All this week and next, I’ll be touring around the web, celebrating the December 7 release of Brand New Me, my fifth Konigsburg novel. And since it’s Christmas time, I’m also giving away three copies of Brand New Me to people who comment on my blog tour. Just stop by and say howdy, and you’ll […]
I’ve talked a lot here and elsewhere about the critics of romance, who are, of course, legion. Their objections to romance novels fall into several categories—romances are poorly written, romances are unrealistic, romances create naïve expectations about male-female relationships, romances reflect the structure of patriarchy by holding up marriage as the be-all and end-all of […]
I just finished a historical by a well-known author. I finished it rather quickly, in fact, since I ended up skimming the last third. The hero and heroine were in love, you see, and he’d asked her to marry him, and she wouldn’t. Why? Well, that part wasn’t entirely clear, or rather her reasons kept […]
I just finished reading a 370-page novel in which the nasty banker was revealed as a double murderer in the end. The thing is, I knew the banker was the baddie after the first fifty pages. Why? Because nobody else in the book had been set up as a possibility. So unless the writer wanted […]
It’s campaign season and it’s killing me. In “real life” I’m a very opinionated person—just ask my friends and family. I can fulminate with the best of them and I have very definite political beliefs. All of which I have to leave at the door when I become Romance Writer. When I taught at Enormous […]
The Web has greatly increased the number of book reviewers available these days, both for ebooks and print books. And that’s all to the good. Given the number of books being published, it’s always helpful to have lots of people posting their own reactions to the latest books available, particularly if those books may appeal […]
There’s been a running discussion about Facebook on one of the author’s lists where I’m a member. First of all, the new Facebook place app had everyone (including me) annoyed and getting instructions for turning it off. Then the discussion took a sharp turn, as these things are wont to do. One author had received […]
My critique group just went through a very painful episode in which one member was banned from submitting anything for a while. The situation was this: the writer had been submitting chapters of something she’d written several years ago. This in itself is risky (as I’ve pointed out elsewhere ), but not really a problem. […]
I just finished Nancy Taylor Rosenburg’s thriller The Cheater. It’s part of a series, although I didn’t realize that when I picked it up. The heroine is a former DA who’s now a judge in Ventura, CA. She’s also a mess. Mind you, she has every right to be. In previous novels she was raped […]
When you write a series, you have one major problem that has to be dealt with—filling in the blanks for people who may not have read the earlier books. Authors who have long-running series are usually pretty straight-forward about this. Ed McBain always used to begin his 87th Precinct books with a quick run-down of […]
