Last week I blogged about tear-jerkers and bittersweet endings. This week I want to talk about Happily Ever After. I love HEA myself—if I didn’t I’d be writing in the wrong genre! I find it interesting that people criticize romance endings as unrealistic.

I know some people who bash romance endings haven’t read the books and seem to think they’re all a romp in a flowery meadow or something. They don’t realize that in a good romance the hero and heroine deal with the “bitter” in the course of the story. They earn the “sweet” at the end.

It’s also a bit like what Paul Gardner said about painting: “A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.” Romance novels end at a happy spot.

I figure the hero and heroine will likely face some more rough patches, though nothing as bad as the author has already put them through. I doubt anyone wants to imagine one of them dying of cancer a year after the story ends. (At least I hope no one wishes that on my characters!) But they still have life to deal with and that means problems. The thing is they’ll face them together. Is that so unrealistic?

Romance readers don’t always agree on what constitutes a happy ending either.

Often the HEA involves a huge brood of children, angelically cute and well-behaved. In a Regency this would certainly be historically accurate as many though not all couples did have large families. (One can also imagine servants handling many of the messier parts of parenting.)

Even contemporary romances frequently include children in the HEA. Jennifer Crusie’s BET ME generated a lot of discussion because the couple in that story chose to have a dog instead. I liked that, as a change, but more because I felt that was what was right for those characters. I also read a lot of reader comments to the effect that it was a more romantic ending because children ruin everything.

OK, they often do! Babies certainly have some sort of sixth sense for detecting when parents are trying to make love, even a few rooms away. Maybe it’s a survival mechanism to ensure there aren’t younger siblings too soon! And all too often “normal” family life is a façade of happiness with a lot of repressed tension. There are certainly bratty kids around, the result of people who didn’t really want them in the first place, maybe.

But functional family life shouldn’t be an unrealistic goal. We aren’t perfect, but my husband and I try to keep it fun and not let things fester. Our kids are pretty fun to be around, at least 80% of the time. I can certainly think of adults with a far worse fun-to-be-around ratio!

Of course real life HEA with children is hard work. Exhaustion battles lust at times. You call a dozen sitters just to set up one night out. Maybe not everyone’s idea of HEA. Sometimes it’s not mine either! Sometimes I yearn for the life Crusie gives the BET ME characters. But that book works for me also because of the realistic characters, the heroine who predicts she’s going to put on weight in middle age, the hero who finds her sexy anyway, the way they nurture his nephew.

Which sorts of HEA do you like? Fairytale? Do you prefer to see her as always slim and him with all his hair, (no matter how much he’s raked his fingers through it, as romance heroes are wont to do)? 🙂 Or more realistic? Are there some HEA elements that you find too perfect to enjoy? Or are there elements of reality that spoil the romance for you?

Do you ever try to imagine characters’ lives after The End?

Elena
www.elenagreene.com

P.S. Image is an illustration by Eleanor Vere Boyle, from Beauty and the Beast: An Old Tale New-Told. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1875.

Okay. I confess. I have a googlealert on my own name. Well, on Diane Perkins, Diane Gaston—and Gerard Butler. A google alert sends a message to your email anytime something new comes up on whatever topic you select. As you can see, I’ve selected three of my favorite topics for this service!

This week Diane Gaston popped up on my googlealert email, and I discovered that my RITA winner, A Reputable Rake, is an ebook! Harlequin has bundled A Reputable Rake with Nicola Cornick’s The Rake’s Mistress and Georgina Devon’s The Rake into an ebook available for order on eHarlequin and other ebookstores such as Fictionwise. It is called Rapturous Rake Bundle.

I’m delighted to enter the ebook market! A number of years ago I saw an ebook reader that intrigued me and made me feel that there would be a strong future for books in this format. Since then the market has grown. You might even say it provided the impetus for an entirely new romance subgenre – Erotic Romace – when Ellora’s Cave burst on the scene.

Many of us would never want to give up books, the feel of them, the smell of them, the sight of them three deep in our bookcases and piled next to our beds. When I see kids playing on their Game Boys (or whatever the “in” handheld game device is now), my own young adult offspring with their new IPods, and young career men and women with their Blackberries, I think that maybe ebooks will be the preferred way of publishing books in the future.

One idea I heard was to put textbooks on electronic reading devices. What a great thing that would be! Our high school and college students, even elementary school student, would not need to carry fat backpacks. Think of all the trees we would save! And one would hope that the cost of such books would decrease. Think of the innovations one could add to textbooks — short videos, animated diagrams, sound.

Most things I’ve read on the issue of ebooks say that there is still not an affordable, user-friendly
device on which to download books. Let’s face it, the IPod screen is a little small and even that device isn’t exactly inexpensive.

I haven’t yet read an ebook, but there is one on my TBR pile. My friend Delle Jacobs‘ His Majesty The Prince of Toads (A Regency!) is my first ebook download and I’m eager to read it!

Ebooks tend to have very long shelf life so an author’s backlist is readily available and ebook publishers often publish books that don’t fit a typical print publishing niche.

