Karen Fox reprints recent sales from Publisher’s Lunch on her website, along with a host of other helpful information such as Brenda Hiatt’s "Show Me The Money" regarding romances advances.  The Publisher’s Lunch replay provides some insight into who is buying what, when, for how much and with what agent.  Familiar names pop up over [...]

Tried to buy another book where the plot goes something like this:  divorced (or almost divorced) parties meet up after an estrangement and then somehow mange to get back together.  Picked the book up.  Put it back down.  See, divorce is what I do for a living.  Not get them but help others to do [...]

About  a week ago Rebecca Brandewyne posted a column on Romancing The Blog calling for a return to purple prose.  Specifically, she took issue with reviewers’ criticisms of some romance books as being "overwritten."  Her theory?  High printing costs first drove content and story length in newspaper articles and was now having an impact on [...]

We chit chat all the time about the lack of respect romance gets from outside the community.  All is not well inside the romance writing kingdom either.   Sylvia has a discussion on her blog about this problem and the backlash she’s feeling for writing what she wants to write.  This touches on some of the [...]

One of my writing pet peeves - I have something like 785 of ‘em - is the failure of some romance writers to have men sound like men in their stories.  I’m never sure how this happens.  I mean, these writers do know men, have heard them speak to each other, right?  Well, to try [...]

I found an article, 20 Steps To Writing Great Love Scenes - Part One by Karen Weisner.  I don’t know Karen Weisner but her bio says she’s published with Hard Shell Word Factory.   Fine with me. 
She raises quite a few points  - 20 to be exact - but one struck me as a bit [...]

There’s been a  lot of talk lately on Wendy’s blog and others about national reviewers and their disregard for romance.  Thinking the answer might be to look somewhere other than in big stodgy newspapers, I picked up Entertainment Weekly.  Being a magazine about all manner of popular culture, surely there would be at least a [...]

I stumbled across a website for the Longridge Writers Group.  Never heard of ‘em.  Can’t tell you if this Group is legitimate or not, but I have a theory. 
There is a link for instructors.  Not exactly household names.  The photos appear to be circa 1979.  There are claims, all written in bold, of this [...]

In keeping with the  hubby’s god-awful movie preferences, he has found two new coma-inducing entries into the category of Most Boring Sounding Movies Ever.  He actually believes we should see the following documentaries.  Actually go out in public, spend money, find parking and sit in a theater with the three other people on the planet [...]

Frequently I’ll be reading along and come to a part in a book, regardless of genre, and get lost because the scene strikes me as unrealistic.  Contrived.  Poor writing.  Bad craft.  I’ve said it all.  Of course, real life can be pretty unrealistic.  Stuff happens that a writer would get nailed for if the situation [...]