What Type of Reader Are You?

By Maureen L. Bonatch

Readers. We may all love a good story, fangirl a little over our favorite author and occasionally have more books than friends (who needs them when you have books?), but we are all unique in the way we read. 

But…just what type of reader are you? Take this quick quiz and find out.

Nibble or Gorge?

1.  I nibble and savor a story. I like to sneak in little bits when I have a few minutes.
2. I find a new author and buy ever other book they wrote and read them in order.
3. I devour books as fast as possible.

Use a Bookmark or Fold the Corner?

1. I use a real bookmark with a print book.
2. Any old scrap of paper, gum wrapper, napkin or string will save my place.
3. I mark my territory on a book by folding down the corner.

Print book, eBook or Audiobook?

1. Print books- I like to hold it in my hand.
2. eBook- I like access to a ton of books in my reader
3. Audiobook- I want to hear the characters.
4. All of the above- if it’s a book, I’ll read it.

Nighttime, Seasonal, Holiday—or Anytime?

1. I sneak in a few chapters before falling asleep—or end up reading half the night.
2. I usually read more on vacation, during holidays, or specific seasons of the year.
3. I read any spare minute, even when I should be doing other things.

One Genre or The More the Merrier?

1. I’m faithful to my favorite genre.
2. I don’t discriminate, I read many genres.
3. I will read anything I can get my hands on—recipes, instructions, just give me words!

Does Size Matter?

1. I like big books and I cannot lie.
2. Short and sweet are great to fit in my busy schedule.
3. Size doesn’t matter if the story is good.

Buy, Borrow or Library?

1. I borrow from friends and family.
2. To afford my reading habit, I use the library.
3. I must own all the books.

Persevere or Bail out?

1. Even if the story drags, I hang on to see if it gets better.
2. Have me at hello or I’m done.
3. I have multiple books started and go from story to story when one gets slow.

What Type of Reader Are You?

Mostly 1’s? 2’s? or 3’s? Whether you're a Nibbling Nancy, a Methodical Melanie or a Gorging Gloria, no matter what your score or your reading style, you are fabulous—just like all readers.

Just how Big is Your—TBR List?

Looking for Love?

The month of love is just around the corner. Forget Me Not is a sweet, short read to get you in the mood for love.

If Cole can't believe she's a changed woman, can Sabrina accept the only second chance she has at love exists in her memories?

Author Bio: Maureen Bonatch grew up in small town and her love of the four seasons—hockey, biking, sweat pants and hibernation—keeps her there. While immersed in writing or reading paranormal romance and fantasy, she survives on caffeine, wine, music, and laughter. A feisty Shih Tzu keeps her in line. Find Maureen on her website, Facebook & Twitter

The Role of Magic

My first M/M romance, After the War, was the story of two warriors growing closer to each other while on the run from an invasion force. While one of them is a gunslinger, the other's an old-fashioned swordsman, and I felt very certain of its status as romantic fantasy until I started getting feedback: there was hardly any magic in it. Wizards were mentioned in passing, but several readers even wondered if I hadn’t written a historical piece without realizing it. I disagreed--it had certainly felt like a fantasy world I was constructing as I thought up its geography, cultures, even religions. 

But it left me wondering--is there a minimum amount of fantastic happenings to be included in a fantasy story? And is magic one of them? 

For that matter, what counts as magic? Strange creatures? Unicorns may have magical powers in one setting and be natural, if unusual, animals in another. Even beings like vampires, Amazons, or shapeshifters can make a story speculative without including any outright wizardry. In the Middle Ages, alchemists tried to become immortal or transmute metals--things that look a lot like magic to us, although they would insist differently (especially if the Inquisition came around). What about witches? Are they manipulators of the basic nature of reality, or simply wise herbalists? And what about Arthur C. Clarke's law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"? Some wonderful steampunk has been written straddling the boundaries of science and sorcery. In this world's Victorian era, Forteans and investigators into the Spiritualist wave tried to make sense of the supernatural in a scientific context, preferring psychic powers and hidden dimensions to magic.

Is magic something the characters in a story take in stride? Or is it uncanny, mysterious in origin and beyond human comprehension? Can you see a wizard's duel at the weekly market, or would a feud between sorcerers be a once-in-a-millennium occurrence that threatens the stability of empires? And wherever it falls between those two points, how do ordinary people feel about magic? If rare but benevolent, it may be a miracle. If commonplace and dangerous, witchcraft may become a petty crime. 

