Hero Hop Winners!

Firstly, a mighty thanks to Carrie Ann for hosting this hop! It was my first, and definitely not my last - I was pretty floored by the sheer number of people who participated! You guys are fantastic inspiration for us writers - so, thank you, as well.

Now, on to the winners! Using the magic of my typing fingers, Excel, and the random number generator at random.org, and taking into account all you wonderful folks who doubled-up via GoodReads and Twitter, the winner of the Deluxe Package Package is...

desitheblonde

Thanks to everyone for contributing! You're all wonderful and beautiful people!

Also, big congrats to our Hero Hop Grand Prize Winners!

Finally, just as a little reminder, I am migrating over to my proper blogsite this week. Actually, I've been there all along, but being new to this whole blogging thing, I had a hard time making up my mind as to what platform I wanted to use. Anyway, you can always find me at my "proper" address, http://ccdenham.net/

Thanks again, y'all! 

Kick-Ass Heroines

Let's face it - there's already a pretty solid platform of voices
ranting critiquing educating the public about the dangers of weak heroines in fiction and media.

Not to misunderstand, mind, because there's definitely a time and place for damsels in distress. There's a reason bodice-rippers were so popular. And, much as I might hate it myself, there is also a reason why so many women want their own Edward or Christian. This is a (mostly) judge-free zone. 

But today's Common Grounds topic hangs out on the other end of that spectrum: kick-ass heroines who don't need saving. They don't need a man to show them how to enjoy sex, nor do they need 'help' feeling worthy or attractive. Now, that can seem like kind of a tall order. After all, we don't want a Mary Sue on our hands either, do we? Neither do we want a heroine so strong, so tough, and so independent, that she emasculates the hero, right? 

...hold up a tick on that last one, actually. Because wouldn't it stand to reason that if our heroine is made of super-napalm-awesomeballs, then our hero might just be equally as awesome, thus resulting in a megaton duo of amazing? Why isn't there more of is? Or wait - maybe there's actually a LOT of this, but it's currently eclipsed by the media-blitz and popularity of weak, vapid, shallow, so-called heroines. 

Well, rather than ranting about it, let's discuss it. What makes a heroine really awesome? The list of qualifications is actually pretty subjective. 

Take BBW-land, for instance. Ooooh, that's a controversial one, and obviously close to home for me. Which is the stronger heroine - the woman who overcomes her eating issues and challenges herself to become fit, thus losing all the excess weight and going from ugly-duckling to swan? Or is it the woman who accepts her body, flaws and all, and celebrates her curves? (My personal answer: it depends on other personality traits in said heroine, but both can be pretty kick-ass options.) 

Some of it just depends on how you look at it - that's one of the many great things about fiction, in general. I've seen reviews of books I hated because I thought the heroines were TSTL, where the reviewer felt that the heroine was particularly strong for other reasons. (This is where diplomacy and a lack of free time helps out tremendously. I simply close that tab and mentally agree to disagree.) 

So, what makes a heroine kick ass in your mind? Who are some of your favorite kick-ass heroines? This is going to be a recurring theme, btw.* Probably about once a month, Mondays will be taken up with certain heroines who kick ass. Could be in books - romance or otherwise, movies, television, even non-storytelling-media (hello PJ Harvey!). And yes, even in real life.

 

All that said, this month's kick-ass book heroines are:

 

Kate Daniels from Ilona Andrews's Kate Daniels series

 

Aylia from Intentional Abduction by Eve Langlais

 

Vin from Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

 

Miranda Rohan from Anne Stuart's Breathless

Other kick-ass heroines:
-Ellen Ripley
-Princess Leia
-River Tam
-Katniss Everdeen
-Buffy Summers

Okay, so the list goes on, and it's no good to blow the whole load in one week, yeah? Unfortunately, the list is also a little image-light due to copyright concerns, but you should get the gist.

Who are some of your favorite kick-ass heroines?

 *Once this current blog-hop is finished, I will be permanently moving over to http://ccdenham.net . Currently, I am just doing mirror-posts, but eventually that will be my permanent home. :)

Down, Down the Rabbit Hole!

It seems like 2012 is the year of the fairytale remake. Well, in mainstream media, anyway. We’ve got it on TV with Once Upon a Time and Grimm. It’s in theatres with Mirror, Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman, and upcoming works like Maleficent, and Oz, the Great and Powerful. And that's not counting Disney-esque movies. (I’m not touching on *cringe* Disney’s retelling of The Snow Queen.)

BUT, it’s been in romance and erotica for quite a long time. Oh, sure, there are the fairy tale tropes that populate much of the romance genre (Cinderella and Beauty and Beast are the two immediate ones that come to mind). There are also blatant retellings that are quite popular.

It’s impossible to delve into the ‘why’s of this practice without coming off as sexist. But the plain truth is that romance is a genre that's dominated by women. Just as, for generations, fairy tales have been most popular (although not entirely), with little girls. Personally, I fucking love it - I love that, as both a reader and an author, I get to play in these worlds that were ‘just’ fairytales while growing up. Even better? They’re rife with so much erotic potential!

Some of my favorites, in no particular order:

The Pearl at the Gate by Anya Delvay is a sexy, little short with a BDSM-BlueBeard theme to it. Double-kudos for nailing the short-story format, which is kind of a bitch to do well, if you ask me.

