*cough* Okay, I’m done now. I’m ready to be an mature, reasonable adult again.

I worship the woman, but I wish great historical romance authors like Julia Quinn would expand their horizons a little bit.

(I still, however, have no desire to read comedic contemporaries because I think grown women should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.)

ETA paragraph break.

I’m over the whole “kick-ass heroine” thing, regardless of genre. It’s gotten to the point where I really can’t tell them apart anymore, and they all annoy me.

That, too. I’ve depised the type from the moment of my very first groan over Anita effing Blake.

kick-ass, invariably tattooed chicks who wear nothing but leather

As an aside, it’s hard to kick ass in leather, especially the tight leather worn in these books, because it restricts movement.

And please may I get something longer than 300 pages? Especially the ones with the humongo font?

Hard to do with so many publishers cutting word count to save on costs.

I’m ready for a nice contemporary. When’s the next SEP or standalone Crusie coming out?

I don’t mind time-travel regencies (I like time-travel in general), but the constant focus on the upper class of that period really grates on me after a while. As a costumer, I can’t stand 75 percent of the fashions between 1800 and 1910, which of course doesn’t help, but still. I have a hard time reading or writing about the 19th century without constantly thinking of the classism and the rigid caste structure of Europe and England especially at the time (not to mention the sexism and the racism of the period, but that’s another rant for another day).

It’s actually more depressing to read about characters who behave as if another way of life didn’t exist all around them than it is to read about characters enduring real and painful suffering while trying to overcome the life around them as long as it works out in the end, believe it or not. I think most historical fiction that focuses mostly on upper class white people has to deal with the issue of the ’superior normalcy of the good life,’ while a lot of medieval and renaissance literature, and even Colonial and American Civil War lit, I find, doesn’t have that affected state of ignorance and insulation that some Regencies do, and it bugs me much more than it did a few years ago. JMHO.

“Sex and the City” knock-offs: I’ll write ‘em, but that doesn’t mean I always to want read ‘em. The present is depressing enough as it is; I want to read to escape sometimes.