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Debut of Men Who Read Romance: Enter Rock Star James Fox

YOU GUYS!!! I am so flipping excited to finally be able to debut this new ALBTALBS feature, after you know, talking about it for more than a year. I found our reading unicorn! 😉 Our first awesome guest is James Fox. He also writes. And more than that – what I care about – it being all about me 😉 is that he is the newest addition to the ALBTALBS review crew! (See?) So James Fox has been saving my bacon all week. He gets about 50 gold stars.

Without further ado… James.

Hi Everyone I’m James

I’m a Farmer living in Oregon. I have a wonderful Wife, and two great kids.
I have loved reading ever since I picked up my first copy of Calvin and Hobbes.
I would spend hours hidden in the crawlway beneath the stairs of our house reading by flashlight.

1. What’s the first romance that you ever read?
It Had To Be You By Susan Elizabeth Phillips

2. How did you get started reading romance?
When I was in middle school, my Grandpa would babysit me a lot. He was addicted to General Hospital, but wouldn’t let me watch it. Instead he told me to go grab a book off the shelf. There were only two kinds of books in my Grandparents house. It was either Louis L’Amour or Romance Novels. One day I was tired of reading about cowboys, so I picked up It Had To Be You. I remember that it had a lot to do with football, which I liked. It also had a great female lead character named Phoebe. In my head she always sounded like Madeline Kahn.

3. Who is your favorite author and what is your favorite romance novel?
Water For Elephants By Sara Gruen would be my favorite romance novel.
My favorite author is Joseph Heller who wrote Catch-22.

4. What would you like to see more of in romances? (What are your most and least favorite sub-genres?)
Miss Havisham from Great Expectations needs a reincarnation! What I’ve been reading has lacked that sort of punch.
I enjoy romantic suspense the most, but I hate it when the suspense swallows up the romantic storyline.
My current least favorite sub-genre is Vampires, with a permanent pass awarded to the Swedish novel Let The Right One In.
That book was a paranormal romance with young characters done perfectly.

5. What is something you hate (or dislike strongly) in romances?
I dislike it when a characters’ issues are magically solved by the end of the story.
Especially when a characters’ career makes a sudden U-turn. I think authors work too hard at a total happy ending.

6. Do you browse the romance section at bookstores? If you saw another guy there, would you offer recommendations, or ask for any?
This is a secret I’m not supposed to tell you. At the back of every book store there is a hidden room. Inside it’s wall to wall tough guys smoking cigars reading Nicholas Sparks aloud to each other. We haul out our new bodice rippers in hollowed out Harley Davidson coffee table books.
That way the ladies will never suspect us.

7. How involved are you in the romance community?
I follow a bunch of authors on twitter, and chime in on Goodreads.

8. Do your friends/family know you read romance novels?
It amuses my Wife who will point out to any visitor what I’m reading. She’ll point at a romance novel laying around, and then back away like its a hand grenade dipped in hot sauce.

9. What other genres do you enjoy reading, if any, and what are some of your hobbies aside from reading?
I enjoy thrillers, scary stories, and the occasional historical fiction.
Outside of that I enjoy hiking the trails here in Oregon with my kids. I try to run a marathon once a while, and I try to write novels.

Heh. He has a sense of humor, too. So! Let’s give Mr. Fox a warm welcome. And do you have any questions for him? I’m going to say – grill him! 😀 Anything is fair game!