Romance Novel Covers De- and Re-constructed

Romance novels are not exactly on my radar in general but recently I've taken an interest. A Nuyorican friend of mine tells me his mother's Harlem apartment is filled with Harlequin paperbacks. My own mother was a devotee of The Days of our Lives soap opera, and my early years recall the voiceover artist recounting how our lives are like sand in the hourglass. For better or worse I go to my grave with this audio artifact from pop culture engraved into my memory and a deep sense of the futility of time's passage.

When I received a lunch invite from Random House's newish digital-only romance imprints (not sure how I got on their radar), I threw it into my digital trash. But later I thought, doesn't Metapulp, my publishing company, have a romance novel in the line-up? So, I retrieved the invite and signed up. After all, I only had to leave my front door, take the uptown A train to Columbus Circle and walk a few blocks to the New York City headquarters of Random House to pull this off. Any hopes I had that the other romance novel lunchers might prove to be old spry men or other stereotype shattering folk who banged out romance novels under pen names, was dashed against the floor like china in a, well, in a soap opera. The ladies in attendance looked like they wrote romance novels. Bright green eyeshadow and matching skirt. Check!

I feasted on my quinoa salad while the Random House editorial staff introduced themselves and basically sold the imprint to the writers. I started googling on my phone the moment they said they also had a scifi imprint named Hydra. Really? That had not been on my radar either. Right away a flurry of negative posts came up regarding the disemboweling tactics of the imprints. (Basically, these imprints are trying to snag the potential breakout indies before they go viral and the contracts pretty much steal off with the copyrights. That's if you believe what you read in blogs anyway.)

Back to my believable blog! I returned my attention to the editors in front of me. A cover "artist" was discussing how she dug through stock photo images of muscly men and nearly naked women to composite the covers, and how even the author got to play a role in choosing the final cover. Want to wrap your stud in green plaid or red? You choose! Nevermind that no one seems to be collecting these covers that all look the same.

Well, let me get on with the deconstruction part of this blog. Aren't all stories just variations on a theme anyway? The romance novel cover is the same freaking cover over and over and over again but so are our stories, no matter what the language. There's a lot of sex and bananas, if you know what I mean, in Gravity's Rainbow.


It's all a signal to a potential reader that a hot dude and chick or some combo is waiting between the pages, waiting to be discovered by you. It seems a little bit of a hellish job, placing an abdomen on a book cover format day after day, though the Random House artist seemed to relish it. Here's some from me:

Horny yet? Let's get down into the deconstruction, which is a bit like adding a halftone dot effect to a stock abdominal image in order to boil it down to its dots, which we will now connect.

If the romance novel really is a latter day roman a clef, then escaping into sexual fantasy is the foundation of the modern desire to read and to write. And what is the sexual fantasy based upon but a hormonal urge to procreate? And why the hell does life want to go on living anyway? Let me use these all important questions to segue to Metapulp's new romantic title, to the titular point.





And here is our cover, sans abdomen:

Yes, I've cowritten a romantic novel with my buddy X.Y. Zero, who has a sense of humor whereas I do not (but I'm willing to hammer out the words as he dictates). It's about the hottest woman in the world who just got lucky. Yep! Metapulp had insisted on an abdominal cover, but we settled for Puerto Rican flag colors instead, striking an agreement between the heavy drinking parties. I ended up pitching the concept to Loveswept and Flirt, Random House's imprint, and their acquisitions editor Shauna said they could brand around me, (I mean us X.Y.), that they did indeed have flexibility that print does not have. I popped a bonbon into my mouth and took a pleasant walk along Central Park West, dreaming of the cover of my latest roman a clef. Why do we write? We write so that people who aren't getting laid can pretend they are, halftone dots and all.

Thanks for stopping by, yours, salem and X.Y. Zero. More at www.metapulp.com.

And by the way Random House and everyone else, everything here is copyrighted by me, salem.  So hands off!

Realism ain't Real

I've never wanted to write a Great American Novel. Such an undertaking presupposes, let's call it, a micronostalgia for a very compressed period of human time. If our species truly has evolved over millions of years, then the Great American Novel author is a bit of a dead fly in the ointment of time. And a desire to pontificate with purpled prose, for example, the doldrums of a dustbowl wheat farmer, just seems a little silly to me. That book too will turn to dust.

Novel writing has not been around that long either. And the realism comprising the voice of the Great American Novel - or any other so-called literary novel - is a fantasy, a cultural collusion.

The deft turning of phrases is our human birdsong at its best.

It is on my mind quite a lot these days as I spend many hours editing storytelling and getting a little too close to the sound, not just of my own voice, but that weird intersection between the sounds and their meaning.

These sounds comprise the uniquely haunting, human ability to generate storytelling. Once the sounds and shapes of written language are pared down to the stick of realism, however, this lathed language becomes mistaken for the thing that it is trying to describe. And yet, this stick language is what commands the big literary prizes. I don't want to go Plato's cave on you all, but a realistic novel is a bit like a shadow on the wall, and a realistic novel prize is another shadow applauding the shadow play.

Right now Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is on my to be read list not because I'm a fan of realism, but because the book is essentially an archeological artifact, written by someone probably keenly or obtusely ignorant of quantum physics. And probably ignorant of the chemical composition of paper upon which a realistic narrative floats like sticks on a sea.

