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darkstarofchaos · 5 years

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Well, I’ve done it. I’ve begun E.L. James’ new book. I’m still waiting for the story to start, but I’ve begun the book.

Now, a couple things before I tear into this fresh piece of literary roadkill and scatter paper viscera to the winds. 50 Shades of Grey was immensely inspiring to me. I read it at a time when I had no confidence in my ability to write sex scenes, and I came away determined to sit down and try again. Because no matter how it turned out, I knew I could do better than that.

This new book, The Mister, promises to be just as inspiring.

Anyway, let’s meet the main characters!

Our dick- Sorry, male lead this time around is Maxim Trevelyan, a 28-year-old womanizer/DJ with looks and money. He is also a photographer. And a model. And a pianist. And a composer.

He has too much time on his hands. Or at least he used to, because he has just inherited an Earldom from his late brother. Now it’s day after boring day of work and responsibility, and every night there’s a new woman to bed. I’m three chapters in now, and so far he’s had... Four? Five? We’ve met three of them, at any rate, not counting the female lead.

One of them is his brother’s widow. They shagged two days after the funeral.

Told you he’s a dick.

Speaking of the female lead, meet Alessia Demachi. She has recently moved to London from... Somewhere, I haven’t gotten that far yet. Because this girl here has a Mysterious Past. She isn’t comfortable around men, and it’s pretty obvious that she’s been abused.

Damn it, this is going to be a “sex with the right person erases all trauma” story, isn’t it?

Anyway, Alessia is Maxim’s new daily: she comes by regularly to clean his penthouse apartment. Like her employer, she knows her way around a piano, but she also has synesthesia. For her, music comes with colors. And that’s all I really know about her so far, so let’s take a look at the plot!

Let’s see... Disjointed prologue during which someone - presumably Alessia - is running from someone... Maxim beds a couple people... We properly meet Alessia, who proceeds to stumble across her employer sleeping naked (very naked, as we’re explicitly told). Alessia does some cleaning and piano playing, Maxim gets another conquest, and then Alessia accidentally wakes him up while cleaning the next day. Oh, and there’s a sideplot with the widow, who is possibly pregnant and inheriting nothing from her husband.

Three chapters, folks. I assume there is a plot, and that Alessia’s Dark Past will catch up with her in the form of her abuser (probably a husband), but if this book is anything like E.L. James’ previous works, all suspense will be wrapped up in a few pages and we’ll be back to banging.

Let’s get shredding.

I’ve never really said anything about James’ technical skills as a writer, so let me take a moment to say, WHO EDITED THIS? In what world does something like this get through a professional editor? Was there a professional editor? Maybe I’m noticing it more because I’m listening to The Mister as an audio book and can’t just skim the text, but I would swear this is worse than 50 Shades. Here are a few examples (first sample sentence is mine):

Every other sentence starts with a verb (”Looking away, I pick up my bag.”)

Lots of adjectives and adverbs. Especially colors. We apparently need to know the color of everything.

Actually, we apparently need all the details of everything. We're walked step-by-step through Alessia’s cleaning, Maxim’s sexual encounters (but not the sex itself, so far it’s all fade to black), and even Maxim’s post-sex lists of things he’s learned about his lays. I mean, kudos for showing-not-telling, but there are instances where telling is the way to go.

Repetition of words and concepts. For example, one of Maxim’s girls is a bit vicious with her fingernails. I’m pretty sure we went through three or four cycles of “gets clawed, exclamation of pain, remark on how dangerous/aggressive she is, repeat”. Eventually he wises up and decides to restrain her (she likes it), which leads to the unfortunately worded, “Grabbing her right hand, I wrap the silk around her right wrist” (I'm paraphrasing, but the repetition of “right” is a real sentence that is actually in the book).

The perspectives. Maxim’s segments are written in first-person present, Alessia’s are third-person present. Now, I have read and enjoyed the latter style, and used to write in the former, but both are controversial styles that are generally not as popular as third-person past. It takes a good writer to pull them off, and... Well. We’re not talking about a good writer.

There are no emotions. Sure, we see the widow crying over her lack of inheritance and Maxim gets a lump in his throat thinking about his brother. I’ll even drop a bit of praise and say I like the way things keep reminding him of his brother, even when he’s thinking about something seemingly unrelated. But then you get to an intimate scene, and it’s just a back and forth of “he does this, she does that”. I would love to say it’s deliberate and that Maxim is just that numb - he is in grieving, after all - but 50 Shades was the same way (and fade to black or not, do we really need this much detail about Maxim’s encounters with women we won’t see again? A couple paragraphs skimming over them would give us the same information about his personality).

And now we have the reason y’all are here in the first place: the problematic elements. So far we don’t have many. Maxim uses condoms, he asks for consent, and when he binds the one woman, he both has her choose a safeword and asks her whether she would prefer handcuffs or a silk scarf. Apart from his habit of picking up a new girl every night, he seems great!

