Venus Winner
Congrats to Sherry Cammer, who wins a print copy of Venus In Blue Jeans! […]
Category: Blog
Happy Birthday Venus—With Contest!
My first novel for Samhain Publishing, Venus in Blue Jeans, was released four years ago, January 27, 2009. It’s been quite a ride, but Venus started it all. The whole Venus saga is kind of an illustration of the way romance publishing works. I started writing Venus because, frankly, a contest judge had pissed me […]
Cooking Thoughts: Taste This, Not That
I love the Eat This, Not That books, although there’s a lot of overlap between them. Once you’ve identified the worst food in American, it keeps showing up from one book to another. Still, it’s always sort of stunning to discover just how much fat can be packed into something that should be innocuous, like […]
The January Bitch
January is a bitch. Trust me on this. November and December have holidays to cushion them. You’ve got the excitement and/or exasperation of seeing your family and friends, planning menus, finding and opening gifts. It’s all likely to carry you through both months without a great deal of reflection about your lot. I’ll think about […]
Writers and Sluts
I know several romance writers who are compulsive about keeping their pen names secret. They work in sensitive jobs or they go to conservative churches or they have snobby friends or they have uptight relatives. Whatever the reason, they figure it’s best if nobody knows exactly what they write. I can sympathize with this feeling—back […]
Nora Ephron: An Appreciation
When Nora Ephron died a few months ago, I knew I had to write something about her. I just wasn’t ready to do it right then. It took me a little while to understand just what I wanted to say about her and why. I’m not sure I know the what and why yet, but I’m […]
I'm Nobody
I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know. I’ll confess—this is actually a version of a blog post I published a while ago, but this week was Emily Dickinson’s birthday: She was born on December 10, 1830. I think about Dickinson now […]
Jumping the Shark
So you all know this phrase, “jumping the shark,” right? If by some chance you don’t, it refers to a particularly egregious episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie enters a competition that involves jumping his motorcycle over a shark tank. The phrase itself, however, has come to refer to an episode of a TV […]
Writing Revenge
This isn’t a post about Nora Ephron. I’m going to write one, honest, as soon as I can process all my feelings about her but I haven’t done that yet. However, Ephron was the author of one of the great revenge books of our time—Heartburn. In case you’re not familiar with the book, it’s a […]
Over the River And Through the Woods
Tomorrow is the first time I’ll be fixing Thanksgiving dinner in Colorado. For the past several years, we’ve celebrated in Fredericksburg, Texas—a Hill Country town not unlike my very own mythical Konigsburg (except for no Toleffsons). A few years ago we started having Thanksgiving at a Fredericksburg bed and breakfast (there are a lot of […]