Carbon Web

I wrote the previous paragraphs last night. This morning I read that E. L. Doctorow has passed, and I read further from The New York Times,

“Someone said to me once that my books can be arranged in rough chronological order to indicate one man’s sense of 120 years of American life,” Mr. Doctorow said on the publication of “City of God.”

A reference to an early, fantastical work also crops up:

His second book, “Big as Life” (1966), was also drawn from genre fiction. A peculiar fantasy — science fiction, sort of — the novel is about New Yorkers who are thrown together one morning when, without explanation, two human giants are found standing, seemingly immobile, in the lower Hudson River. An unsuccessful book — “Unquestionably it’s the worst I’ve done,” Mr. Doctorow said in 1980, and would have no reason to change his mind later — it remains his only novel no longer in print.

And from his canon, that is the book I would like to read. Realism ignores how fantastical reality is. We are, last I checked, inexplicably spinning around in a mobius strip of space-time, made of what we call carbon, eating carbon, writing with carbon on carbon.

Literary realism strips awe from existence.

Genre, on the other hand, incites awe. That's nothing to be embarrassed about. Sharknado 3 debuts tonight on the Syfy channel, but I won't be able to watch it because I'll be out on the Hudson, where no doubt giants from some other space-time continuum will be bathing near the Statue of Liberty.

We live in a universe ebullient with imagination, and one where literary realism ain't real.

salemwire's home: www.metapulp.com

Time is Concentric

This morning I looked at images of Pluto sent back by the New Horizons NASA spacecraft. This afternoon, as I was narrating my novel Black Hole Butterfly, I read the line:

"The men of Gasland did not know time was not - and in fact never had been - linear. It was concentric, like the rings of a tree, organically evolving around its once seeded core." 

I could also have written it is like a planetary system, circling around the center of its origin.

The question I have for you today: what is time to you?

NPR just measured the time it took for New Horizons to make it to Pluto, using as its stick the complete Harry Potter audio books, which one would have to listen to over and over and over again to span a decade. No thanks!

Well, without our lives being that repetitious, that is what we do. We impose a seven day week on ourselves and pretend that the cycle is a straight line marked by our own aging.

The great thing about science fiction as opposed to science fact is that I can use the language fueled by imagination to alter my perception of time. Think about it. We aren't going anywhere. Ever. The best we can do is go in circles. Time is not, and in fact, never has been linear. It's concentric.

Put that in your Pluto, and crank it.

Salemwire Brooklyn Reboots with Plastic Monsters

Lately I've been reading Darwin's The Origin of Species. This isn't a page turner but more of a meditation on naturalism and on the origin of various loaded phrases that have churned up into pop culture like bottles from another time on the shore of now. Recently while reading it on a C train in Brooklyn, I pictured four of my selves holding hands like a paper chain of people going back in time. It would only take four of me to go back to 1859, when Charles Darwin was struggling, at the end of his life, to stake his claim on the theory of evolution. As I looked up at the diverse faces across from me, I wondered if we could be considered varietals.

Let's just say that every time I come across the word monstrous in Darwin's work, people look just a little more monstrous to me. But I'm an imaginative sort and a wordsmith, so this is the effect words have on me. I also am fascinated by his usage of the word plastic. Plastic as we know it, the kind that floats up onto the shores, wasn't around in his day, so he means moldable. It certainly did not take me long to start looking at people as varietals of plastic monsters, which is all great imagination food for a writer who tends toward science fiction.

Last week I'd only read a few pages before the C train delivered me to DUMBO in Brooklyn, where I attended Make it in Brooklyn, basically a pitch contest where folks with a Brooklyn based business plan had 2 minutes each to vie for $25K in funding. Or perhaps these were plastic monsters vying for the dough. At any rate something booze-related nabbed the prize. I ended up introducing myself to a few of the pitchers, like the plastic monster from Timescape and a plastic monster space suit designer from Final Frontier. Ultimately I made my way over to the tall plastic monster emcee, who I thought was some Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce honcho but turned out to be a founder of Makerbot.

There were other brilliant plastic monsters with working prototype shoes for the disabled, toilets for schools in Senegal and an app for finding places to recycle your plastic monster plastic bottles. Moneyed plastic monster venture capitalists sat and stood in refined, mostly dark blue and black suits, eager to throw their moolah at ideas. Money, if anything, is intrinsically plastic, and requires great mental fortitude, aka faith, to believe in it.

I left this event feeling like I had just waded into a little tidal pool of Brooklyn evolution. I was not there for money but to see who was up to what in my 'hood. And let's just say I departed with visions of the near future, in which I'm using my Makerbot to make my own spacesuit out of recycled plastic bottles in which a toilet compost compartment, humbly designed in Gowanus, is screwed to my you-know-what and also features shoes that I can kick off and on in zero Gs when I'm heading for a cocktail in the Mos Eisely Cantina which has a special, I know, from the alcohol app.

I just happen to know a lot about spacesuits. Why? Because I read science fiction, dammit, written by plastic monsters like Neal Stephenson and Andy Weir. And I write it too. And now I narrate it out of Metapulp Studios, the smart science fiction, Brooklyn based company served by the C train.  Check this out, here's my first audiobook Joe4 placed right above that rocking spacesuit art cover of The Martian:

All right all you plastic monsters, have a great weekend. And Happy Birthday, America.