Give me a couple more chapters and I’ll get back to you with how he behaves around a girl he’s actually supposed to “fall in love” with.

So far, the biggest problem I see is actually Alessia. I mean, a young woman with apparent trauma who isn’t comfortable around men? I’m not saying she can’t fall in love or desire sex with somebody because of her hangups, but I am saying E.L. James is not the person I would trust with such a sensitive issue. I am fully convinced this is going to be a magic dick scenario, and whatever Alessia’s been through will melt away, never to be heard from again, as soon as she has sex with the guy. And the guy will magically become monogamous, and he’ll heroically rescue her from her abuser at some point, and they’ll get married and live happily ever after.

Bonus points if the abuser isn’t her husband and Alessia is still a virgin. Because virgins are the magical cure for guys.

Now if y’all will excuse me, I'm feeling inspired to go finish a sex scene I started a couple weeks ago.

#The Mister #el james #Spoilers #I guess #I mean nothing's really happened yet #But it's a new book so #The Mister spoilers

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thecousinswar · 7 years

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Today in history, August 14, 1473: the birth of Margaret Pole:

"Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury (14 August 1473 – 27 May 1541), was an English peeress. She was the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of kings Edward IV and Richard III. Margaret was one of two women in 16th century England to be a peeress in her own right with no titled husband. One of the few surviving members of the Plantagenet dynasty after the Wars of the Roses, she was executed in 1541 at the command of Henry VIII, who was the son of her first cousin Elizabeth of York. Pope Leo XIII beatified her as a martyr for the Catholic Church on 29 December 1886.

Margaret was born at Farleigh Hungerford Castle in Somerset, the only surviving daughter of George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence, and his wife Isabel Neville, who was the elder daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, and his wife Anne de Beauchamp, Countess of Warwick. Her maternal grandfather was killed fighting against her uncle, Edward IV of England, at the Battle of Barnet. Her father, already Duke of Clarence, was then created Earl of Salisbury and of Warwick. Edward IV declared that Margaret's younger brother Edward should be known as Earl of Warwick as a courtesy title, but no peerage was ever created for him. Margaret would have had a claim to the Earldom of Warwick, but the earldom was forfeited on the attainder of her brother Edward.

Margaret's mother and youngest brother died when she was three, and her father had two servants killed who he thought had poisoned them. George plotted against his brother, Edward IV, and was attainted and executed for treason; his lands and titles were forfeited. Edward IV died when Margaret was ten, and her uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, declared that Edward's marriage was invalid, his children illegitimate, and that Margaret and her brother Edward were debarred from the throne by their father's attainder. Married to Anne Neville, younger sister to Margaret's mother Isabel, Richard assumed the throne himself as Richard III.

Richard III sent the children to Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire. He was defeated and killed in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth by Henry Tudor, who succeeded him as Henry VII. The new king married Margaret's cousin Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter, and Margaret and her brother were taken into their care. Soon young Edward, technically a potential Yorkclaimant to the throne, was moved to the Tower of London. Edward was briefly displayed in public at St Paul's Cathedral in 1487 in response to the presentation of the impostor Lambert Simnel as the "Earl of Warwick" to the Irish lords. Shortly thereafter, probably in November 1487, Henry VII gave Margaret in marriage to his cousin, Sir Richard Pole, whose mother was half-sister of the king's mother, Margaret Beaufort. When Perkin Warbeckimpersonated Edward IV's presumed-dead son Richard of Shrewsbury, 1st Duke of York, in 1499, Margaret's brother Edward was attainted and executed for involvement in the plot. Richard Pole held a variety of offices in Henry VII's government, the highest being Chamberlain for Arthur, Prince of Wales, Henry's elder son. When Arthur married Catherine of Aragon, Margaret became one of her ladies-in-waiting, but her entourage was dissolved when the teenaged Arthur died in 1502.

When her husband died in 1504, Margaret was a widow with five children, a limited amount of land inherited from her husband, no salary and no prospects. Henry VII paid for Richard's funeral. To ease the situation, Margaret devoted her third son Reginald Pole to the Church, where he was to have an eventful career as a papal Legate and later Archbishop of Canterbury. Nonetheless, he was to resent her abandonment of him bitterly in later life. Additionally, Margaret, without adequate means to support herself and her children, was forced to live at Syon Abbey among Bridgettine nuns after her husband's death. She was to remain there until she returned to favor at the ascension of Henry VIII in 1509."

