I recently read a romantic suspense novel from an author I really like—I think I’ve actually read everything she’s ever written. The plot in this one is up to her standard—intricate, complex, and growing out of a confluence of motives that are tough to anticipate. And the hero and heroine have zero chemistry. I thought […]
A couple of weeks ago, the redoubtable PG Forte and I had an extended debate on Twitter (as we’re wont to do) about the merits of True Grit. PG preferred the Henry Hathaway/John Wayne version. I’m a fan of the Coen Brother/Jeff Bridges one. I don’t want to rehash the entire discussion here, but the […]
My editor hates the phrase “stand up.” She’s also not crazy about “sit down.” In both cases she cuts “up” and “down,” I guess because she considers them unnecessary. Since I know she’s going to cut them, I’ve tried not to use them when I write, having my characters stand and sit without supplying the […]
I was watching a rerun of CSI with the hubs the other night. Well, I started watching it, but I got too annoyed to go on with the episode about halfway through. It was the climax of last season’s serial killer plot, with Bill Irwin being a maniacal genius. In the end, the whole thing […]
So I see from the Sports page that Colt McCoy, former quarterback for the UT Longhorns, has a brother named Case who is the current quarterback for the Longhorns. I mention this only because the McCoys are the only men I’ve ever run into who actually have names that sound like romance heroes. Think about […]
Recently Kim Wright wrote a blog post about the movement of literary fiction writers into genre: http://www.themillions.com/2011/09/why-are-so-many-literary-writers-shifting-into-genre.html. It seems that the valiant lit fic types can no longer make a living writing about despair among the suburbs, thanks to the current publishing climate, and so they’re heading over to the genre slums to supplement their […]
The Romance Writers of America, unique among writers organizations, allows unpublished writers the same membership privileges that it gives to published authors (other organizations, like the Mystery Writers of America, have a tiered membership system). The idea behind this policy, apparently, is to encourage aspiring writers to join a professional organization in order to have […]
Texas, being the rather large place that it is, has elements of both the South and the West. South Texas, where I lived for twenty years before moving to Colorado, is actually more Western, but I did manage to pick up a few southernisms during my time there. One of them is the phrase “bless […]
Mae West’s birthday is August 17, and those of us in the romance business need to wish her a happy one. She was born 118 years ago. So you might ask, why should we appreciate Mae? Because she was one of those women who paved the way—she wrote plays about sex and about gay men […]
Okay, it’s time to admit the truth. Once, long, long ago in the dim, dusky past, I was a copyeditor. Not only that, I actually taught copyediting. Now you’d think this would help me write, but in fact all it really does is help me punctuate. Any copyeditor can tell you that editing your own […]
