'THE CURTSY, PART ONE: GOLDEN GIRL THWARTED'

THE CURTSY (by Andy Nowicki)

In early 2015, I formed what proved to be a hare-brained scheme.

My plan was to compose a romance novel, but to improve upon the generally literarily threadbare genre with something really substantial and truly worthwhile. 


I had already published a short story entitled Eve and the Nephite under the pseudonym "Regina Winewater." That story had sold moderately well online, due to the fact that I had located a generally unknown marketing niche: LDS-affiliated women who enjoy Book-of-Mormon-related romance stories. 

But my next project was more ambitious. I aimed to write a novel upon the subject of male dominance and female submission, like a certain then very popular-- and still quite popular-- book series... with the tiny difference that I actually wanted to make it good, instead of crappy. I planned to compose this novel, entitled The Curtsy, in installments. I released part one on Friday, February 14, 2015 the day of the release of the first Fifty Shades of Grey movie.

Here is how I, under the gender-bent guise of "Regina," introduced The Curtsy, Part 1: Golden Girl Thwarted-- on her, that is Regina's-- blog.

I am very pleased to announce the release of my work The Curtsy, Part 1: Golden Girl Thwarted through New Romantic Press. It is now available for purchase on Kindle and in paperback.

The Curtsy is a novel that is being released in serialized form, with two additional volumes to follow.
It is an ambitious work, in which my goal is to restore literacy to the form of romantic fiction, to rescue it from the altogether tawdry muck in which it currently dwells, and give it the sense of sublimity it once had... 

The Curtsy is a meditation on the meaning of submission, both in human relationships and on spiritual matters... It has been described as "Fifty Shades of Grey rewritten by Jane Austen."

(This was not a lie, per se, since I pictured myself describing it in exactly those terms whilst in a hypothetical pitch meeting with a hypothetical publishing agent... I pictured the agent in question as acting initially skeptical, but eventually being won over by the sheer, undeniable brilliance of my pitch.)

If you like your romance with a better vocabulary, a more refined wit, and a sharper sense of mordant melancholy than can be found among the standard-issue contemporary "bodice ripper," then The Curtsy may just be the book for you! Your humble author asks most supplicatingly-- one might say, "submissively"-- for you to give it a try, O master reader...

It was an interesting idea, but as it turned out, quite misbegotten. It proved harder to piggyback on the Fifty Shades movie/general phenomenon than I thought it would be. So The Curtsy saga faltered.

(to be continued)