I have two or three blogs I check regularly, but Jenny Crusie's is not one of them. Her blog tends to be about the process of writing her books, which is (theoretically) fascinating, or it would be if I was trying to learn how to write a novel. But I'm not, so I would only read it because of being such a big fan. And if you're a fan, knowing all the nuts and bolts of how something is put together kind of ruins the charm. Sort of like when we had to quit watching all the "making of" DVDs that came with the Lord of the Rings movies, because knowing exactly how they shot that scene where Gandalf and Frodo are sitting next to each other in the cart destroys the magic.
Did that make any sense?
But anyway. Back to what I wanted to say. A few months ago, when I did happen to check Crusie's blog one day, buried in the comments section of a post about how she chose the covers for the re-issues of her recent books is a comment she wrote about the different kinds of romantic fiction that are out there. She makes a distinction between romance novels, chick lit, women's fiction, romantic adventure, paranormal romance, etc. Her recent novels (Fast Women, Tell Me Lies, Crazy for You) are women's fiction. Her collaborations with Bob Mayer are romantic adventure (a term they made up). Etc.
I see her point. Fast Women is an order of magnitude more complex than, say, the latest Nicole Jordan. Not that there's anything wrong with reading the less complex stuff, I'm just riffing here. Maybe instead of lumping everything I've listed here as "romance," I should make some distinctions. But I'm lazy, you know? I don't want to think that hard. I'm copping out and falling back on the default. If it's sold in the romance section of Borders (my local bookstore), I'm calling it a romance. *nods to Maps and Legends* where Chabon has a section about how fiction is categorized by which section of the bookstore it's in. He wasn't being complimentary, in fact he was being quite snide, but I'm going with it anyway.
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