GUEST BLOG: Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is a chick-lit and non chick-lit writer, editor of This is Chick Lit (we have a copy to give away to one lucky reader!) and of course, special friend of Trashionista. In the first of our special Bafab guest blogs, she tells us why...

I Never Set Out to be a Chick-Lit Writer by Lauren Baratz-Logsted.

I never set out to be a Chick-Lit writer. Not that I’m in denial or anything, but I simply never set out to become any particular kind of novelist; I merely wrote. In November of 2001, having written seven unsold novels, I started reading reviews of books put out by a new publisher, Red Dress Ink. The reviews weren’t universally positive, but one thing I could tell right away: the editorial sensibility behind these books would be interested in my sixth unsold novel, The Thin Pink Line, a dark comedy set in London about a somewhat sociopathic woman who fakes an entire pregnancy...

And so it came to pass: In July 2003, RDI published The Thin Pink Line as their first-ever hardcover. I’ve since gone on to write three more books for them – Crossing the Line, A Little Change of Face, and How Nancy Drew Saved My Life – with a fifth to follow next year. In the years since my first book was published it’s been hard to ignore the slings and arrows Chick-Lit has regularly been subjected to. People who have never read the genre, or who have only read a few books, dismiss the books wholesale as being empty, an error akin to dismissing all literary novels because you find Joyce’s Ulysses too dense.

The Grumpy Old Bookman - in a blog written on June 30 about the genre novelist Laurell K. Hamilton- has these wise words to offer for people looking down their noses at what they perceive to be inferior fiction: “…may I remind you of a point made elsewhere on this blog, namely that it is a fundamental error, with moral implications, to think of fiction as a hierarchy, a sort of tower block, if you will, with literary fiction at the top and the ‘lower’ types of fiction tucked away in the basement. That is a concept which has no intellectual validity. The correct way to think of the various genres of fiction is as a street of many bookshops; and in this street there are no prime sites. Each shop pays the same business taxes as any other: all shops are equal. And the smart customer places her business in different shops at different times; to the advantage of everyone, most importantly herself.”

For those open-minded readers who do not want to be guilty of committing “a fundamental error, with moral implications,” I would like to point them toward This Is Chick-Lit, a positive anthology of stories showcasing the broad range of Chick-Lit – satire, dark comedy, futuristic, paranormal, mystery, romantic comedy, metafiction and magic realism – of which I am editor as well as one of the 18 contributors.

In addition to the Chick-Lit books she’s written, Lauren Baratz-Logsted is also the author of the forthcoming books VERTIGO, a literary novel set in the Victorian era with erotic and suspense undertones, and ANGEL’S CHOICE, a serious Young Adult novel about teen pregnancy. Author website.

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