I admit it.

I read romance novels.

Not exclusively, not all the time, and not every day. But I do read romance novels.

Shocking, I know. And unlike my mom, I will not claim to skip certain parts of them either, because I don’t, unless they’re terribly written. Then I am likely to skip, say, the rest of the book.

But I both read and enjoy them. So there. Take that.

I also have another admission to make, one that will be more shocking to all but a select group of people who know me.

I write romance novels, too. And no, you haven’t read any of them. I haven’t tried to get any published, because, well, I’m a chicken. But the fact remains that I have written n romance novels, where n is greater than 2.

This post (which is not about my secret admissions above, exactly) has been banging around in my head for a while, but I’ve avoided writing it for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I work in a very male-dominated, technical profession. The kind of profession where you might, in a non-work social setting, overhear someone making jokes about how women watch porn differently than men in a way that is both very funny (ok, I laughed) and completely, completely wrong. (N.B. Women who watch porn do not watch porn movies all the way to the end because we’re hoping there’s going to be a wedding. This xkcd cartoon explains the problem quite clearly, thankyouverymuch. )

So lest I destroy my geek cred, these were not admissions I felt particularly comfortable making.

However, in the spirit of my new “screw that, I’m me, deal with it” philosophy, eh, well, screw that – I’m me. Deal with it. I read romance novels.

I also read novels about space and dragons and real people and aliens and art and religion and time travelers and road trips and whatever-you-call-what-went-on-in-Hunter S.-Thompson’s-head and dystopian futures and, and… I read everything.

Except for books about the apocalypse. I hate those.

(Ok, I got sidetracked trying to keep my geek cred there. Onwards…)

I also held off because what I wanted to say about it might lead to the conclusion that I was making a specific commentary about me, my life, my husband, my previous boyfriends, friends, crushes, parents, pets, whatever… which I am not.

So there’s my disclaimer: I’m not.

It occurs to me that there are a lot of misconceptions, particularly by men, about why women read romance novels. It’s kind of sad, really, because one could probably learn a lot about what women really want from their partners/lovers/whatever from them, but I’ve been thinking about this for while, and I decided that I, your lovable hero SUPER Grover, am just the monster to clear this up.

Er, wait, sorry.

Sesame Street fantasy again.

So here’s the real gist of the post (and the death of my credibility as a geek, forever and ever and ever, amen) – I decided I had something to say about why women read romance novels and how people (ok, guys, mostly) get it all wrong. And so I’m saying it. Right here. Now. Just for the Hell of it.

Mostly because I refuse to be embarrassed about it.

Your mileage, as always, may vary

N.B. This post is broken up into multiple pages for readability. Click the page numbers below to continue…

On to Myth #1: Romance novels are just porn for chicks…

And then I got up and planned to write, but we three had a Sunday morning cuddlefest in bed once C awoke, and, eh, nothing beats that.

And then I realized I didn’t have my LaTeX environment set up on this desktop the way I wanted to start writing, so I did that…

And there was some Torsten-wrangling, and a bath, and some breakfast, and…

And now it’s 12:45 pm. The usual NaNo procrastination appears to be well underway, because I haven’t written a word.

(To be fair, no real procrastination is involved except for this post – this is just a typical weekend day with kids, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I just want to get writing, because this novel is a very tiny part of what I plan to get done this month!)

(Sorry R.S., couldn’t resist on that last one…)

A hint to all you future parents out there: the sleep deprivation and time crunch you will experience after the birth of your child does not help this situation. I think I may need to place a disclaimer on all of my e-mails telling readers to contact my son if the contents are nonsensical, unreadable, or otherwise completely messed up.

And now that Mr. T is almost nine months old (?!!??!!) and we’re back from Europe, I am about to dip my toes back in to being a professional X, Y and Z again.

I am not, in any sense, prepared to give up being Mommy at home with Torsten, but since many of the things I do can be done either from home or part-time (and all of them privately, if I so choose), I will soon be firing up the old brain and integrating some work (some combination of programming, writing and teaching – you didn’t think I got that CELTA for nothing, did you? ) into my weekly schedule.

We’ve always planned that I’d start working on getting this together once we got back from abroad, but now that we’re really back and Christian has Torsten for the day, I’m finally sitting down over a cup of coffee to work out the details, and I must say it feels pretty good. At the moment it’s low-pressure while I work things out, but it’s still nice to be on the path.

More on this as things come together…

I’m writing mostly on the fly here on my trusty Asus Eee PC, a little laptop with a small half-screen running Linux (in this case, eeeXubuntu), and screen-size combined with lack of time to proofread and reword things leads to some pretty heinous violations of the English language.

I say this just so that you trusty readers understand that I know some of what I’ve been writing is pretty sloppy – I just don’t have a whole lot of time to fix it at the moment, and with a snuggly Torsten, it’s likely that I never will.

My little perfectionistic self will just have to learn to live with it

Makes me feel guilty – my current excuse for not writing is legit (a 3-month-old at home and a lack of sleep make it a bit hard to get into the zone), but considering how seductive blogging was before the baby, I think it’s a good point about what a time-sink (and creativity-sink) blogging can be if you’re trying to write something else, be it a CS paper or an article or a novel.

