Because when a woman writes a romance, it's assumed that she's writing a wish of hers. When a man writes one, it's assumed he's not, and instead is attempting to tell the truth of the human condition.
I think there is a more general favoritism toward male authors in regards to literary merit. What is the image of a literary author, after all, a man with some silver hair smoking a pipe. A woman writing a romance gets a triple whammy in terms of literary merit, female, a genre that isn't considered one of merit (along with others), and lumped together with a massive number of writers making it hard to stand out.
Oy, in the book I just finished, I had to slog through, no lie, a 103 word sentence/paragraph.
All punctuated correctly, so I suppose not technically a run-on sentence, but really dude? You couldn't have stuck a period in there somewhere?
Impressive. That sentence should be stuffed and mounted on a wall.
Well, I suppose it's already stuffed.
You couldn't have stuck a period in there somewhere?
You smother his art! How dare you!
One sentence, 538 words (it's a legal doc):
[link]
Impressive. That sentence should be stuffed and mounted on a wall.
Snerk. No kidding. I literally had to read through it two or three times to really catch everything he was trying to say because at about word twenty or thirty, I'd start glazing over and trying to find somewhere to put a definitive pause of the sort a period would provide. Don't get me wrong... lovely sentence, lots of meaning, and I get what he was trying to do in conveying a breathless, almost stream-of-consciousness feel, which was appropriate for that point in the story, however, I think that technique works a little better in first person. To me, in first you don't have same the distance from the narrative that third provides (just IMO, mind you) and you can get caught up in the sort of manic chaos that sort of phrasing provides.
Or I could just be full of crap.
I think Thomas Mann once wrote an entire chapter as a single sentence. Of course the German language lends itself to this...
In German, you can write an entire sentence as a single word.
One of my favorite passages in
Absalom, Absalom!
includes a sentences that goes on for, like, at least half a page. And the other two sentences are really short.
