Chilling out to the maxxxxxxxxx

[erastes]

I'm on leave now until next Tuesday and I've been spending a lot of time in the bath and reading.  About 2 and a half hours today. Yes. You heard. If I had a hot tub, I'd never come out.

zehavit_lamasu and Anne Brooke - Gaywyck and Dangerous Man arrived today!  I'm so book gluttonous at the moment, I've started them both...

Well, I've read three books in the last four days, and all gay historical stories written by men, and they've made me think.  Because all three of them (Firelands and Frontiers by Michael Jensen, and Master of Seacliff by Max Pierce) are 1. Very well written and 2. Romances.

They are more sentimental in parts than most of what I've been reading from women writers, and the sex is so soft as to be non-existent. 

I know that this is rather judgemental of me to be surprised at this, but these books are the first gay historicals written by men I've knowingly read, other than James Lear's wonderful "The Back Passage" and if I'd been asked to guess the gender I would have said "female" for all three.  The only thing that might have made me pause was the obvious want of the writers to get the historical details right.

Now - before I beat myself up with my own assumptions I'll just talk about a theory of mine regarding historical fiction.  I've belonged in my time to a few historical novelists groups, particularly of the critique type and I've noticed that IN MY EXPERIENCE (underlining that this is purely *MY* experience) that men seem to get the detail right, or attempt to more than women.  I'm not saying for one second that there's not 10000's of women writers out there who are getting it right, and striving to do so, but this is what I found, with unpublished novelists in critique groups.

My theory is therefore, that women read a lot of historical romances.  Let's be frank - there are a lot of historical romances that don't bother to get the nitty gritty right, and do little more than put characters in period costume but have them still hold the modern mind set of today.  So people read these books and they think "I could do as well as this" and then they perpetuate the myth, they copy the Heyerisms  and each time it gets a little more exaggerated until it's a parody of the time involved.

I used to see this is fan fiction.  Faction, or Fanon - is where something almost becomes canon because it's written about so often, the lines between what's real and what's homage becomes blurred.  For example, In Harry Potter fanon Lucius abuses Draco, whether physically or mentally or sexually.  Remus and Sirius are a couple and so on.

So a lot of women writing historical fiction are only writing carbon copies - riffs if you like - of other historical fiction they've read and loved.  Regency being the most popular of this maligned genre, for example.

However, my theory goes on  - MEN read O'Brien (Jack Aubrey) Forester (Hornblower) Cornwell (Sharpe etc) and see just how paintstaking their research is and they think "Cripes - if I'm going to write this, I'd better work hard to get as good as this)

Yes yes yes - I know this is generalising but I still think this holds a lot of water.

I'll be doing reviews of the three books I've mentioned in a while, but they are all highly recommended. My filthy mind would have liked some hot sex, but I can't have it all, all the time. I'll have to go and seek out some women writers!!!

*G*

Oh and I finished Eragon too. Not awful. Can't see what everyone hates about it. I've read worse. A lot worse. Stupid ending (yeah blah blah sequel bleakwell) and the derivative names from Scandanavia and bizzarely Japan drove me bonkers, but readable.  I hate Eragon and I REALLY REALLY want Saphira to die more than I can say....