard—that tormented, foul-mouthed, or perverse male characters are celebrated, while their female counterparts are primly dismissed as unlikeable,” was later posed to a panel of authors at The New Yorker, with compelling results.

Heroine Week, Day 2 – Sexual Double Standards in Romance Novels or She Wants It - And That's Okay by Molly O’Keefe

I think that sometimes we confuse difficult and unlikable with complex and flawed. But being a Mary Sue can be tiresome, y’all! And no one knows that better than Molly O’Keefe’s heroines, who risked not being liked in favor of having fun and doing what they want (while wearing pink cowboy boots).

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Sexual Double Standards in Romance Novels or She Wants It - And That's Okay by Molly O’Keefe

I live in a bubble. My friends, the women I follow on Twitter, the blogs I read - our viewpoints upon the world, feminism, sex, romance novels - they match up the majority of the time.  I work from home so I don't have to see people or converse with people I don't like, or who routinely anger me and I've stopped reading the comments sections on line, where so much ugliness seems to reside.

Heroine Week, Day 2 – The Appeal of the Unlikable Heroine or Why I'd totally Root for Scarlet to Beat Up Melanie by Nicole Helm

Unlikable heroines seem to be really appealing (unsurprising, once you think about it). Nicole Helm has been one of their fiercest champions and I’m glad she’s here today to tell us why.

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The Appeal of the Unlikable Heroine or Why I'd totally root for Scarlet to beat up Melanie by Nicole Helm

The unlikable heroine. She saunters onto the pages of a book and takes no prisoners. She might be mean. She might be arrogant. She might find a way to get what she wants no matter what.

These are characteristics that make many romance readers swoon...if we're talking about the hero, but more often than not they are the characteristics that make a heroine totally polarizing and labeled "unlikable". You love her or hate her, and there's very little in between.

Heroine Week, Day 1 – The Heroine's Point of View by Stephanie Doyle

What I love about Stephanie Doyle's books is that they are risky and push boundaries, and this reflects on her heroines. These women are self-reliant, brave and refuse having their bosses’ secret babies, even when the opportunity presents itself.

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The Heroines's Point of View by Stephanie Doyle

I think most of us will universally acknowledge that Pride and Prejudice stands out as one of the first great romance novels. Our Alpha if you will. I will add to that and say Jane Eyre is (in my opinion) the most incredible romance heroine of all time. She hedges out Elizabeth ever so slightly for me.

When I started thinking about heroines and who my favorites were I started with where it all began. One of the obvious things that stands out with these two books is that the story is told from the point of view (POV) of the heroine.

Heroine Week, Day 1 – The Care and Feeding of the Everyday Heroine by Sarah Mayberry

Welcome to Heroine Week! I'm so excited to finally share all the fabulous guest posts with all of you. I know you're dying to get this party started, so here is one of my favorite authors, Sarah Mayberry. Her heroines are admirable, approachable and relatable, and this post pretty much explains why.

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The Care and Feeding of the Everyday Heroine

by Sarah Mayberry

Sometimes I think us contemporary romance authors have it tough, having to spin romance and lust and love out of the ordinary plain cotton of everyday life. Our heroines don’t get awesome swords or fighting skills or backstories that involved magic spells and paranormal powers. We don’t get to dress them up in hats and gloves and petticoats and send them out to roam the streets of London in a high perch phaeton with some gorgeous aristocrat at their side.

Guest Post & Giveaway: Molly O’Keefe on Sports Journalism, Realistic Romance and the Consequences of Fame

Molly O’Keefe wrote one of my favorite books of 2012, and she continues to amaze me with her ability to infuse her stories with a heavy dose of realism. 

Romance tends to, well, romanticize every aspect of life, especially when said life is already seen as desirable but unattainable. This is particularly true with sport romances that mostly feature perfection and an idealized version of reality that gets old when constantly repeated. So when I read a book like Crazy Thing Called Love, a story that doesn’t pull any punches in its portrayal of the negative consequences of sport glory and fame, and still manages to deliver a very romantic love story, I feel hopeful that more authors won’t hesitate to tell stories that are closer to reality.

She’s here today to tell us more about that uglier aspect of fame, and what makes it so fascinating.

Also, stick around because there’s a giveaway at the end.

Guest Author & Giveaway: Anne Calhoun

Image Credit

Breath on Embers was one of my favorite Erotic Romances of the year, and Anne Calhoun one of my favorite authors. So today I’m very happy to welcome her to the blog. The story is set in New York, and the city features prominently, almost like a secondary character. She’s here to tell us more about it. 

Location, Location, Location – Columbus and Manhattan

“You know who lives here?” he asked as she was about to walk out. Without waiting for her response, he added, “People who want to feel alive.”

“I should go back to Columbus then,” she said.

“Is that a possibility?”

She shrugged as she wrapped her scarf around her neck. “I don’t have a plan one way or the other,” she said truthfully. Right now her only plan was to get through the holidays. Life in January was impossible to imagine.

She had the door open before he spoke. Like Erin, he liked to get the last word in. “Maybe you should stop fighting the city.”

BREATH ON EMBERS, my current release through Carina Press in the RED HOT HOLIDAY anthology, is set in Manhattan, specifically on the Upper East Side and in Midtown. This is a setting I know well. My husband and I moved to Manhattan in the late summer of 2001 and lived there until 2006. I would have stayed for the rest of my life but by the end we had a toddler and an apartment that seemed to be shrinking as he grew. I know people raise kids in the city, but we didn’t want to do that. So we moved back to the Midwest.

Guest Author & Giveaway: Katie Porter

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I'm happy to welcome Katie Porter to the blog. This is the co-writing team formed by authors Lorelie Brown and Carrie Lofty. Together they write Erotic Romance, and they are here today to tell us more about their new book, Inside Bet. 

Heather’s Mysterious Tattoo

By Katie Porter

Heather from Inside Bet is pretty straight laced. She’s an accountant, and has lived a very straight and narrow sort of life for more than a decade. She dresses conservatively and drives a six-year-old Camry. That’s what makes her happy—and helps her live down some pretty serious mistakes in her past. But that doesn’t mean she’s absolutely locked down.