Sandra’s Miscellany

This topic cropped up on the Bombshell thread over at eharlequin.com, so I’m posting my thoughts here as well as there.

My general thought is that we’re still sort of figuring out what constitutes a woman’s action/adventure novel. I mean, a Bombshell heroine is not (and I’m sorry if I offend anybody here) “a dickless man with boobs.” No no no!

My tendency when I first got into writing Bombshells was that I needed a heroine who could out-alpha the alpha male — and that pretty much totally negates our true feminine power. (Yes, I learned the error of my ways and fixed that.) Maggi Sanger (AKA GODDESS and HER KIND OF TROUBLE, by Evelyn Vaughn) is a good example of a heroine who epitomizes not just feminine power in terms of her grailkeeper quest, but in the very fact that she practices Tai Chi rather than, say, Tae Kwon Do.

When you think about it, Tae Kwon Do is very much about brute force — all straight lines and angles. But Tai Chi (and kung fu) embraces turning the opponent’s energy against him by its use of arcs and circles. Tai Chi isn’t linear, but expansive; it uses the body naturally, not violently.

So I guess I see our quest to write a solid Bombshell heroine as, in part, a struggle to create a heroine who’s Tai Chi rather than Tae Kwon Do.

Example: I saw a clip from a 60’s (maybe 70’s) Chinese kung fu movie in which a woman warrior, when challenged by a sword-wielding man, said she would allow him to pass into the house if he could cut the tofu she’d made. He slashed, hacked, jumped, etc. and the woman simply moved the big wooden flat of tofu up, down, behind her back, over her head, under the table, etc. until he gave up and left in defeat.

That, for me, epitomizes the Bombshell heroine.

One of the heroines who does this well is Stephanie Feagan’s Pink Pearl (SHOW HER THE MONEY and SHE’S ON THE MONEY). Pink’s adventure in SHTM is not direct, but oblique, because her quest is to keep an object out of the bad guy’s hands. Similarly, Jessie fools the Homeland Security agent by leading him on a merry chase through the jungle — he buys into the whole male pursuit of woman thing — only to reveal at the end that she’s not actually carrying what he thinks she is. It’s misdirection — using the enemy’s strength against him.

So those “feel” to me like steps in the direction of figuring out women’s adventure. Women are not “not-men,” but our own creatures. While we’ve come a long way toward becoming our own, I think as a society we’re still locked in to the not-men idea. So some of our Bombshell heroines read like mannish women and the adventures appear to be traditionally male adventures — tramping through the jungle, fighting the evil dictator, etc. And that’s fine, because we’re in process.

It’s truly an exciting time to be writing in this new subgenre.

But no, a Bombshell heroine is definitely not a man.