I had a French teacher who used to like to proclaim that all teachers are really frustrated actors. Sometimes, I wonder if all romance novelists are really frustrated matchmakers. There’s a reason one of my college friends nicknamed me “Emma”. In real life, one’s set-ups have an irritating habit of fizzling, due […]

Let’s be honest. We all have plot tropes and character types that annoy us silly. It doesn’t matter how beautifully the prose might flow; it doesn’t matter how true to life the characterizations might be, you still want to fling the book against the wall. Just because. In the thousands and […]

It does seem very appropriate, on Presidents’ Day, to be writing about my travels across this great nation of ours, as I zigzagged from sea to shining sea with a lot of stops in land-locked locations along the way. My author tour started in Boston and looped through San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, and Nashville […]

In every author’s life, there comes a time when her fortitude is put to the test in the most grueling challenge the literary life has to offer. No, I don’t refer to scrambling to write the last three hundred pages of your manuscript in about three weeks flat because that pesky scoundrel of a […]

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that always makes me nostalgic. Perhaps it’s all that turkey; perhaps it’s the family gathering together; perhaps it’s that extra day off to read lots of novels. Whatever the reason, as Thanksgiving day approaches, my thoughts turn lightly to romance novels past.
I have all sorts of first […]

The genius girls in the office next to mine have come up with a new way to wile away the hours: a Quiz of the Week. Every week, a new question appears on their dry-erase board. Last week, the question was “What Would You Be If You Weren’t a Lawyer?” The answer […]

There’s been a lot of brouhaha recently about authors self-promoting on the internet. If you go to the discussions section on Amazon, the thread about intrusive authors has garnered far more commentary than any other topic. Authors are everywhere these days: posting on websites, promoting their own books on Amazon, writing blogs. […]