And so I blog about it, of course

That’s all for now. Hope everyone is well, and I hope to be back with more soon…

So there are these curtains – roman shades, really – I’m supposed to have been working on forever. We have this house, you see, with very oddly-sized windows, and since the outer walls are just masonry – outside brick exposed to the inside directly, in fact – mounting regular curtains into what are effectively cut-outs for the windows seemed to be a real pain-in-the-butt idea when we first moved in. In retrospect, I was on crack, but what can you do? Anyway, I have in fact finished many of them (our living and dining rooms, for example, and all done finally – they were mostly done a year ago, but I didn’t finish the raising-and-lowering mechanisms until a few weeks ago), but the ones for our bedroom have been on hold for some time, and with as cold as that room gets, it’s about time to get them done, hopefully before Small Monster gets here. They’re nice and insulated and keep out light well, and I know that’s going to be important, since he’ll be in our room for some time. We do not want a Small-Monstercicle.

Now you may be asking why it is that all of the curtains in the front rooms are done before our bedroom, when one might think bedroom curtains were *ahem* a bit more important, but let’s just say I had a guest last Christmas that was demanding in no uncertain terms that they be up before s/he arrived because s/he was staying in the living room. And since I have always had some fear of this person’s wrath and irritation (and I was trying to be as good a host as I could be under the circumstances), they got done.

And now here it is, a year later, and I haven’t bothered with the shades in our own room, and we like, need them. Yesterday.

Thing is, I just don’t want to do it. And pregnant me wants to do it sooooo much less. I don’t really want to do anything, to be honest, except that sitting still hurts. So does moving. Late pregnancy is fun, folks!

I mean, regular curtains are easy (or easier) – line a sheet and hem it – but I am hardly a seamstress, and I have real trouble cutting out large rectangles of cloth evenly. Seriously. I suck at it. I’m not even sure how it’s really supposed to be done. The sewing part I don’t mind as much, but the cloth cutting?

I suck.

And since I have to lay out these rolls of lining on the ground and get down on my hands and knees to measure and cut – great position for baby, rotten position for heavy mama whose wrists hurt – I have totally been putting it off forever.

A great friend of mine mentioned yesterday that maybe the novel was my pre-labor nesting, but this strong internal command that I get these curtains done in the next couple of days sounds more like it to me. With my luck, my water will break all over the place while I’m cutting out material tonight, but I don’t think I’d complain except that the curtains just wouldn’t get done.

Bah. So anyway, there will be little blogging tonight, and no noveling beyond the 1k I pushed out earlier just for the Hell of it. I’m gonna get these MoFos done, darnit.

Ok, so it’s 4:30 am on Sunday, but I’m still up and just about to go to bed on an enforced-bedtime-so-that-I-don’t-sleep-too-late-Monday deadline. Yeah, yeah, 4:30 am is too late by anyone’s measure, but it was 6:30 or something yesterday, and so I figured if I can turn it back to 2:30 by tomorrow, I’ll be doing well.

Small Monster, for those of you keeping track, is still in there. He’s increasingly cramped, which makes my belly dancing especially interesting (note: I do not belly dance. My belly dances. Like does the wave all by itself. Big difference), and there are times when I really feel like he may just claw his way out through my belly button. I am so big and round right now that I might not even complain.

Kid, I am so ready for you to come out. It’s like, I knew before there was a baby in there, you know, the size and kind of baby they show in pictures in A Child is Born, but your size and the power of your muscles make it clear that there’s a full-grown baby in there. As in the kind we have here on the outside. So it’s time for you to come out.

But so far, kid seems to be staying in, and happy about it (I’m a little afraid he’s going to start ordering Domino’s for delivery to his little house. That delivery man is so not coming to the door, I’m telling you, child). None of the things they tell you might work is bringing it on so far (pineapple, spicy food, squats, walking, the full moon, etc), but I figure it just means he isn’t quite ready, so I’ll keep on walking and squatting and eating peppers like a fool. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s some early labor stuff going on – I’m crampy and all, and my back aches like Hell sometimes, so I figure (pray) my cervix is probably progressing some more, but as far as I can tell, he still hasn’t dropped all the way into my pelvis – he seems to much prefer sticking his fist in there, or at least that’s what it feels like. It’s creepy. And that’s as far as it goes. I’m just hoping they don’t get to the point where they decide they have to induce on my due date.

So, as a special message to my son: Come on down, Small Monster! You’re the next contestant on The Price is Right! (N.B.: Price = $300, which is about $293 more than my parents paid for me – $260 more, really, adjusted for inflation – but then, I was born in special circumstances )

Anyhow. Mostly it’s just waiting now. I got another 6k out on the novel, which puts me within easy striking range of the big 50k, but like the last time I won, the novel isn’t nearly done (my last one hit about 90k by the time I finished it, and I figure I’m about halfway through the storyline on this one). There’s no way in Hell I plan on trying to finish this one before the kid comes, but it gives me something to do other than to check websites going, “Is this a sign of labor? how about this? does this mean I’ll deliver this week? come on, kid, come out!” Not that I don’t have more to do than that, but it’s a favorite pastime of enormously pregnant women.

Other than that, I cooked a big turkey breast today (Grothoff tradition – don’t buy turkey until the day after Thanksgiving. We’re weirdos like that ) and did a wee bit of coding. Not much accomplished, but then, I didn’t have to I’m totally not going to stress and tire myself out in the next couple of weeks – I have labor to look forward to and all, and I figure that’ll be enough work for me.