When you think about it, we Skiffy Rommers are all in the hero business. Our heroines, and thus our stories, would be lost without them. Not because our gals can’t take care of themselves, but because they can do more, fly higher, be stronger with these men at their backs.
I’ve been into hero worship for as long as I can remember. The first movie I can remember seeing as a child was THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD with Errol Flynn. The movie was old even then (yeah, I’m old, but I ain’t THAT old), but for some reason I was seeing it on the big screen in a real theater, and I was instantly in love. All that energy! All that compassion! That swash! That buckle! That sword!! To this day that movie is one of my favorites, and no one can hold a candle to Flynn’s take on Robin.
In 1966, the second of my lifelong heroes hit the small screen in the person of Captain James T. Kirk, and again, it was the energy that attracted me. It seemed he just attacked every problem with everything he had and never gave up. I was just a kid, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. And I still find him a fascinating character.
I fell in love with my third hero on the pages of a favorite book, long before I ever got to see him onscreen. I was old enough at 16 to truly appreciate Aragorn, son of Arathorn, and future king of Gondor when I met him in the LORD OF THE RINGS—the hidden passion, the self-doubt, the quiet courage, were SO calculated to make a teenager sigh! But when I saw him onscreen for the first time and he started swinging that SWORD? Well, let’s just say I was glad to be all grown up (and happily married)!
So what do all of my favorite heroes have in common? Besides the fact that two of them are genuine swashbucklers, they don’t seem to fit the same mold. And, strangely, the heroes I’ve written for my heroines don’t seem a lot like these guys either, on the surface. But they do share some qualities I think are absolutely essential in a good hero.
1) Energy—Charisma, animal magnetism, whatever it is, it draws the eye and in your heroine’s case, the whole body. Guys are compelled to follow, women to drool. You just can’t have a good hero without this kind of chemistry and it’s God-given.
2) Compassion—I love the scene in ROBIN HOOD where Robin shows Marion around Sherwood and the peasants are thanking him for helping them. He’s given up his life for this—that begins to make him a hero to her. Kirk is capable of making the tough decisions, but he more often breaks rules and stretches limits to save people. Aragorn is a healer—it’s what proves his right to the throne. An alpha male without compassion is too often a thug.
3) Resourcefulness—Every good hero has a wide range of skills, from weapons to fire-building. But he should also recognize and draw upon the skills his companions (Robin and Aragorn) or his crew (Kirk) bring to the table. Most of all he should be able to recognize and sometimes defer to the skills of his lover, as all three of these men are able to do. Besides, Robin and Aragorn can sing or recite to their loves for entertainment and Kirk can dance. Not too shabby.
4) Intelligence—Your hero need not be the smartest man in the world, but he should not be dumbest, either. Spock, clearly, was more intelligent than Kirk, but Kirk had the ability to synthesize information and opinions, the ability to make quick, decisive judgments, the ability to work with people and that, in effect, made him smarter. That’s the kind of global “smarts” I’m talking about.
5) Humor—This may be a personal preference, but somehow I don’t think anyone loves a glum hero. Lighten up, guys. Growling is only sexy in the bedroom.
6) Courage—This would seem to be a given in a hero, but there are all kinds of things that pass for courage that may be mere foolhardiness instead. Physical courage in the face of battle is something that all of my heroes displayed, but they also had to dig deeper and face grief, homelessness, abandonment, deprivation, despair and losses of all kinds in order to win through. Those challenges demand a different kind of courage, a kind not always recognized in alpha male heroes.
And, of course, the final characteristic that is absolutely necessary in a hero is vulnerability. In the end he must be open to the possibility of love. For without that, he would not end up with the wonderful woman we have all picked out for him, now would he?
Cheers, Donna
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Finally! SFR from Barbara Elsborg!
As a Beta reader of Barbara Elsborg's LUCY IN THE SKY, I've been anxiously awaiting the release announcement so I could plaster it all over this blog. It's here! LUCY IN THE SKY will be Barbara's ONLY Science Fiction Romance/Erotica released to date.
Barbara (who we've nicknamed "The Phenom") has sold or released at least a dozen novels in the last eighteen months, mainly with Ellora's Cave and Loose Id and has consistently received four and five star reviews. She also gets outstanding covers, and LUCY (IMHO) is yet another. See if you don't agree.
