High Desert Novelists Eagerly Embrace Pursuit of Romance

Ah, the romance novel, where the women are blessed with small, perfect teeth, slender legs, full breasts and silken hair, where heroines are ever virtuous, intelligent, witty, independent and impetuous.

And their men.

Oh, their dangerous men.

Broad shoulders, “well-defined chests,” “leanly sculpted” tan faces and (my personal favorite) “masculine lean hips.” Where can a girl find such a stud?

In Palmdale.

Yes, Palmdale--at the meetings and in the minds of the High Desert Romance Writers of America chapter--a group of authors trying to break into the sweet, or steamy, world of smoldering gazes and electric embraces.

Sure, you elitist literary types, go ahead and mock their genre. Turn up your noses, you celebrity insta-book authors, you haughty crime novelists and science fiction space cases. Call it fluff. Call it silly.

Call it a billion-dollar industry. That’s billion, with a “B.” Nearly half--49% to be exact--of all paperbacks produced are romances. And these writers want a piece of that publishing pie.

“We all want to be published, whether it’s because we want to see our name in print, or that we need to tell that story that only we can tell, or we fantasize about being rich like Danielle Steele, or we simply love to write,” Beverly Clark, the group’s librarian, said during a recent meeting at the Old Country Buffet in Palmdale.

The writers also want their outdated image corrected--unfrumped and unfrilled. No one at this meeting wore chiffon.

They do not lie in bed in pink peignoirs with yippy, talcum-white, pug-nosed dogs at their feet, eating bonbons and writing with a peacock quill. Nor are they all bored housewives lost in fantasies of chisel-chested hunks.

They seethe at newspaper writers who use the phrase “bodice rippers” and start their stories with a mini-satire of a romance novel. (OK, they shamed me out of it.)

They often write in home offices and whenever they find the time, fitting paragraphs filled with romance and sexual tension in between full-time jobs, husbands and children.

They do , however, revel in the unabashedly romantic.

“I love romance. I read romance,” said Tanya Stowe, president of the Romance Writers.

Stowe’s first novel, “Time’s Embrace,” involved time travel to the Egypt of the pharaohs.

For Stowe, a full-time writer for five years, the fluff/formula stereotype stings. “It’s just a way for people to label us and put us down,” she said.

It’s also a way to mock those who pass up the New Yorker in favor of books with titles like “Betrayal” and “An Old Fashioned Affair.”

“If three women are in a line and one is reading Grisham, one is reading a romance novel and another is reading Louis L’Amour, who do you think is going to get the flak?” asked Chelley Kitzmiller, a Tehachapi writer and reviewer who recently published her second book, “Fires of Heaven.”

“I think the romance novel is perceived as it is because it is an industry for women and by women,” said Kitzmiller, 48. “There has been this perception that the women reading this aren’t as valuable, not as well educated.” Actually, most readers are college-educated and employed, contends Kitzmiller, who credits a book called “Sweet Savage Love” with changing her life.

In 1975, on a camping trip to Bishop, Kitzmiller was marooned in a 24-foot motor home with two other adults, five children and two dogs during a blizzard. While the children colored and her husband fumed about missed fishing time, Kitzmiller and her sister-in-law holed up in a bedroom and read aloud from the one book in the vehicle.

Kitzmiller was hooked. When the weather cleared, she remained in the camper alone, reading. Years later, she started writing her own and founded the Orange County chapter of RWA, which now boasts 400 members. She is now program coordinator for the High Desert chapter, which after only a handful of meetings has about 30 members, including two men.

“I don’t think you’ll ever meet a more supportive and caring group,” said Kitzmiller, who calls the RWA a sisterhood.

Indeed, there is an almost sorority atmosphere. They hold raffles for candy-filled crystal bowls and baskets of writing implements. They give awards for various publishing accomplishments, but the red hearts are reserved for published romance authors--only three or four to date.

“Many of them are never going to make it,” Kitzmiller said. “Others will struggle for years like I did before they ever sell a book.”

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Romance writers can dish up emotion in any setting they can imagine: Western theme, hold the steam please; time travel, backward or forward; Westerns with Native American themes; gothics littered with vampires and werewolves; mixed with mystery; in historic novels, and in outer space.

And they have a loyal and growing group of readers waiting for their work.

“I think the romance readers have always been there,” said Stowe. “They’ve been closet readers. As we are given more respectability, as we earn more respect, people are not afraid to come out of the closet and admit they read romances.”

Sure, reading romance novels isn’t going to save the world, the writers agree. But then neither is sitting on the couch stuffing beer nuts in your face watching the Rams or the Angels lose, again.

“Men could learn a lot by reading these,” Kitzmiller said. “They’d learn a lot more about what women really want. But I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime,” she said, laughing.