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. :)

"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?

I Was Never Cool In School...

At the risk of bending some very wise rules about blogging (as explained by the great Kristen Lamb), I figured I'd go ahead and properly start things with an introduction and explanation of just what the hell I'm doing here. See, I have years (eep - more like a decade!) of experience with online journaling, spewing 'random musings' and pointless, narcissistic crap every day, several times a day, with little regard for what readers might have wanted.

Blogging is a different animal, apparently. And I'm a different person from those days. And, even though this is my blog, it's not really about me. It's about you and me - our common grounds, hanging out on those common grounds, shooting the shit about what interests us, all while drinking excellent coffee, consuming excellent chocolate, and admiring excellent eye- and ear-candy.

Therefore, I proclaim Mondays to be Common Grounds day. I'm an erotic-romance and paranormal-romance author. I would hope that if you've found your way here, it's because you and I have a common interest in the things that point to those types of reads. Things like magic, shifters, mythical creatures, afterlife, etc. But also things like yummy men and women, badass heroines and heroes, intelligent smut, and a proper touch of BDSM.

All the same, sometimes I'm going to want to get some things off my chest. I'm a writer, after all. Which means not only do I have Thoughts and Feels about the writing process, but the formatting process, the editing process, and the social process. Being a writer, whether self-published, or traditional, or somewhere in between, involves so much more than words on the screen. So, indulgent as it might be, I proclaim Wednesdays to be Writerly Wednesdays.

Fridays, well - it might not be the most original concept in the world, especially for a Friday, but damnit, it's fun - Friday Mash-ups. Random links I've found throughout the week that you should check out.

All that said, the title for this post does have a point:

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