Peter Elbow was one of the leaders in revising the way we teach writing during the seventies and eighties. His books Writing Without Teachers and Writing With Power were beloved by teachers and students alike for their multitude of ideas about getting the whole writing process going. Back in the days when I taught Freshman […]
Most romances are written in third person. It’s not a requirement, mind you. There are first person romances, some of them classics (Jane Eyre springs to mind). But using third person allows you to use multiple points of view, switching back and forth between hero and heroine, for example, with the villain thrown in sometimes […]
So recently Kristan Higgins blogged about a conference she attended representing a diverse group of writers: romance writers, poets, memoirists, other novelists. At one session, novelist Andre Dubus III made some slighting comments about typical romance readers. When one of the romance novelists took him to task during the Q&A (he’d never read a romance […]
So I discovered this new-to-me author last week: Judith Merkle Riley. Her historical novel, Serpent Garden, is set in Tudor England and France, and it’s an absolute delight. Riley juggles multiple points of view, a complex mixture of historical fact and conjecture, ingenious details of her period setting, and a whiff of the supernatural. All […]
So the romance world has another outrage to deal with, but this time it’s been perpetrated on us rather than by us. A writer named John Havel decided to “expose” Amazon’s bestseller list practices by plagiarizing a novel and then manipulating it onto the list. Havel justified himself by saying that all the profits he […]
So Finding Mr. Right Now is out of my hands now. It’s been on the shelves since June 3, which marks the beginning of the final phase of the book’s life with the author: sales and reviews. I don’t have much influence over sales (and for a lot of reasons, I won’t really know much […]
As a writer, I find waiting for release day tough. I want to talk about my book, shout about my book, gloat about my book. But until release day, I won’t know if other people enjoy my book as much as I enjoyed writing it. But now the wait is over, at least as far […]
It’s not much of a secret that Konigsburg, Texas, the setting for my Konigsburg series for Samhain Publishing, is loosely based on Fredericksburg, Texas, a premier vacation site in the Texas Hill Country. I find it a lot easier to write about places I know, mostly Texas and Colorado since those are the places where […]
If you write, sooner or later someone will ask you where you get your ideas. It’s a logical question, particularly for people who’d like to write but who aren’t sure how to go about getting started. Unfortunately, for me it’s a tough question to answer. Sometimes I remember how I got an idea, but most […]
I’ve weighed in on the alpha hero debate in the past. I’m not a big fan of traditional alphas—the tormented tough guys who don’t much like women but are willing to make an exception in the heroine’s case. My problem with them stems from the only slightly latent misogyny in the concept and the fact […]