Here's the blurb on "LUCY":
"When you wake up to find a spaceship in your backyard, what do you do? Choose from three:
Phone the police.
Scream.
Go yell at the alien for wrecking your garden.
Lucy storms out of her house to confront the inept pilot and the last option turns out to be both the right and wrong choice when she finds the gorgeous hunk’s name is Three. She’s torn between fury that he’s not only crushed her roses but decapitated her statue of Eros, and a longing that he enliven her boring life and whisk her to the stars. Three doesn’t give her a choice when he throws her over his broad shoulders and takes her into space. Lucy soon finds herself exploring alien territory in ways she never imagined.
Three’s efforts to hide and protect her on the mother ship are stymied by his inability to keep his hands—and other body parts—off the luscious Lucy, and it looks as if her immediate fate might be a solo trip into space without a spacesuit."
Reader advisory: Contains male/male sex scenes.
Let me add my own comments to the above. LUCY IN THE SKY is a unique blend of Barbara Elsborg's trademark humor, a fun space adventure filled with imaginative characters, situations and suspenseful action, all combined with a spontaneous and incredibly tender (and very HOT!) romance. Lucy is identifiable and endearing and Three is one of the most compelling SFR erotica heroes ever. If you like your SFR with extreme steam, don't miss LUCY IN THE SKY.
Intrigued? Want to see more? Read the excerpt here , then mark your calendar for October 21st.
Barbara (who we've nicknamed "The Phenom") has sold or released at least a dozen novels in the last eighteen months, mainly with Ellora's Cave and Loose Id and has consistently received four and five star reviews. She also gets outstanding covers, and LUCY (IMHO) is yet another. See if you don't agree.
Here's the blurb on "LUCY":
"When you wake up to find a spaceship in your backyard, what do you do? Choose from three:
Phone the police.
Scream.
Go yell at the alien for wrecking your garden.
Lucy storms out of her house to confront the inept pilot and the last option turns out to be both the right and wrong choice when she finds the gorgeous hunk’s name is Three. She’s torn between fury that he’s not only crushed her roses but decapitated her statue of Eros, and a longing that he enliven her boring life and whisk her to the stars. Three doesn’t give her a choice when he throws her over his broad shoulders and takes her into space. Lucy soon finds herself exploring alien territory in ways she never imagined.
Three’s efforts to hide and protect her on the mother ship are stymied by his inability to keep his hands—and other body parts—off the luscious Lucy, and it looks as if her immediate fate might be a solo trip into space without a spacesuit."
Reader advisory: Contains male/male sex scenes.
Let me add my own comments to the above. LUCY IN THE SKY is a unique blend of Barbara Elsborg's trademark humor, a fun space adventure filled with imaginative characters, situations and suspenseful action, all combined with a spontaneous and incredibly tender (and very HOT!) romance. Lucy is identifiable and endearing and Three is one of the most compelling SFR erotica heroes ever. If you like your SFR with extreme steam, don't miss LUCY IN THE SKY.
Intrigued? Want to see more? Read the excerpt here , then mark your calendar for October 21st.
Friday, September 25, 2009
AT THE MOVIES
I love movies. Not films, mind you, though I like them, too. Movies. Flicks. Picture shows. (Used to be) Drive-ins. You know, the stuff that Hollywood churns out in mind-numbing quantity and debatable quality every week of the year. Most of it is watchable. A lot of it is forgettable. Some of it is good. Once in a very long while it takes your breath away.
I’m usually not looking for that kind of experience when I go to the movies every Tuesday. I go to be entertained—and for the (almost) free popcorn I earn with my Regal Theaters Crown Card. (If you are a regular moviegoer and you don’t have one you are THROWING MONEY AWAY!) Most Tuesdays I’m not disappointed. I have a good time. The movie and the popcorn are decent. Life is good.
But going to the movies that often can really make you wonder.
