"I'm smart and I'm going to show it"?

Almost certainly. And come to think of it, she did complain about too many culture references. Which are deliberate, and are character statements, and are all classic-romance-novel references (GWTW, Jane Eyre, P&P, all of which have had well-circulated video adaptations.)

I drop strange references into stuff all the time (ask Teppy about my faux-James Joycean "Rain was general over Sunnydale" some time). I thought it was clever. Not everyone's going to get everything.

I just don't want to write a Look How Clever I Am novel.

Can you tell my junior-high-school insecurities are showing?

That one would be a personal "is it a clever aside or does it stop the story and yell 'See! I paid attention in lit class!' and call attention to itself?" Case by case, naturally, the annoying things.

Not wanting to write a look-how-clever-I-am story is perfectly valid. It sounds silly, but you might want to sit down and just count how many references there really are. How many per paragraph? Per page? Pull out a few published romances for comparison.

Not everyone's going to get everything.

And you can't please everyone. t mememe I got a crit that said "Your characters are unsympathetic, your pacing is glacial and your dialog is boring because it sounds too much like real people." Aside from being the only person who said anything this stringent, it's not terribly helpful. I mean, what does that leave? The font I wrote it in? t /mememe

Hope the crits you get are more helpful.

Heh. I was just thinking about the phrase "too clever by half" the other day and decided that while I understood the complaint (and it's occasionally valid), that it usually reflects the speaker's insecurities. Because cleverness is a positive value. I guess it's problematic if its a kind of stunting. Preciousness I guess. But clever plotting and clever dialogue are big pluses with me.

You write for yourself first of all, and if you glory and take pleasure in being clever, then you should try to be as excellently clever as you can be. It may well be that a smaller, more specialized (Firefly-sized) audience is the only ones who are going to get it, but that's the breaks.

IMO, as long as the cleverness serves the story--i.e. drives the plot, characters, mood, and/or setting--you're fine. I only mind clever if I think the only reason the author is doing it is to show off.

Subjective, I know, but you'd probably be able to recognize it if you gave the section a rest before you read it again and come to it fresh.

(ask Teppy about my faux-James Joycean "Rain was general over Sunnydale" some time). I thought it was clever. Not everyone's going to get everything.

The fact that I didn't catch that ref was MY issue, not yours, sweetie.

I drop strange references into stuff all the time (ask Teppy about my faux-James Joycean "Rain was general over Sunnydale" some time).

But hadn't you not actually either read "The Dead" at this point? Or I could be getting my Bitch canon mixed up