79. Defining romance and chat rooms

Friday, June 24, 2005

Well, after I audioblogged yesterday for the first time, I discovered I was really lazy. I really didn't get anything done yesterday at all. I ended up talking to some friends in a chat room and somehow the discussion ended up on sex toys. My friends were at one site, and posting links to toys they found to those in the chat room. Some of toys are just strange looking. I called the evening research, which is just amusing me to no ends really. I do write sex in my stories, so you never know when that site could become handy.

Speaking of chat rooms, today Yahoo! announced that it was closing down their user made chat rooms following a report that some use their chat rooms to exploit sex from minors. I had watched a movie just earlier this week about a woman that began to go into chat rooms online to crack down on pedophiles, so there is a problem, and I'm glad that Yahoo took this action to clean up their rooms, and hopefully bring them back in a format that keeps children safe. I was inspired by the news, and I wrote a short news editorial talking about chat rooms, blogging and children which you can find here if you're interested. Seems I'm no longer lazy because I wrote that up in not even ten minutes. Maybe I needed a day of goofing off to clear my head a little?

Yesterday in my blog hopping, I read several entries across many different blogs about the survey posted in the RWR about the definition of romance. Now, I'm not a member of the RWA or receive the RWR in the mail myself. I'm just going by what I'm reading across the main blogs including Sylvia Day's and Jaci Burton's.

The survey states the following:

A. The romantic relationship is between one man and one woman.

B. The romantic relationship is between two people.


In my opinion, the two choices limit so much for the writer in regards to the RWA. If the majority agrees with choice A, what about those like myself that write gay romance? What about lesbian romance? What about writer's that write about romance involving threesomes? There are so many things that are left out by their definition if you choose choice B, which is a little less limiting, what about vampires? Ghosts? Werewolves? Paranormals are just huge right now, and this definition just totally leaves them out.

The more and more I see of the RWA in regards to this situation, the more I just scratch my head. There is already an issue when it comes to that choose to go the e-publishing route to begin with when it comes to the RWA, and then you add on the fact that I write male/male, I'm not sure where in the RWA structure I would fit. The The Guild seems to be more accepting, but they are still very much in the beginning stages of their creation. I guess I'll have to wait and see what happens.

Also don't know when this happened, but blogger has apparently added the feature of letting you post pictures in your blogs, hosted free by them. Read more on that here.