The thing about e-reader romance...

So here is what I have discovered…on a bus at 5.30PM…the kind of romance that you buy to read on your iPhone is NOT the same kind that you get from Mills & Boon. Seriously, not the same.

I had finished the pulp trash I had in my hand bag on the bus coming into work, so not wanting to face a 45 min bus ride home with nothing better to do than perv and the strange people around me, I decided to download a e-book through Stanza.

I followed the instructions, selected romance (wanted escapism and a happy ending) and paid US$5.99 for a book. And it downloaded straight away. All good.

Except that in the first five minutes I realized that this kind of romance was going to be very different from my usual fare. Oh sure there was a girl and a guy and at some point they were going to get it on. But normally I prefer to wait past the second paragraph of the book before references to ‘hot sausages’ and ‘flooded’ nether regions.

Did I stop reading? Hell no! But I do admit to holding the iPhone closer and to angling it so that the poor woman next to me didn’t cop an eye full if she decided to try for a sneaky look at what I was reading.

And yes, once I got home and went to bed for the evening, I decided to keep reading and finish the book. Part of me is disappointed that I paid USD for a story that lasted two hours, but then like I said to my colleagues at work – it was a bit like real life – the sex was over before you were done with it.

The quality of the writing was, well not the best. The plot (words built between the graphic sex scenes) was so weak I began to fear that the writer had tourettes and the character development was pretty much limited to descriptions of his abs and ‘hot sausage’ and the size of her butt.

So then I wondered, well who writes this stuff? Because I don’t think your average 30 something woman describes an erect penis as a hot sausage. And we certainly wouldn’t want to write a character who called it a hot sausage. So is cheap e-reader porn written by 17 year old boys with bad skin and more imagination than experience or by 80 year old Grandmothers who skim read penthouse for inspiration rather than draw on remembered experience? I don’t know, but in the interests of truth and accuracy I will endeavour to ask all my friends and colleagues about the term ‘hot sausage’.

On an aside, given than I had finished iPhone porn, I grabbed a really old M&B from the bottom drawer this morning as I was leaving the house. It was part of a bundle I had bought on ebay ages ago and it was printed in 1970. That was a good year and to be honest sometimes the characters in the old style books can be far more exciting than modern romance characters, so I was looking forward to reading it. And then I have discovered that the protagonist is 17 years old and after one lunch date, an evening meal and quick ride to work she is in love with her 38 year old boss. Sigh, it’s one extreme to the other – either I am reading about hot and heavy porn romance OR it’s supposed to be some romantic explanation of a man’s mid life crisis and carry on with someone who is too young to drink alcohol.

God help me, maybe this why I read those books about serial killers…

A boy and his brain

‘It wasn’t my fault Mummy,’ he said ‘it was my brain.’

‘Well,’ I replied ‘how do we make sure that your brain listens to me in future?’

There is a pause whilst small boy contemplates this conundrum. His brow furrows in concentration, his eyes look off into the distance and his small rosebud mouth purses in deliberation. ‘I don’t know,’ he says despondently ‘it doesn’t have any eyes or ears Mummy, so it can’t see or hear you.’

How to keep a straight face? ‘Oh dear, well does it listen to you then? Can you tell it not to do silly things like sit on your sister’s head when she is lying on the couch?’

‘No Mum, it cant hear me either. It’s a very silly brain. I think that only girls brains can hear them. I don’t think boy’s brains work the same.’

Ahh, I think, out of the mouth of babes….