And as a non-American, SF has never meant “San Francisco” to me but always “science fiction”.

Clearly I am the most important writer in the world, and my opinions are tantamount to edicts from God.

Dearie me.

Clearly I am the most important writer in the world, and my opinions are tantamount to edicts from God.

Off to rebuild the world in seven days, whistling all the way.

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964)

Extruded will work though. Poor David, I will never forgive him when I figured out The Mallorean was basically a re-write of The Belgariad.

My problem has never been sex or lack thereof in a book. My rant has always been about a book being labeled romance that clearly doesn't have the characters making any sort of emotional declaration/commitment by story's end.

My other problem is having a whole genre labeled porn regardless of the emotional journey in it.

Romance is, and has always been, about the emotional journey of the main characters. Even if the HEA is an EHEA (Eventually Happily Ever After) you can put those characters through all sorts of crises–serial killers, plagues, asteroid storms, harems, spiritual and sexual awakenings–as long as you deliver on the emotional commitment.

My problem has never been sex or lack thereof in a book. My rant has always been about a book being labeled romance that clearly doesn’t have the characters making any sort of emotional declaration/commitment by story’s end.

Someone’s bound to differ with me though.

Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal.

Yes, I know there’s another, more offensive, definition:

obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, esp. those having little or no artistic merit.

You sound like you were Carol-Lynned.:)

Oh, and in my RFG mode, Beautiful Girl was fabulous. I started it at the hair salon and finished it while waiting for my daughter’s braces to be put on.

And you guys are right about E books, too. Even though I had to print it out on paper, nobody gave me any flack about what I was reading at all. So I ordered some backlist Ebooks of Shiloh’s and look forward to them. I have clarinet and piano lessons to wait through. . .

Now, that is undoubtedly true of some erotic romance. But that is because it’s true of a portion of any mass market genre. There is a term of art from speculative fiction writing — Extruded Fantasy Product. I’m not happy with people who use the clear and undeniable presence of EFP on large swathes of bookshop shelving to claim that all speculative fiction is hack work churned out quickly to make money, and there is a certain “glasshouses and stones” feeling about an sf&f writer playing the same game with Extruded Romance Product and romance as a genre, erotic or otherwise.

I understand people absolutely loving Lisle’s fiction. I haven’t read it but it’s gotten great reviews from readers I respect and I aim to try it sometime. But in the same way that I don’t want to merge an author’s online comments with her books, I don’t want to engage that process in reverse, either. Some authors write books I love but aggravate the heck out of me when they speak outside the pages of their fiction. Lisle’s online voice tends to aggravate me, although it may very well be that her fiction wouldn’t.

One more thing: I think it’s a wonderful thing when authors support/coach/promote up and coming writers or writers within their genre — that is, when they serve as teachers as well as writers. BUT, for some of these authors, the teaching/coaching thing is also a *business* (just like, for example, writing for hire), and while that may not diminish their commitment to the work, that work isn’t, IMO, completely selfless, either. In other words, author A may be a talented writer and/or teacher, but that doesn’t mean I won’t dispute or question something she says with which I disagree.

However, to me Ms Lisle’s post reads more like a very disdainful (if not scornful), “I don’t want to be known by anyone as someone who writes that kind of stuff.”

And when “that kind of stuff” is shorthand for all the negative connotations that the word porn has, by and large, for most of society, it is difficult not to take it as an insult to both writers and readers of what Ms Lisle is equating with porn.

I don’t think Holly Lisle’s comment was at all appropriate, BUT. I think Jane is taking this line: I'd think it would be obvious to anyone with a brain that ANY writer who is writing both adult and YA fantasy under her own name is not going to be even remotely interested in including anything that could be categorized as porn, or romantica, in a magazine she's ALSO putting out under her own name somewhat out of context.

She’s not saying that some who writes adult romance would be ashamed to have an EC line under her name. The emphasis is on the YA, not the adult. And a number of authors with YA creds don’t want their “adult” books confused with their YA ones, if only b/c they are more adult. (Meg Cabot, for example, doesn’t encourage her younger readers to read her Patricia Cabot novels, though she knows they do read them.)