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I don't usually enter into
discussions about respect and romance writing. I firmly believe
respect is not something others confer on you; it's something
you take for yourself.
Besides, defining "respect"
is a nebulous endeavor since it is so individual. To some
writers, respect is having critics write rave reviews. To
others, it's list ranking. Still, others crave Mom or Aunt
Alice's approval. There are writers who feel we'd be better
respected without clinch covers and there are writers who
see the clinch as a trademark.
Obviously, what respect isn't
is being universally read because Romance already claims that
status and still we worry.
But a recent email on a loop
touched me deeply and made me mull over this "respect" issue.
Sandra Hill posted a fan letter she'd received. Hill is known
for her entertaining, energetic Historicals with a handsome,
virile man on the cover. When a reader picks up a Sandra Hill
book, she knows she is going to have some fun.
The letter went: Dear Sandra:
Thanks for the postcard of your upcoming book. I must tell
you that I hooked my sister, Lynne, on reading romances and
especially on your books. She always judged a book by its
cover and loved your covers and postcards. She died on Jan.
12 of this year. At the wake I placed "The Bewitched Viking"
in the casket in a position that when people would kneel down
and look up .... guess who they saw! Many people giggled and
if they really knew her did a belly laugh. Thanks for bringing
to both of our lives some humor and the help it gave us as
she battled her cancer. Hopefully she can read in heaven!!
I'm laminating the "Truly, Madly Viking" to place at the cemetery.
She would have loved it.
Thanks so much.
Diana Hill achieved what
every fiction writer from Oates to Grisham, Shakespeare to
Dumas hopes to attain--she captured the imagination of her
reader. For the space of time it takes to turn the pages of
a book, she held Reality at bay. God bless her. She did her
job.
Such an achievement can't
be measured on the pages of the New York Times Book Review.
It's too personal and has nothing to do with literature through
the ages and other snobbery. I'm not even certain those untold
numbers of Aunt Alices and Moms would have positive comments.
But I do know that when I
think back on the writers I respect, they've rarely written
books that were the critics' choices. No, their books are
the ones that touched my heart, my mind, and my imagination.
They made me laugh, sometimes cry, and always involved me.
Those writers made a difference in my world-even if it was
only giving me a break from life through a few hours of enjoyable
entertainment. There have been times when I have needed to
escape.
If I were to talk to these
writers, I would order them to not give a care what critics,
peers, or relatives have to say about their work because I
deem it valuable. Their books mean something to me. I will
never forget them.
And over time, I think this
form of respect, the respect we must earn reader-by-reader,
slowly, patiently, and solely for telling the tale well, is
the only respect that matters. Cathy Maxwell's next book is
THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT, a Feb. 2001 release from Avon Books.
She will also have a short story in the NAL anthology IN PRAISE
OF YOUNGER MEN, Jan. 2001. She is currently at work on a new
book for Avon Books tentatively titled THE SPENDER STUD.
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