So, have you read any good eBooks lately?
Do you hate the idea of eBooks or are you a little bit intrigued?

To set up a google alert of your very own, go here:
http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en

And this is why I google Gerard Butler! Here he is on the set of 300, due for release in March!

Cheers!
Diane

This is going to be a short Saturday post! I’m writing it at an Internet cafe in snowbound Santa Fe, where I’ve come for a too-short birthday trip (it’s on the 15th, and Barnes and Noble giftcards make GREAT presents. I’m just sayin’…). So, I’m going to follow Megan’s example from a few weeks ago and let YOU be the post. Tell us what you’re currently reading, what’s in your TBR pile, or what upcoming books you’re looking forward to.

I decided not to bring many research books with me this weekend. I’ve been buried in my three ongoing projects (Regency with elements of ancient Greece, Tudor England, pre-Revolutionary France), and I’m afraid if I don’t take a break I’ll have Henry VIII dancing at Almacks with Marie Antoinette. Instead, I’m treating myself to some fiction–Colleen Gleason’s The Rest Falls Away (couldn’t resist after her interview here!), Claire Thornton’s The Abducted Heiress (a rare Restoration setting, something I would love to see more of), and a mystery by Sarah Stewart Taylor, Still As Death.

That’s my weekend reading! What’s yours?

There’s big excitement about this entry on
Kristin Nelson’s blog where she claims editors are gagging for historicals.

She’s too discreet to say which editors, though, which is a pity.

Apart from the argument that historicals have never been dead/dying, this raises another point:

Who determines the market?

Is it the editors, who make the decisions about what they want to buy? The marketing department, who decide how the books should be packaged? Is there a special bucket, way up in the penthouse suite of every publisher, where an executive dips his hand in, pulls out a slip of paper, and solemnly announces (for instance) that eighteenth-century men in kilts are in?

Or is it the readers? Or the writers?

How can anyone write to the market when the high concept of 2007 may be the stale bagel of 2009 (which is probably when a book submitted now would be published)?

We’ve been talking here recently about cliched plots vs. tried and true story lines, and I think the truth is that a good writer can subvert and polish something that’s been done to death. But what are we missing?

What would you like to read and/or write? It’s time to roleplay the character of Ms. or Mr. Big NY Publishing House Executive. Is there a time period you feel is neglected? A type of character you don’t often see? A setting? You’re going to choose what we’ll be reading next…and it’s….

Janet

Writing as Jane Lockwood, Forbidden Shores, September 2007, Heat/NAL
One Last Scandalous Exchange, October 2007 HarperCollins Historical
www.janetmullany.com

I confess. I’m an emotional slob and did I prove it this weekend!

First I took my kids to see the new version of CHARLOTTE’S WEB. When I first read this book as a child, I cried at the end. I apparently still haven’t grown up because I had to surreptitiously wipe away a few tears in the movie theatre. The movie was pretty well done, the celebrity voices only occasionally distracting (and Julia Roberts was great as Charlotte). The special effects used to show Charlotte spinning her web were lovely. But it was the ending, of course, that got me, when Wilbur says “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” May we all deserve such a eulogy!

Apparently this wasn’t enough exercise for the tear ducts. I also happened to finish THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE (a New Year’s resolution of sorts) this weekend. It’s a polarizing book. Some people are put off by the nonlinear storytelling, some people are disappointed because they were expecting science fiction, not a love story, others complain it’s not a love story because Harry and Clare have too much sex (we Riskies have never heard that complaint, have we????) But there are many who love the book, including my friends at Writer Unboxed, who did an interview with the author, Audrey Niffenegger. One of my friends commented how she cried over Henry. Well, slushbucket here cried too, not just over Henry, but over Clare, too (and maybe a little for myself because I may never write anything half as powerful).

Of course I had to think about why these stories affect me so much. I think it’s because by taking a different view at life (through a friendship between a pig and a spider, through a love relationship whose ordinary events unfold in an extraordinary way) they remind me to live in the moment more, to cherish love and beauty whenever and however they come into my life, and to be willing to risk the pain of losing what I love.

I try to get some of that into my stories, though it’s harder in romance where the reader is primed to expect a happy ending. The thing is the characters don’t know it’s going to be OK and one has to get the reader to feel that. One can also plumb wounds from the past or sacrifice secondary characters, though these things can’t be contrived or they feel like cheap ploys. And rosy as we might make those final scenes, the bittersweet is there in the vows “til death do us part”. Maybe that’s why people cry at weddings. (Of course this whole issue is moot if it’s a paranormal and h/h are immortal, I suppose!)

So do you like tear-jerkers? What are your favorites? Any favorite romances that get you going? What do you think makes them work? Are we authors evil for doing such terrible things to our characters?

And lastly, could you imagine anyone ever having wiped a tear (let alone do anything so unladylike as to blow her nose) into this antique hanky c.1850? (Image from Karen Augusta Antique Lace & Fashion.)

Elena, resident Risky Regency Watering Pot
www.elenagreene.com