For example, was it REALLY necessary to strip Kate Beckinsale and put her in the shower in the first five minutes of WHITEOUT? Beckinsale, of UNDERWORLD shower fame, did a creditable job in her role as a U.S. Marshal “with a past” in a dead-end post at a science station in Antarctica where people start dropping like flies, despite the gratuitous opening scene. The movie paid fair homage to those isolated science station on the ice movies that have gone before it—THE THING comes to mind—and it didn’t give away too much too soon. Best of all, it offered Alex O’Laughlin of the late, lamented MOONLIGHT, in a small, but crucial role. All in all, a good B movie with a decent female protagonist.
Rising a little higher on the scale, both in ambition and in execution, was GAMER, a science fiction flick starring the much more interesting Gerard Butler. The premise was not bad—some genius with more brains than ethics figures out a way to hook up “video” game players to live human avatars (who else but convicts?) in a combat game. The rest, of course, was all DEATH RACE 3000, but who cares when it was Butler’s soulful puss onscreen making us believe it? The acting was first rate, the dialogue well done, even if the plot was a little derivative. And the more it went along, the deeper it got, which probably explains why the fan reviews I read were less than enthusiastic. Not enough exploding body parts for the usual crowd, I guess. I gave it a B+. The only question here was the continuing puzzle of whether Butler’s agent, or Butler himself, suffers from multiple personality disorder.
Which brings me to the overriding question of today’s blog. Both movies were rated R, and justifiably so, for the violence they contained. So why were there children in both of these theaters? And I’m not talking fifteen-year-old boys sneaking in trying to look cool. In the case of GAMER, a man brought a little boy, who looked to be maybe six or seven years old. In WHITEOUT, a couple brought little Suzie and Johnnie, neither older than eight or nine. Nothing those kids saw up on screen was appropriate for them to see.
I don’t blame Hollywood for making the movies that were being shown that day. Everyone involved in making those movies had every right to express themselves creatively as they saw fit. The movies were rated appropriately so that everyone knew what to expect when they went in the theater. So I can only think that the guardians of these children didn’t care that they were seeing what they saw.
It’s no longer a valid excuse to say that the kids know it’s not real. Do they really? The Hollywood effects wizards go to great lengths to make it LOOK real. Hell, sometimes I’M not sure it’s not real! Some pictures you just don’t need to have in your head (especially if you’ve got an imagination like mine!).
And do we really want our kids growing up inured to watching realistic body parts flying through the air and squished heads UP CLOSE! and entrails oozing out of body cavities and all the things that God knows we would protect them from in real life if we could but we can’t always? What kind of world does that lead us to? It’s all very well to say it’s none of my business that those kids were in the theater that day, but what if watching this stuff has a permanent, negative impact on them? Excuse me if I don’t want to have to meet them in a dark alley some night in the future.
My solution? Easy. And very old-fashioned for such a forward thinking person. Make parents act like parents. No kids under the age of 13 in R-rated movies. Period. Let’s start with that. As a compromise to make that go over I’d probably lower the age of consent for R to 16. Hell, they’re sneaking in anyway. Mom and Dad, if you want to go to the movies, you have a choice. Take Junior and see the latest Disney or Pixar offering. Or get a babysitter and go see INGLORIOUS BASTERDS. Somehow I think Quentin would agree with me.
LATE NOTE and yet another question for us Skiffy Rommers: News is that the powers that be have set back the release date for THE ROAD, starring Viggo Mortensen, yet again, this time until “closer to the end of the year.” The excuse is that the post-apocalyptic SF film is too much of a downer in today’s economic climate. Do you reckon that SF/SFR in general is seen as too depressing by the marketing types?
Cheers, Donna
I’m usually not looking for that kind of experience when I go to the movies every Tuesday. I go to be entertained—and for the (almost) free popcorn I earn with my Regal Theaters Crown Card. (If you are a regular moviegoer and you don’t have one you are THROWING MONEY AWAY!) Most Tuesdays I’m not disappointed. I have a good time. The movie and the popcorn are decent. Life is good.
But going to the movies that often can really make you wonder.
