Here’s the bad news:  those of us who write romance may be contributing to the downfall of the family. Yeah, it was a shock to me.  It’s probably a shock to you.  Apparently, it’s time we take some responsibility for our actions. 
See, according to Stephanie Coontz author of Marriage, a History: From Obedience to [...]

I don’t know Whiting Award winner John Wray but I like his style.  Seems he hated every minute of his book-signing tour for his first book The Right Hand of Sleep.  When it came time to tour for his next book, Canaan’s Tongue, described as "a baroque tale set in the pre-Civil War South" he [...]

Having just read here that we’re not supposed to talk about the search for agents and publishers on our blogs, I am going to rush right ahead and ignore the sound advice.  I don’t plan to whine and moan about them - about me, yes - so I should be safe.  Let’s hope.
So, the search [...]

It’s now clear that the news magazine The Week has a regular feature called "Best Books" mixed in with its Book List section.  I thought the Edward Conlon piece (referenced a few blogs back) was a one-time thing.  No.  This is a regular feature.  Who knew?
Here’s what I like about this section:  it appears to [...]

Having written book reviews with Wendy for Paperback Reader for a few weeks now, I have a greater appreciation of how hard this process is, how much time it takes, how careful you have to be and how impossible the whole grade thing is.  Slapping a letter on a review, I now believe, doesn’t mean [...]

Every now and then I read something and wonder what King Idiot came up with the idea.  While I know JK Rowling has more money than the Queen, this is a bit much.  I’m all for the free market, blah, blah, blah, but this kind of thing can’t be good for the publishing industry or, [...]

Disclosure:  I have not read The Hours by Michael Cunningham.  After sitting through all 400 hours of the movie and hating almost every minute of it, I decided never to read The Hours by Michael Cunningham.  Yeah, I know about the Pulitzer and the 1.5 million copies sold.  Stories that center solely around suicide and [...]

So, it’s 1984ish.  I’m somewhere in the junior/senior year of high school range (I was young for my grade - no, I swear that’s true) and Bret Easton Ellis’ book Less Than Zero comes out.  For a girl raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a story about privileged teens in Los Angeles is just about the [...]

There’s been a lot written about Melissa Bank and her newest release The Wonder Spot.  The book touched off quite a debate when the NYT, under the guise of a review, took personal shots at the book, Bank and the chick lit genre as a whole.  To anyone reading the petulant and childish diatribe it [...]

There is a general feeling in the romance writing world that adverbs, adjectives and dialog tags are evil nasty critters that must be removed from our writing under penalty of being forever unpublished.  The inclusion of one adverb too many is held up as a sure sign of mediocre writing. Honestly, who out there hasn’t [...]