Wednesday Round Up.

Sadly, from time to time life descends into chaos and all hell, if not actually breaking loose, is at least champing at the bit (hey we can mix metaphors as well as cocktails y'know).

The point (and there is one) is that our lovely Ravenous Romance hostess Inara has had to devote additional energy to keeping chaos in check and the hell hounds muzzled and this week is unable to offer us our usual romantic interlude.

Inara's apologies to all and in fairness it's not just her, in the UK it's half term, offices all over the country are missing large chunks of staff, writerly types have deadlines looming for halloween or christmas and the pressure is on for the upcoming silly season. We all have so many additional expectations on our time in the run up to the holidays that occasional lapses are inevitable.

Instead then I thought i'd do a brief roundup of our discussion of the position of romance as a genre, since the whole conversation was done in the comments last week and then tell you what I have planned for the site over halloween.

Romance gets no respect. Discuss.
God this sounds like something my English teacher would have set us at school. "Compare and contract two fiction genres". Anyway. I threw this out a few days ago and was pleased to see some interested points raised by the Ravenous team and other commenters.

The whole issue of genre snobbery was raised - all genres have good and bad writing, yet for many genres people focus only on the substandard and trite.

There was also an interesting point raised about romance being book fluff for girls and whether there is an equivalent for men, the general feeling was yes, this is what thrillers are for. Thrillers share common themes and characters, plot lines are often repeated, they are wildly popluar and share the same blend of good, bad and middle of the road writing as fantasy. They don't however, share anything like the stigma.

We discussed branding - call something Romance and it sounds fluffy and a bit silly, and for girls. While we are not sure it could really be called anything else, perhaps the other elements could be put forward more strongly. Many romances are also adventures or thrillers or sci fi, something, not just boy meets girl (or boy, or girl meets girl, or alien, or whatever) argue, kiss, fall in love, live happily ever after. There is more to it than that and perhaps a rethink on presentation might help alleviate the popular view of the genre. Of course given it sells like mad and seems nearly recession proof unlike oh say literary fiction, perhaps we just shouldn't care.

We touched briefly on the fact that genres and especially romance often don't get the kind deeper critiquing that literary work gets, creating a sense of it's being lighter and more easily dismissed before we even start.

The general conclusion was, before you knock romance, perhaps you should try it? Give it a fair try, read a few different styles, because as with any genre or any kind of fiction at all, not everything within it's label is going to suit you.

I think that pretty much covers the key points and it was a really interesting topic for me as a recent convert and someone with a long history of mocking.

Now for what is coming up for Halloween on Un:Bound.

In a few days time I am going to start my official run up to Halloween. This will be in addition to the usual posts, not instead of. Each day will have a short story loosely on topic for the time of year. The post will have an introduction to the author, a few comments about the story (without giving anything away) and the first paragraph of the story to lead you in. It will then link directly to the story in full and have an additional link to the short fiction index on Un:Bound. I hope you will enjoy the tales as much as I have been.

Keep in mind, we do not have an editor to go through everything and people have kindly responded to my pleas for fiction, in some cases coming up with something at very short notice.