In my short story Unnatural Means, I finally wrote about magic...or did I? While Unnatural Means clearly takes place in a world where people believe in--and persecute--magic, the viewpoint character, Isak, is never certain whether his prisoner Sain is a true witch or not. Whether the reader believes Sain or Isak will impact their judgement of the characters, but it's certainly true that Isak feels Sain has some sort of hold over him, bewitchment or not. 

My forthcoming release from Carina, Gardens Where No One Can See, will be my first M/M romance to feature what it unquestionably magic: cruel sorcery so powerful it overcomes the warrior Renad's will, enslaving him. Renad and his friend and lover, Nemaran, aren't magicians, and they don't understand the intricacies of the spell binding him. Instead they have to feel their way around it, working together to learn as much as they can and find a way to counter it. Like Unnatural Means, Gardens is a story that wouldn't happen without the idea of magic, and it's also what I like to call a "nature of magic" story: how sorcery works is crucial to solving the problem the characters confront. 

Although writing a "nature of magic" story was fun and gave me plenty to think about, I also enjoyed exploring the boundaries of fantasy with the comparatively mundane After the War. What I love most about a story are how the characters interact with each other and with their world, whether magic is a major part of it or only a glimmer of mystery at the corners of what they know.

What sort of role do you like magic to play in your stories? Would you ever consider reading or writing a fantasy story where the existence of magic is unclear or unproven, or where it exists but doesn't directly impact the plot? And--my gooey inner nature won't let me close without asking--isn't love the greatest magic of all? ;-D 

On Being a Writer of Genre Fiction

The other night I was chatting on Instant Messenger with one of my writer friends (and critique partner). She and I have a lot in common as writers because we both started out writing literary fiction and non-fiction - and were moderately successful at it - and then both switched to writing genre fiction. We both write erotic romance and she's had a very successful urban fantasy trilogy while I'm making my way in fantasy and fantasy romance.

In this conversation, she mentioned that one of her friends from her "former" writing life had a memoir published with a university press and she was excited to go to the launch party and see all her old friends. Then she expressed trepidation, saying that she never knows quite what to say to them about what she's writing now, as if she's internalized some of the shame of writing genre, especially in SFF and Romance, which tend to be the most sneered at among the "genres" by lit fic types.

It's really hard to say, though, if it's us or them.

But I totally understood what she means. I miss my old community - more so because we moved away. I loved the comaraderie of it all, the sense of being admitted to the club. I told her that I look at the Newsletter from the foundation that gave me a fellowship for a two-week residency, back in the day. Doing that residency was huge for me. First, just passing the jury to be awarded the fellowship was enormously validating. But then - spending those two weeks being fed and catered to while I did nothing but write? That was the first time I felt like a REAL writer. Like was I was doing was important. My fellow residents and I joked that they treated us like we were curing cancer. (I should mention this particular residency included artists of all types - painters, musicians, writers, photographers, composers, you name it.)

That joke reflected our internal uncertainty that we didn't really deserve such support, even as we reveled in it, like foster children plucked off the street and mistakenly given a rich home. We kept waiting for them to discover the error and boot us out.

Miraculously, they never did.

Some writers make a virtual living of this itinerant lifestyle, going from residency to residency. Part of this to support themselves in the early days but also because, with rare exceptions, lit fic writers rarely make money any other way. They work as professors at universities and writing programs. Genre writers typically have non-writing related careers until they make it.

I know far, far more genre writers making a living on just writing than in the lit fic world. I enjoy the writing more, too. But, when I get that newsletter...

There's stuff like:

~ Fellows nominated for the 2013 Tony Award:

~ featured in a solo exhibition

~ has been appointed Artistic Director

~ was shortlisted for Salt Publishing’s International Scott Prize

~ had its US television broadcast premier on PBS’s Independent Lens series

~ The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded...

I'm reading through this, looking for my buddies and thinking "and Jeffe Kennedy has the second book in her Covenant of Thorns series, Rogue's Possession, coming out on October 7!"

Somehow, it just doesn't have the same ring, you know?

At the same time, I know that these sorts of prestigious announcements are the coin of the arts realm. This is what they trade upon. In that world, reputation and resume are what get you more work. In genre? Sales figures.

