2010 Lammies Awards Finalists: The Dark Horse?

[reviews_and_ramblings]

First of all this is not a post aimed to raise polemics, it's only a post to prove that, sometime, people get inflamed over nothing.

When the LFF changed the guidelines adding the notorious "gender orientation/identity of the author" eligibility point ("In determining whether a book should be submitted for consideration, please note that the Lambda Literary Awards are based principally on the LGBT content, the gender orientation/identity of the author and the literary merit of the work"), a lot of people, me first, even if not publicly, felt like "castigate", like someone was telling me to not enter in a field that was not for me. But my philosophy is to "live and let live", and so, as I said before, the Rainbow Awards were not "against" the Lammies, but merely to give space to a lot of authors who usually have not otherwise.

Like someone tried to say, probably nothing really was changing for the Lammies, and indeed I saw, and cheered, to some submissions that were not exactly "strict" to the guidelines, and no one in the LLF commission said nothing. Good for the authors and good for the commission.

But let us be sincere, I think that people was, most of all, scared of the "kind" invasion of female authors of gay romance. They are mostly in the Romance category, but in the last few years, they are spreading on the Mystery, Fantasy, Sci-Fic, Young Adult... yes, I think they were who the commission was pointing at. Nevertheless, I don't think they were really banned from the Awards, and in fact, some of them are among the finalists.

But I think no one noticed something else, probably since it's not common: among the finalists there is also a male romance author, who is competing for the Best Gay Romance, and you know what? He is not at all a new name for the romance readers. H. Leigh Aubrey, self published author of A Keen Edge (my review here: http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/953851.html), is the pen-name of Leigh Greenwood, a well respected author of heterosexual Historical Romance; and, from what you can read on Leigh Greenwood's bio, he was married with a woman for more than 30 years, and it was his wife that, in a way, pushed him to write Romances, leaving all those trashy books around the house. Now, as he said, he has decided to stop to prented, and instead of writing het romances, he is writing gay romances... well I wish him best of luck and to have the same success he had with his Western Historical Romance.

Gender is not the same as genre in novel, as it should be. Now, I'm not saying that I want to mix Gay with Lesbian or Transgender or Bisexual, but that is the "theme" of the book, not the gender of the author. This is my idea.

Comments

[rbm00.livejournal.com]

I am really curious about his book. It's $18 on Amazon, and if it weren't so expensive, I would try it.

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

I bought (yes I still buy some books ;-)) the ebook version directly on Iuniverse website. It's 6 dollar: http://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000110549 (and no shipping cost!)

or 7.68 dollar on EbookMall:
http://ebooks.ebookmall.com/ebook/342138-ebook.htm

[rbm00.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the links! I tried Adobe Digital Editions last year and it froze my computer so I uninstalled it. But since the ebook is out, I'll keep my eye out for a non-DRM version.