Samhain Publishing Ltd. Weblog

The Masochistic Heroine

I started thinking about masochist heroines not because of any fiction I’d read recently but because of some nonfiction—a book by a woman who’d been one of the multiple wives of a Mormon fundamentalist. She’d spent most of her life in grinding poverty bearing thirteen children and dodging her husband’s murderous relatives. I’m afraid my first reaction to the book was “Why on earth didn’t she leave?” Some of the author’s reasons are understandable—she was the descendant of several generations of polygamists, which made her think that kind of life was normal, and she didn’t really have a way to get herself and her children out of the family compound. But some of them are just incomprehensible. Namely, she swears she loved him.
Now, I write romances—love is my stock in trade. But I have a hard time understanding how you can love a man who marries six other women, is seldom around (because he’s off earning money to support these women and his thirty-plus children), and has little time for affection when he is. Unless, of course, you’re a masochist.

Venus In Blue Jeans – Now In Print

Venus In Blue Jeans, my first book for Samhain (and my first novel ever), has been released in print, and I still get a thrill just seeing the cover. Well, I mean, look at it. Isn’t it gorgeous? The week after Venus was released in print, I got the news that it was also a finalist for an EPIC Award in the Contemporary Category. Talk about your cup running over!

“Venus in Blue Jeans PRINT” by Meg Benjamin
Read An Excerpt Online

Genre: Contemporary Romance
ISBN: 978-1-60504-435-4

Length: 280 Pages

Price: 16.00

Publication Date: November 1, 2009

Cover art by Natalie Winters

A guy. A girl. A Chihuahua. Two of them will find the love of their lives.
Konigsburg, Texas, Book 1
Coming off a broken engagement to a lying charmer, all bookstore owner Docia Kent wants is a fling, not a long-term romance. And for her fabulously wealthy and fabulously nosy parents to butt out of her life for a while. The Texas Hill Country town of Konigsburg looks like the perfect place to get both. Especially when she gets a look at long, tall country vet Cal Toleffson.
Cal has other plans for Docia. One glance at the six-foot version of Botticelli’s Venus, and he knows he’s looking at the woman of his dreams. Now if he can just fend off the eccentric characters of Konigsburg long enough to convince her romance isn’t such a bad idea.
One night of mind-blowing sex isn’t the only thing that leaves them both stunned. With Docia’s bookstore under attack, Konigsburg suddenly doesn’t seem so welcoming. Once again she finds her trust tested—and is left wondering if she was ever meant to have a happily ever, after all.
Warning: Contains explicit sex, hot Texas nights, cool sarcastic friends, the world’s sweetest hero and the world’s saddest Chihuahua.

To find out more about me, my books and Konigsburg, Texas, please visit my Website.

Would You Like My Book? Are You Sure?

Before a recent family get-together, I got a brief e-mail from my brother-in-law asking me to bring along a copy of one of my books so that he could take it to my husband’s aunt. Now leaving aside the sort of obvious response to that—“Gee, Bob, can’t you afford to buy my book?”—I could see other, more long-range problems. My husband’s aunt is an 87-year-old unmarried lady; once upon a time, you might have called her a spinster. While I may not be too sure of Aunt Beth’s tastes in literature, I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t like my stuff.
This is a sensitive question for a lot of us. We write romance because we like it. We read it. We support it. Catherine Wade had an interesting post on her blog about this a couple of months ago, pledging that she would no longer apologize for writing romances and asking the rest of us to do the same. I’m with her all the way. But at the same time, I know some of my friends and relations won’t like what I do because they’re not fans of the genre. I’ve already had a friend tell me she liked my first book “except for all the sex.” If you read romances, the fact that my books have a lot of sex scenes shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. If you don’t, it may be a bit of a shock, to say the least.
So what do you do when your grandmother wants a copy of your book? Or your grade-school teacher? Or the pastor’s wife? Or your colleague at work who reads mostly literary fiction? Samhain requires its authors to write warnings that are posted with the book description at the Samhain Web site. These are mostly good-humored (hey, we try to be witty about it), but they also serve a serious purpose. Samhain doesn’t want readers buying books with content they’ll find offensive. So how do you head off a friend or relation who might be similarly upset by what you’ve written?
So far I’ve tried the straight-forward approach, telling anybody who asks that, yes, my books do include fairly explicit sex scenes, but no, I’m not writing porn. I have no idea how erotica writers handle this, but I’ll bet they’ve had to come up with ways to alert their maiden aunts before they buy their latest books.
The problem for all of us may be that reading and liking romance is still regarded as a guilty secret by a lot of people, even though it’s one of the best-selling genres in publishing. It’s always possible that my husband’s aunt has been reading romances for years and would look at mine as just another on her TBR stack. But she’s never mentioned it, and I’m not sure how to ask her. So for now, I’ll just tell my brother-in-law that I don’t think my book would be right for Aunt Beth. And then the next time I visit her, I’ll check her bookshelves for copies of Nora Roberts or Danielle Steel or even Barbara Cartland.
And if I find them, I’ll be sending her autographed copies of my books—ASAP.