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Blog postI got a delightful email today from Heather Ashby, a fellow Firebird. She's reading Love in Reality and enjoying it. "It's a lovely oasis between writing/tweaking/polishing my own manuscripts..."
The best thing about Heather's compliment is that I know exactly what she means--not all books "work" as relief when you're knee-deep in your own stories. When you find something that provides that added bit of relaxation, well, it's a good thing.
I'm madly -
Blog postI need two three-minute bits to read aloud for school. One's for open mike night. That's tough because three minutes isn't long enough to read much of a novel to any purpose. So I just steal from the funnier of my posts here.
Last summer, I modified this post on Deciphering Romance Novel Blurbs & Reviews. Seemed to go over well enough.
This time (which is to say, next week's Stonecoast residency which is also next month's residency, and the first of next year's resi -
Blog postI got tagged by Ellis Vidler, author of TIME OF DEATH in the Interview Meme, The Next Big Thing.
Q. What is the title of your book?
A. LOVE IN REALITY, available as a digital book from Harmony Road Press.
Q. Where did the idea come from for the book?A. Watching too much reality TV! Specifically, shows like Big Brother, where contestants are locked in a fictional "house" and have to kick each other off one at a time until a winner is selected.
Q. What genre -
Blog postJust like that, this is now officially an AUTHOR BLOG!
Okay, I'm not an author yet--Love in Reality will be on sale early next week--but I have a laundry list of stuff to do that's a mile long and includes school work AND writing the next book in the series, so forgive me if I'm jumping the gun.
Plus, I'm excited. Okay, so that's actually nerves. I'm nervous. Nervous that someone will write to me about some hideous mistake. Not the other kind of mistake--the kind where -
Blog postI've given the same advice to two author friends recently and it occurred to me, why not post it at Promantica (aka, the most anorexic blog on the planet)?
Of course you don't need to read the post; my advice is in the title: Write the book you'd love to read.
Here's what I'm talking about. Between various online discussions and the brand new Amazon author rankings, it's clear that some romance authors are doing very well indeed. E.L. James, Sylvia Day, Kristen Ashley, -
Blog postRegular readers Barb and JoDee have asked for that perennial September favorite: the essay on "What I Did Over the Summer." Specifically, how the RWA National conference went.
The answer: I dunno, I was sort of invisible, seems unhelpful, so let me parse it out.
When I was an associate at a Philadelphia law firm, I started quilting as a hobby. I'm not a very good or prolific quilter, but then I wasn't a very good lawyer. Interestingly, I didn't feel like a law -
Blog postI haven't blogged here in months. Shame, really. I like this blog. I like writing about romance.
But from where I'm sitting, there are so many topics I can't write about safely. Here's a partial list:Other authors' books. I have discussed books in the past, but I don't review them. There's a very narrow range of topics in which I talk about a book because something about the book is interesting. Alternatively, I can praise a book to the rafters--no one objects to that--but this lead -
Blog postI love (LOVE) free samples. No, not those titchy little plastic spoons at the supermarket. I'm talking about the free samples of books that you get to download at Amazon.
You get ten percent of the book. If, at the end of the sample, you want to read the rest, you buy the book. If not, delete the sample.
Here's what I love about this. It shifts the line between readable and unreadable. It gets rid of the DNF entirely. Samples allow me to skip downloading the merely read -
Blog postA wonderful benefit to being a GH® finalist is that I was instantly enrolled in a class with a lot of other talented writers. Then they suggested other groups, and before I knew it, I'd joined two new (to me) RWA online chapters, two more Yahoo groups, and watched my email grow exponentially. (Personal motto: You're never alone after you final in the Golden Heart®!)
It was also a chance for me to change my mind about publishing my contemporary legal romances through Harmony -
Blog postI'd love to tell you how to take critiques, comments, judges' remarks, beta-readers' notes, and other feedback in the right spirit. Gracefully. With aplomb. (A curtsey might be over the top, but you get the idea.)
We authors need to know how to do this. Because, honestly? I think the animal behaviorists missed a trick. There's Fight, there's Flight, and then there's Cringe.
I do that. I get creepy-crawly sensations up my arms, the back of my neck tingles, and I just wan -
Blog postTwo months ago, I was gutted (as the British would say) by a family matter. It's hard to convey how bad it was without getting specific, and as it's not all about me, I won't go into details.
The point is, my world deflated like a badly-prepared souffle. This made social media, which is like a well-prepared souffle, hard for me to do.
Ten weeks later I engaged in a Twitter conversation. It was lovely; a delectable trifle that cheered me up no end.
Ten weeks -
Blog postJennifer McQuiston has a three-book deal with Avon.
Romily Bernard has a three-book deal with HarperTeen.
Kat Cantrell (who won Harlequin's SYTYCW contest) and Ami Weaver have series titles coming soon from Harlequin.
They're all fellow Golden Heart® finalists for 2012, and I'm proud of their accomplishments, just as I'm very happy for the many finalists who've gotten agents since the announcement, and all those who already have agents. (Another finalis -
Blog postTrue story: The tiny house I grew up in, built in 1765, was haunted. Weird noises, strange occurrences, definitely a sense that someone or something had never moved out. I walked in the front door one day and heard my brother Dan playing the piano. Only when I poked my head in the living room, he wasn't there at the piano, or in the room, or even in the house. No other exits, no windows he could have crawled out of.
