An Open Letter To The People On The Internet

Dear Fellow People On The Internet,

I think maybe we all need to stop using the word "special" to mean "not smart," because I'm pretty sure that the etymology there is that it comes from "special needs."

("Special snowflake"-type usage is a different case, and I'm not disposed to complain about it.)

Thank you,

Somebody who just realized that, when she's trying to write dialog for middle-school-aged bullies, she assumes that "special child" will be among their top five most frequently-used insults.

Every time you post about Nalini Singh, an angel kills a baby.

The Amazon synopsis of Archangel's Kiss, the second book in Nalini Singh's skeevy "Angels make vampires" series:

( Cut for spoilers for the first book. )

How many horrifying things can you find in that synopsis? How many horrifying things in each sentence? It's like a quickly-scribbled draft for the Problematic Paranormal Romance Drinking Game.

It's hilarious that Raphael is "stunningly dangerous," rather than "terrifyingly dangerous" or "stunningly gorgeous," as the layperson might expect. In paranormal romances, it is a matter of course that these concepts be conflated! My fondness for the genre shames me.

I actually find myself very reluctant to read paranormals recently, because I find that some writers internalize this a little too much. The point at which it becomes particularly troubling is when an author wants her hero to be a Sexy Monster, but puts all her energy into the Monster part and then expects the reader, using her knowledge of the genre, to extrapolate the sexy.

From what's in the text of the first book, Raphael's just a sociopath who happens to have pretty wings. There's not really much in there to redeem all the horrible stuff he does. He was going to kill a baby because the girl wouldn't do what he wanted, and it is my position that pretty wings do not make up for this.

But because he's a paranormal romance hero, people read him through the lens of other, superficially similar characters, and so absolve him of his villainy, assuming that, per genre requirements, he shall absolve himself by the end of the book. That he failed to do so is, pitted against the overwhelming weight of genre formula, a mere technicality.

(Anyway, I've decided that in my awesome paranormal romance, there's going to be an ancient evil that has a seal on it and they stupidly unseal it and the ancient evil will be the heroine. It is subversive because ordinarily we expect the ancient evil to be the hero, right?

Paranormal romances are so bad.)