What strikes me about all of this is, I'm still the same writer. In many, quantifiable ways that I can point to, I'm  much better writer than when I received that Fellowship. Certainly far more people read my work, I sell more books and, yes, make more money at it.


More than that, I work harder at my writing and produce far more than I ever did then. I feel like a working writer now. A real writer, in a totally different way.

I may not be curing cancer, but that's not my job. I'm a writer.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning author with a writing career that spans decades. Her fantasy BDSM romance, Petals and Thorns, originally published under the pen name Jennifer Paris, has won several reader awards. Sapphire, the first book in Facets of Passion has placed first in multiple romance contests and the follow-up books, Platinum and Ruby are climbing the charts. Her most recent works include three fiction series: the fantasy romance novels of A Covenant of Thorns, the contemporary BDSM novellas of the Facets of Passion, and the post-apocalyptic vampire erotica of the Blood Currency.

Jeffe lives in Santa Fe, with two Maine coon cats, a border collie, plentiful free-range lizards and a Doctor of Oriental Medicine. Jeffe can be found online at her website: JeffeKennedy.com or every Sunday at the popular Word Whores blog.

She is represented by Pam van Hylckama Vlieg of Foreword Literary.

Deciding on Genre

The conversation prompted by yesterday's post on writing in multiple genres, both on the blog and elsewhere (sorry, some people ping me in other venues, rather than commenting - it's all good to me), has gotten me thinking about genre.

First of all, someone pointed out to me that Kris Rusch posted on a very similar theme yesterday, which is well worth reading. Essentially she agrees that it's good for authors to write in multiple genres because it broadens audience. She also pointed to a workshop conducted by her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, on writing to genre and genre conventions. She kind of complains that only a few writers sign up for this every year, implying that this shows poor business sense.

On top of that, I'm cross-posting this to the Here Be Magic blog, because someone else wasn't able to, and the theme this month is "Fantasy Romance Favorites." For those of you not in the swim, fantasy romance is its own sub-genre now.

So I blithely agree to cross-post, then starting racking my brain for fantasy romance books. You'd think this would be easy for me, since Rogue's Pawn, the novel I have coming out July 16 from Carina, is fantasy romance.

Heh. And yet - not so much.

See, if I'd taken that workshop from Dean Wesley Smith, I would have written the book to the genre I picked. I can see how this would make good business sense. I totally did not do this. I started out with a character. I knew she was a scientist and that she became a sorceress. There were seed images and feelings that I dreamed. The stuff with the bathing chamber deep underground and the Black Dog - all stuff I dreamed.

(I know very few of you have read it yet - soon, soon!)

I did *not* dream the genre. Nor did I decide, "oh! I'll make this a fantasy romance, which means I need to follow this genre conventions." No, I wrote the story and there ended up being this waltz of seduction with a manipulative Fae in the story and there were my romantic elements.

Did this method cause me problems? Of course it did! I can tell people it's kind of like Jacqueline Carey and a bit like Anne Bishop, kind of like Diana Gabaldon and with hints of J.R. Ward. Which, if you have read those writers, probably sounds like a muddle.

Would it have made better business sense to take Smith's workshop and get good at writing within genre conventions? Probably so.

And yet. I don't wanna.

This might mean I will never be a hugely best-selling author. Today, I am at peace with that.

Categorizing books by genre help readers find what they want, but that way of defining is only one tool. As readers, we all know it doesn't always work. How many times have you have to ask the person in the Big Box Bookstore where they shelved a particular author? When I was on my Laurel K Hamilton kick, I had to ask. They'd put her under Mystery. Okay. I've read numerous pieces speculating that Fifty Shades of Grey has hit this new audience so big because none of them know it's a romance novel, much less "erotic romance with BDSM elements." Young Adult (YA) didn't even become a genre until recently. What were reading, those of us who were young readers in the 70s and 80s? Hard to say.


This is my problem as a reader, thinking about Fantasy Romance Favorites. Does Jacqueline Carey count? I bet not, because the romantic arc, while important, isn't the main backbone of the stories. The ISBN has it under "Kings and rulers, succession," which really amuses me.

What this comes down to for me is that the whole concept of genre is a construct. It's not real. It's about branding and marketing and expectations and easy sound bites, but it has nothing to do with the actual story.

And isn't the story what it's really all about?