For example, was it REALLY necessary to strip Kate Beckinsale and put her in the shower in the first five minutes of WHITEOUT? Beckinsale, of UNDERWORLD shower fame, did a creditable job in her role as a U.S. Marshal “with a past” in a dead-end post at a science station in Antarctica where people start dropping like flies, despite the gratuitous opening scene. The movie paid fair homage to those isolated science station on the ice movies that have gone before it—THE THING comes to mind—and it didn’t give away too much too soon. Best of all, it offered Alex O’Laughlin of the late, lamented MOONLIGHT, in a small, but crucial role. All in all, a good B movie with a decent female protagonist.
Rising a little higher on the scale, both in ambition and in execution, was GAMER, a science fiction flick starring the much more interesting Gerard Butler. The premise was not bad—some genius with more brains than ethics figures out a way to hook up “video” game players to live human avatars (who else but convicts?) in a combat game. The rest, of course, was all DEATH RACE 3000, but who cares when it was Butler’s soulful puss onscreen making us believe it? The acting was first rate, the dialogue well done, even if the plot was a little derivative. And the more it went along, the deeper it got, which probably explains why the fan reviews I read were less than enthusiastic. Not enough exploding body parts for the usual crowd, I guess. I gave it a B+. The only question here was the continuing puzzle of whether Butler’s agent, or Butler himself, suffers from multiple personality disorder.
Which brings me to the overriding question of today’s blog. Both movies were rated R, and justifiably so, for the violence they contained. So why were there children in both of these theaters? And I’m not talking fifteen-year-old boys sneaking in trying to look cool. In the case of GAMER, a man brought a little boy, who looked to be maybe six or seven years old. In WHITEOUT, a couple brought little Suzie and Johnnie, neither older than eight or nine. Nothing those kids saw up on screen was appropriate for them to see.
I don’t blame Hollywood for making the movies that were being shown that day. Everyone involved in making those movies had every right to express themselves creatively as they saw fit. The movies were rated appropriately so that everyone knew what to expect when they went in the theater. So I can only think that the guardians of these children didn’t care that they were seeing what they saw.
It’s no longer a valid excuse to say that the kids know it’s not real. Do they really? The Hollywood effects wizards go to great lengths to make it LOOK real. Hell, sometimes I’M not sure it’s not real! Some pictures you just don’t need to have in your head (especially if you’ve got an imagination like mine!).
And do we really want our kids growing up inured to watching realistic body parts flying through the air and squished heads UP CLOSE! and entrails oozing out of body cavities and all the things that God knows we would protect them from in real life if we could but we can’t always? What kind of world does that lead us to? It’s all very well to say it’s none of my business that those kids were in the theater that day, but what if watching this stuff has a permanent, negative impact on them? Excuse me if I don’t want to have to meet them in a dark alley some night in the future.
My solution? Easy. And very old-fashioned for such a forward thinking person. Make parents act like parents. No kids under the age of 13 in R-rated movies. Period. Let’s start with that. As a compromise to make that go over I’d probably lower the age of consent for R to 16. Hell, they’re sneaking in anyway. Mom and Dad, if you want to go to the movies, you have a choice. Take Junior and see the latest Disney or Pixar offering. Or get a babysitter and go see INGLORIOUS BASTERDS. Somehow I think Quentin would agree with me.
LATE NOTE and yet another question for us Skiffy Rommers: News is that the powers that be have set back the release date for THE ROAD, starring Viggo Mortensen, yet again, this time until “closer to the end of the year.” The excuse is that the post-apocalyptic SF film is too much of a downer in today’s economic climate. Do you reckon that SF/SFR in general is seen as too depressing by the marketing types?
Cheers, Donna
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
The Ruby-Slippered Sisterhood
For skiffy rommers out there thinking of entering the Golden Heart, my 2009 Golden Heart class this week launched a fabulous blog. GH finalist Liz Bemis designed and developed the site, and it's just lovely. In conjunction with the launch, the group is giving away GH chapter critiques and sexy slipper mugs. To participate, just leave a comment.Today's post is "Don't Enter the Golden Heart ..." by finalist Amy Talley (who recently made her first sale). Other September blog topics include:
- A Brick Road of a Different Color
- Go for the Gold! Tips for Turning Your GH Entry Into a Potential Finalist
- A Heaping Portion of Inspirational Sap, or, Why I Almost Didn't Enter the Golden Heart
- Suddenly Cinderella: On Acquiring Glamorousness in Four Months Flat
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