#today in history #On This Day in History #margaret pole #birth

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honeybeeshepherd · 7 years

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So I’ve just finished the last of a bunch of old, out of print romance novels I got off of eBay and I thought I’d do a brief round up for posterity sake:

Top row (l-r): A Noble Resolve by Sara Blayne (1998) Boring Regency era romance. They don’t even kiss until the end which meant most of the drama came from some external plot about the hero’s illegitimate cousin trying to wreck revenge on him for inheriting the Earldom and not him. The period vernacular was good though. I could have given it an extra star for the beautiful cover illustration, but I’d just have to take it off again for how ugly the rest of the cover design is. 2/5

The Little Pretender by Barbara Cartland (1950) Beautiful first edition copy from the 1950s, set a few years after the battle of Culloden Moor. Normally Cartland is a #1 partisan supporter of British imperialism, but I guess since the Scots are white she decided actually what the English did to them was actually Bad (or something, idk). Also, apparently she hated Germany ever since her brother was killed in WW1, so I guess it wasn’t too much of a stretch for her to decide she didn’t like Germans taking the throne (but William and Mary were Dutch? I guess that’s German enough). Heroine impersonates hero’s long since presumed drowned half-sister to spy on him for Bonnie Prince Charlie to find out how sympathetic he is to the Jacobite cause. With such a pseudo-incesty plot you’d think there would be lots of “oh god why am I so attracted to my sister” and “oh no I love him but he thinks I’m his sister” angst but you’d be wrong. Resembled more a historical spy thriller than a romance novel for most of it because Cartland is another of those old-school authors who doesn’t like her hero and heroine to realise they’re in love (or even, in this case, interact with each other) until the very end. The hero was practically a supporting character! 3/5

The Surprise Of His Life by Karen Keast (1991) Satisfying if forgettable category May-December romance. Normally I don’t like those pseudo-incesty father’s bff (or bff’s father, or brother’s bff, or bff’s brother, etc) books but this one was fine. 4/5

Middle row (l-r): Lord Of The Keep by Ann Lawrence (1999) Excellent medieval May-December romance. There are two distinct acts, the first one is about the internal drama (if you don’t like jealous heroes maybe give it a miss) and the second is about external drama. Normally I hate external drama but this plot really showed how much they loved each other. 5/5

The Ultimate Betrayal by Michelle Reid (1995) Remember when I said there’s something inexplicably comforting about reading Mills & Boon novels? This was what I was reading. I loved it and it’s definitely the favourite of the bunch. Incredibly angsty second chance romance, where the heroine discovers her husband (the hero) is having an affair (or is he???). Obviously adultery is normally a huge no-no in romance novels but I thought it was handled well enough to justify going there. Could’ve done with an epilogue though. 5/5

The Secret Pearl by Mary Balogh (1991, 2005 reprint) Someone on here recommended this but I can’t remember who. Just nice slow-burning regency romance. There was a lot of external drama, which like I said I’m not a fan of. I detected elements of Jane Eyre, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Great Gatsby and (if you squint hard enough) Rebecca. The centrepiece of this novel should have been the heroine angsting when she discovers her new employer is also her one and only client when she resorted to sex work when trying to survive in London, but it was mostly skipped over coz she confronted him immediately (as a side note I hate it when protagonists are emotionally mature enough to discuss their issues honestly and openly before the end, just coz I love The Angst™ of bottled up feelings). 3/5

Bottom row (l-r): Meet Me In Texas by Sandy Sheen (2005) This is my second Mills & Boon (ok, technically my copy is a Harlequin but I refuse to call them that) Super Romance and I’m still on the fence on whether I like them or not. This one was kind of uninspired-ly written. Back in the day the hero rescued the heroine from a kidnapping, which should have been interesting but there wasn’t very much done with it. 3/5

Lucifer And The Angel by Barbara Cartland (1980) I actually read this one last, but for some reason I photographed it in the wrong order. Extremely by the numbers Cartland romance. It’s all there: the temporarily impoverished aristocratic heroine who can’t seem to form a full sentence and is described in creepily childlike terms, the misogynistic hero (Cartland is the author who brought us that timeless feminist classic “The Marquis Who Hated Women”), the damsel in distress drama, the not realising they’re in love until the end, the purple prose when they finally do. 3/5

Forbidden Wine by Lyndsey Stevens (1983) Typically old-school 80s Mills & Boon romance, except it’s set in Australia. There’s a lot of kissing and heavy petting but they never do it. M&B from this era is kind of fascinating coz they’ve realised that premarital sex is a thing that most people now do but they’re still trying to hold on to their old idea of the virgin good girl heroine and no-sex-before-marriage rule. Also, we’re meant to look down on the heroine’s sister for being a bad mother, but she never wanted to be a mother and it was the heroine who talked her out of getting an abortion for her own selfish reasons. 4/5

#romance novels #reading tag #honey bee shepherd original #just FYI 3 stars from me is generally code for ‘boring af but i’d feel bad giving it less than 3 stars’#long post

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