gwyn | Feels like: Antarctica

For once, the predicted snowpocalypse is in fact a snowy apocalypse--over 8 inches and counting. I couldn't sleep last night because I was so worried about a tree limb falling on something, anything: power lines, the garage, my house, another plant. As it is I might lose the main part of my lilac bush, which is about 70 years old, and I'm not sure how much more the black bamboo can handle. It's scary af because there's more expected, but no one is saying it's going away at any point, and temperatures are hovering around freezing every day. Multiple snowstorms are expected.

And hey, hi, I haven't been around much since I finished the 31 flavors recs. To be honest, I probably won't be as much as I used to: between the awful discussions about money that have made me feel like I'm some sort of sleazy scam artist for being in a financial crisis right now and having a ko-fi account; the backlash about people wanting control over their posts; my inability to understand this where-fandom's-going-next stuff; and most of all, feeling like I can't trust my own community of fans because they're scraping decades-old personal shit from journals and posting it and bullying anyone who takes issue with it being on fanlore (seriously fuck fanlore to hell, they're violating the very community they're pretending to be about documenting), I just...don't feel like fandom's a fun place right now. And really, it doesn't matter--I have never felt more like what is the point of working so hard on things, about loving fandom, when no one even sees me.

Existential crisis: it's what's for dinner.

On a work note, I just finished a really weirdly written book that I thought for sure was a new author; turns out she's published a few books. I was just O.o . None of the basic mechanical things that current publishing standards require, like section breaks or clear POV shifts, random time jump whiplash, no dialog tags. But I'm sure it wasn't intentionally ominiscient narrative. Seriously, there are so few dialog tags even I, a professional reader, couldn't easily follow.

It got me thinking about how strange it is that I mostly do romance now as a copyeditor (I miss my guidebooks!). Because while I love romances, I have not yet read a single one from my main publishers that I would eargerly choose to read, and most of them make me recoil. A lot of them are by seriously popular authors, but they're all so painfully heteronormative and Southern Christian influenced values (guys who are obsessed with marriages and babies, as much as their wives are, even though they're in a type of field where...no guys would care about that sort of thing, people who get pearl clutchey about swearing and "everyone knowing they'll be having sex on their weekend getaway") and I wouldn't mind it too much, if it were toned down.

Because inevitably, what every book starts trading in, are things that I did not know before I became such a heavy-duty romance copyeditor that I would come to hate: jealousy, love triangles, hypermasculinity. ETA: I forgot gender essentialism!! And now I know that I have to add jealousy to my list of DNWs if I do Yuletide again, because my god, I hate it so much. I've always hated jealousy, my ex used to get upset that I didn't get jealous, like he thought somehow that was a sign of love (spoiler: it never is), and I loathe it in fictional heroes and heroines. I read one book where the male character responded to the female's jealousy with thoughts about how it was the hottest thing he'd ever heard. Related to jealousy, everyone in these romances is possessive, reactionary about someone's sexual past (especially if they run into an ex), and men often resent women having friendships, can't wait till the time when their attention will be solely devoted to him. Insert barf emoji here.

Love triangles are also related--like, I get that few people in the western world think this way, in that I think you can love more than one person at the same time. I'm sure that's one reason why I responded SO strongly to Steve Rogers--even though Marvel deny it, and act as if this wasn't their intention, it's so clear from the way Steve behaves that he cares for, can love Peggy and Bucky at the same time, and I think that still extends to him in the future. He just loves who he loves. And I know the appeal of the HEA, that's what I love about romance. But I never read the kinds that might think outside that super narrow, possessive-inspired "you're mine and mine alone" box where maybe there are two people who can give someone the HEA.

The hypermasculinity speaks for itself, but it's one of the worst parts of modern romances that I work on--in this latest one, there was a constant repetition of how real men didn't cry, didn't wear tights (for their superhero costume party), hated pink, etc. etc. The Southern writers are absolutely the worst at this, with the Western writers coming up behind, close.

I was regularly editing a couple people who unfortunately had books coming out when I was dealing with the cancer, so now I think they've shuffled off to other CEs. I'm going to see if I can get back on their books to take some of this taste out of my mouth, because even if they do follow a lot of those tropes, at least the jealousy and pearl clutching is toned down. I don't think any of my big publishers do m/m or w/w type stories, either, but I might at least ask.