My Trip Down Memory Lane

These days I write mystery. Years ago, however,(when my kids were small and I wanted to make some money while being a stay-at-home-mom) I wrote romance under a variety of pseudonyms. Most of my romance books were romantic suspense. For me, a good adventure with an element of danger just always seems to make a story more fun to read.

Now I write mystery, with a special partiality for historical mystery. I thought I’d said goodbye forever to all those romance novels. But something interesting has happened. In the days when traditional publishing was king a book was shipped to stores, stayed on the shelf a few weeks, then was remaindered. (Alas, I think that means it was made into toilet paper)In other words, it just disappeared.

Times have changed. Jeff Bezos has turned the publishing world upside down. Now that Amazon is the 900 gazillion pound bookstore in the room, books are not remaindered. They do not disappear forever ( as I thought all my old romance novels had). In fact, ebooks can theoretically last forever. Wow! For authors, this opens up a new world of possibilities.

So I’ve acquired the rights back on those romance novels I wrote many years ago. I’m reading through them. Revising them. In the process, I’m discovering they’re kind of like time capsules. A lot has changed in our culture and in our society, and in our technology since I wrote those books. I’ve been reflecting on the changes. Perhaps the most obvious is telephones. 

When I wrote romance nobody carried a cell phone. To bring those books up to date I’m having to re-think phone calls. Someimes it’s easy. But more than I imagined, it gets complicated. You’d be surprised at how many plot turnings depend on the accessibility of a telephone. If my heroine can’t call for help when she’s dangling off a cliff, she’s in trouble. But nowadays what right-minded heroine would be dangling off a cliff without her smart phone?

Cell phones, of course, aren’t the only things that have changed. In the last couple of decades there’ve been some pretty earth shaking cultural shifts. That comes into focus as I take a trip down memory lane re-reading my romance books. I’ll get into those cultural shifts and their effect on story-telling in my next blog post.