As some may remember, I’ve already posted about judging for this year’s RWA RITA contest. It was an interesting experience—some of the books were first rate (I’ve discovered a couple of authors I really enjoyed whose other books I’m now reading), others were less so. I plan on volunteering again next year. But one response […]
All regency heroines are virgins. It’s a standard trope. The only exceptions to this are widows and the very occasional courtesan. But mostly the regency heroine is untouched as the driven snow, no matter what her age happens to be. And thus the scene in which the hero discovers that he’s making love to a […]
I’m on record as believing user reviews are basically a good thing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used these reviews for purchasing decisions on things like slow cookers. Reader reviews can come under the same heading, but not always. Some reader reviews are thoughtful and make a lot of sense. Some reader […]
You know how it is. You start reading a new novel and slowly you begin to see the outlines of the plot emerging. And after fifty pages or so, the pieces start falling into place. Okay, it’s another poor-bluestocking-goes-to-London plot—which variation will this be? Will she become a companion for her beautiful cousin? Will she […]
Okay, every other author has now blogged about the 2011 Romantic Times Booklovers Convention except me. This isn’t because I have nothing to say about RT, it’s because I needed time to sort out all the things I wanted to say. Some of them are totally irrelevant (e.g., I completely hated the glass elevators at […]
Okay, I came late to the train wreck that is the Jacqueline Howett/ Books and Pals fight, but a comment on one of my discussion lists stuck with me. One author said she’d stopped editing self-pubbed authors because, like Howett, they were just too hard to work with. This was her polite way of saying […]
I’m a romance writer, which means I write sex scenes. It goes with the territory. It’s also the hardest part of my job. Why? Despite the usual heavy-handed jokes (“Bet you do a lot of research, har, har, har”), trying to come up with an interesting way to describe sex between your hero and heroine […]
A few weeks ago, Amazon announced an interesting statistic: their e-book sales, which had earlier eclipsed their hardback sales, had now exceeded their paperback sales. E-books were officially Amazon’s best-selling format. The response from a certain segment of the romance-writing community was immediate, although not exactly what you might expect. Amazon, they said, was lying. […]
Headhopping is one of those terms that’s well known to most people in the romance-writing community and probably unknown to anyone who isn’t part of it. It refers to shifting point of view from one character to another within a scene, and it’s a no-no. Actually, no-no is too mild. It’s a Mark Of Cain, […]
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about the Big Misunderstanding as a plot device and why I disliked it. Since that time, I’ve actually used a Big Misunderstanding in a plot of my own (see Venus In Blue Jeans), so I’ve sort of moderated my opinions. Yet I found myself thinking […]
