Recently, there’s been a lot of chatter about readers and authors behaving inappropriately, with just about everyone having their own idea of what inappropriate it, from those who think that readers should never be allowed to make any negative comments about a writer’s work to those who think that writers who make any sort of […]

I’m a slightly odd personality in that I tend to go into things in fits. I’ll write a book in a little more than two months, and then I’ll just muck about with writing for a while, not producing many pages. I’ll devour 10 or more books in a week, and then I’ll […]

When I was in elementary school, I had two favorite TVs shows. (Hey! You have to WAIT for it BEFORE you start making fun of me.) First, I loved Star Trek: The Next Generation. Okay, no, the storylines usually made no sense, the characters tended to be cardboard-flat, all the […]

There’s been a lot of stir over the past couple of years over sex and its role in romance–how much sex there should be, when it’s appropriate, and even how the characters should have sex.
Almost without exception, the debate ends up dissolving into insult. One side sniffs, “Those erotic romances have no plot–they’re just […]

Many romances have mystery subplots that take up between three to seventy-five percent of the page count, and the emphasis upon and quality of the mystery is very important to many readers.
As a writer, I’ve found there are three basic ways to include a mystery:
-the incidental mystery (the characters know it’s a mystery and are […]

Something that’s interested me for a while is that romance readers say they value intelligence in heroines very highly, while they like their heroes to be muscular and handsome, brains–and even particular personality traits!–taking a distinct backseat to those physical attractions.
So why is it that there are five stupid heroines to every stupid hero in […]

A gestalt is a thing that is greater than the sum of its parts. And gestalt stupidity is what you get when an airheaded woman, her careless husband, and fate combine forces to completely confuse and complicate their lives. (Not fate’s. The man and the woman’s.)
Part the first: While on a […]