Glass Slipper by Abigail Barnette (who is actually Jennifer Armintrout) not only nails the erotic, novella-format, fairytale retelling, but it’s a lovely, yummy May/December romance.

Loved A Kiss at Midnight by Eloisa James, of course, which is another Cinderella retelling. That’s also the first in her Fairytales series. The rest are on my TBR.

There’s also Petals and Thorns by Jennifer Paris, a Beauty and the Beast novella which was more erotica than anything, but I enjoyed it.

And, of course you can’t go without mentioning Nancy Madore, here. She has several anthologies of erotic fairytale retellings that should be in any fan’s library.

Finally, who can forget Anne Rice's well-loved/well-hated Beauty and the Beast trilogy? Heh.

The fairytale craze also hits the paranormal subgenre pretty frequently. What do you expect, what with the Djinn (‘Genies’), and shifters (Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and Red and the Wolf, yeah!), and magic all over the place. Hey, I’m not afraid to admit that my very first ebook purchase ever was the Kings of Wonderland series by Cheyenne McCray. *fans self*

It bears noting, however, that this resurgence of fairytales seems to be less one-sided in gender appeal, which is awesome. Mainstream media is definitely a win on that end; I know just as many men who are addicted to Once Upon a Time and Grimm as women. And they’re all going to the theatres for the big screen retellings.

Even more awesome, however, is that it’s happening, even just a little bit, with books. My husband just finished Cinder by Marissa Meyer, of his own volition. It’s still a bit farther down my TBR list. What’s more? He’s impatient for the next book in the series.
It’ll be a while before I can get him hooked on Abigail Barnette, however.

So, what are your favorite fairytale retellings? Hit me up with some recs!

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things..."

TIME TRAVEL!

I always thought my first real spark of love for time travel happened when I was eleven. I remember walking out of the movie theater with my parents, a huge grin on my face, babbling nonstop about all the possibilities, and how it wasn’t completely out of the question that someone could someday really build a flux capacitor. (The whole teenage-crush-on-Michael-J.-Fox thing came a year or two later.)

Recently, however, I came across some old school papers and book reports my mom kept around. Apparently the time travel thing was a bit older than that, harkening back to elementary school and my childhood obsession with space and astronomy. I even illustrated my own “rainbow ring” for a book report on Tunnel Through Time by Lester Del Rey.

It’s such a huge topic and plot device. And really, what’s not to love? Well, other than the brain cramps and geeky arguments. Fortunately, there seems to be less of that in Romance - we’re too busy enjoying the results of time travel to fight over methods.

Even still, the fact that it hasn’t yet been accomplished in reality means that there are so many different ways we can accomplish it in fiction.

You’ve got your sci-fi time travel, and its variations - time machines built here on earth; space travel and wormholes and subsequent time travel there; mystery-time-travel, where someone from the future has the means and comes back to our present-time for whatever reason.

Then there’s the ‘magical’ time-travel - whether it’s accidental, a fluke of some kind of spelled-object; a Somewhere In Time kind of metaphysical trick; or completely fantastical and paranormal, where characters manage to willfully create the means to travel in time.

And those are just the means of time-travel. In fiction, what the characters and plot do with said time-travel is wonderfully and endlessly varied. Boil that down to romance-fiction, and you still get a delicious selection of methods. I’m not sure I can decide which romantic time-travel trope I love best:

-Modern character is thrust into a historical era and must function there. Inevitably, the lead character (okay, usually heroine), falls in love with someone in that era, and they must decide to sacrifice their entire world and choose to live out of their proper time for this new love.

This is often a nice, convenient way to write a historical romance without it being a typical historical romance. We can enjoy keeping one foot in each time, so to speak, and it feels like we’re ‘with’ the lead character, or they’re with us, in our wonderment of the world they’re experiencing.

Occasionally I’ve found stories where the heroine ultimately does return to present-time (usually unwillingly), only to discover her hero has materialized there in some form or another, say, via reincarnation or divine intervention. I absolutely love that idea, but I’m a sucker for that sort of thing!

-Character from historical era is thrust into present. Similar to above, but I don’t see it as frequently. Also, more room for hijinks with, say, a Viking wandering around Manhattan. Often, these feel less like the focus is on the time travel, and more like the focus is on the ‘modern’ woman falling for a crude, beast of a guy. Again, not so different from the previous example, but there is the advantage of the hero being taken down a notch because he has to be guided by the heroine through unfamiliar waters.

-There’s the more sci-fi form, with a character from the distant future coming to the present for whatever reason. I haven’t personally come across this in any romance novels, but have seen it in a few short stories that I liked.

-Just as rarely, but most appealing to me, is the notion of shorter-term time-travel. Maybe this goes back to the whole Back To The Future thing, but I like the concept of characters traveling and falling in love within a bare couple of generations of each other at most. Even better, I love the idea of actual consequences playing out, IE, the traveling character eventually returns and faces the older version of the man/woman they fell in love with in the past.

Obviously, this isn’t a comprehensive list, and I’m no expert on the topic. Just a fan and a writer! So, what are your favorite time travel tropes?