Being that we’ve profiled her a few times now, we thought to actually take a look at some romance novels author Aminka Ozmun should be finally finishing up this month. Unfortunately, they are to be delayed, and thus the launch of her site for promoting them. The delay, however, has nothing to do with the works she has completed to date, but rather with the author’s self-confessed perfectionist nature.
“I don’t want to just sell romance novels online, I want to help create a movement,” states Ms. Ozmun. This is a refrain readers familiar with this blog will know well based on our past articles on her art: She wants to put interracial relationships between Asian men and black women on the cultural map of mainstream America, if not the world. ”So it’s important for me to put my best foot forward, because in a sense I’m defining this sub-genre myself right now, I think, and because the web is such a visual medium and the culture in general is just so visual, I’ve got to have everything looking good. Also, the web is expected to be interactive, and I wanted more than just a ‘brochure site,’ an online catalog, an online bibliography. This isn’t just for Aminka; it’s for the movement.”
While we’re not sure that anyone reads romance novels to get preached at, Ms. Ozmun insists that that won’t be the case at all. ”I understand that I’m just an entertainer, that whatever ‘art’ I create is incidental, so to speak, since my intentions are first and foremost to, honestly speaking, amuse, delight, enchant. Basically, make my readers fall in love. So I get that. I get that and I won’t be foisting some kind of artificial message on them. It’s just that my fiction deals with a rather unique subset of interracial romances and is created mainly for people interested in that. So it’s not like I’ll be lecturing them at all. I’ll just be showing them what’s possible, romantically, between Asian men and black women!”
A laudable motive, to be sure, but as blog publishers ourselves we don’t look too kindly on writers who miss their deadlines. But the ever-ready Ms. Ozmun has a response for that, too. ”That’s why I need to get the site just right. Because first impressions are lasting impressions — and I don’t want them to turn into last impressions, literally, if you know what I mean. And beyond site visuals and even site behavior (I still have a lot of technical work to do with regards to the forums, never mind the newsletter and affiliate program), it’s important for me to launch with not just a handful of titles but to present a full-fledged bibliography worthy of the name, to create the impression that black women-Asian men fiction, while new, has got a solid foundation, a good start, as evidenced by the variety of stories on offer.”
As we said, she always has an answer.
Given space constraints, then, our appraisal of the two books she has (more or less, more than less) finished will be detailed in another article (or two or three, even) in the weeks to come. Suffice it to say that her “versatile idealism” intrigues us enough to consider any reviews at all — not to put too fine a point on it, gentle readers, but we’re not normally in the habit of cuddling up with romance fiction here — so we shall be giving them the full treatment soon enough: Honest, and comprehensive.
Stay tuned to the front page of BetterPlaceRescue.org.