My sister had the best story. Believing we had a poltergeist, she s -
Blog postLast year, I blogged about not being a finalist for the Golden Heart.
What a difference a year makes. Jeanne Pickering Adams, the Region One representative to RWA®'s board, phoned me this morning to announce that Blackjack & Moonlight is a Golden Heart® finalist in this year's contest.
Two things have popped into my head since this morning.
First, something Jim Kelly said in a workshop at Stonecoast, the MFA program I started this year. The subj -
Blog postI'm reading Thea Harrison's Elder Races books, and while I'm not the biggest fan of paranormal romances, I do enjoy her depiction of an entire world that's divvied up among seven different classes of paranormal critters--and that one of the classes is witches. (Even if none of the novels thus far casts a witch in anything other than a bit part.)
I had to reread Dragon Bound, though, to really appreciate what's going on. That's the one with the Wyr-dragon, Dragos Cuelebre, and his ma -
Blog postI (finally) finished R. Lee Smith's Heat, an immense book (really: 500+ pages or longer -- hard to gauge on the Kindle, but it's a nearly 1 MB download) and one that's hard to categorize.
Or rather, Heat is easy to categorize...several times over.
First of all, I heard about it at Dear Author, where January's review used the words, "the best independently published book I have read, and one of the best books I have read in a long while."
Hey, I wa -
Blog postOnce again, I've failed at the TBR Challenge. (Sorry, Wendy.) Mostly that's because I'm not reading as much. I started Heat by R. Lee Smith, which had been recommended by Dear Author, but it's a long book, and I don't seem to have the time to devote to reading that I used to, so I haven't come close to finishing it.
But the challenge itself, to read a book in my TBR that was recommended, nearly stymied me. First, I don't make a note of why I've bought a book when I order it. By the -
Blog postThe numbers vary, but it's widely agreed that women need upwards of 20 minutes to achieve orgasm in a sexual encounter with a man. (Masturbating to orgasm can be much more efficient, taking on average just a few minutes.)
By contrast, men take far less time to reach their climax in a sexual encounter. I heard numbers as low as 3 minutes, but let's just say it's way less time than women take. According to a colleague of mine, his friends had a routine to deal with this: the husband w -
Blog postA writer named Cale McCaskey has a blog post up about "The Problem with Romance Novels." It's a bad essay with an over-reaching thesis (really, dude? all romances?) and the only examples he provides are of three works of literature (Jane Eyre, Pride & Prejudice, and Romeo & Juliet), which he argues--badly--are not romance novels.
Yale (I admit I didn't get into Yale Law. I went to Penn)So, being the uber-bitch that I am, I posted a comment. I'm not proud of this, b -
Blog postI dropped out of my writers' critique group; last week's holiday party was my last meeting with them.
I'm reflecting on this as 2011 closes because it's symbolic of what I suspect will be a number of changes, some exciting and some just sad, that come with the new year.
In the case of the writers' critique group, it seemed pretty obvious to me that it wasn't going to go well if I continued to attend meetings while I was working on my MFA program. And I can see already t -
Blog postOver at AAR, Lynn Spencer posted a great piece on what a shame it is that so many Regency romances don't bother to take place in the Regency period.
Chatsworth House
Coincidentally, my TBR Challenge read for December is A Regency Christmas, a holiday anthology from Signet. It was published in 1989, theoretically the heyday of more historically appropriate regency romance. Apart from the issue of the value of money, which no one seems to get right,* there's enough of the flavor -
Blog postThis week, Ross and I become publishers.
Thursday, December 8, is the release date for Tara Buckley's first erotic novella, The Realm of You. In it, Tara looks at the ways communication in a marriage can get derailed by assumptions. Oh, and there's lots of kinky sex.
I am not Tara Buckley. To explain how I've come to be Tara's publisher, I have to back up and explain about getting rejected a lot.
In 2010, when my writing actually sucked, I minded the reject -
Blog postIn the classic comedy with Bill Murray, a weatherman is forced to relive Groundhog Day over and over until he gets it right.
I feel as though I've been reading that premise, over and over.
I'm a little peevish about this because it deals with my current bugaboo: external conflict. I got a rejection recently from an editor who read the whole of Blackjack & Moonlight and said, "There’s never a difficult choice or insurmountable obstacle in front of them, nothing -
Blog postI had a mad crush on Encyclopedia Brown when I was little. I read as many of the Nancy Drew books as I could find. And I adored the adolescent detective in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Christopher, who seemed like he might have some form of autism. So, to satisfy this month's "non-romance" TBR Challenge, I went back to a mystery with another child sleuth. I like their common sense and their ability to ferret out the obvious details that adults
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Blog postAs the daughter of two Brits, my mother was hardly a profane woman. Nonetheless, she had an earthy explanation whenever she was introduced to a dubious candidate as boyfriend / fiancé / husband of a female acquaintance: "He must be good in bed."
I love the philosophy imbedded in this. There was no intent to insult the woman's choice of man, even if his charms eluded my mother. Instead, she was respecting the fact that she couldn't know all his finer points, an
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