Cute But Not Quite the Inspiration I Needed

While I had intentions of re-reading a certain novel around Veterans Day, it didn’t quite pan out, and I instead took a break for a fluffy romance novel.  Tessa Dare is one of those romance authors I consider generally reliable, although she can be hit or miss for me.  I absolutely love a few of her novels while others are just fine.  From reviews, I saw that this one was generally entertaining but not necessarily hitting all the right spots for readers. And I have to say I concur.  I also think it was definitely my mindset going in and that it probably wasn’t the right novel for what I wanted.

So full disclosure: I may be participating in nanowrimo this year for the first time ever, and I may have decided to try contemporary romance because I figured that at least from a plotting perspective, it might help to start with a genre I enjoy that followed certain patterns – I also love urban fantasy and YA fantasy but thought I might get too stuck in world building. However, I am also halfway through the month and kind of struggling to fill out the novel (and come up with creative ways to describe people’s genitalia), so I thought reading a romance might help me clear my head and remind me of how the authors fill out plot.

And I really should have gone with a contemporary romance for that even if I normally prefer reading historical romances.  Some of the cutesy jokes that Tessa Dare does weren’t working for me, and I am not sure if it was because they are the type of thing I normally wouldn’t have enjoyed or if it was because I looking at it from a more critical eye?  For me, I have noticed, there is a fine line between cute joke that is called back, and something that is overdone or too cute – in this case, it was the constantly changing names of the “cave of carnality” that went past cute to eye roll inducing (I also was the one person here at CBR that cringed at Courtney Milan’s puppy cannon in The Suffragette Scandal). Anyway, as much as I like Tessa Dare, she is not necessarily a good comparison for me because there is no way I can’t pull off the light humor and mix of pathos and frothy in the same way.