So You Stopped SOPA. Now Can You Stop Piracy?

Like a lot of Web users, I wasn’t all that thrilled by the two solutions to Internet piracy proposed by Congress: SOPA and PIPA. Both would have led to unwarranted shutdowns of innocent sites and both assumed a degree of oversight among site owners (including me) that just doesn’t exist on the Web. But did […]

Read More

Six Sentence Sunday – Venus In Blue Jeans

Cal Toleffson saw the love of his life for the first time at 5:47 p.m. in the Dew Drop Inn, downtown Konigsburg, Texas. He wasn’t exactly dressed for the event. He’d spent the forty-five minutes preceding Happy Hour tending to a sick goat. “Tending to” was the polite way of describing it. The goat was […]

Read More

Lay Off Stephanie

Okay, I just read my first review of One For the Money, the first movie version of one of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels. Granted this particular review is more concerned with dragging Katherine Heigl over the coals than actually talking about the movie, but here’s the thing: The reviewer has obviously not read the […]

Read More

The Paula Problem

A while ago I wrote a blog post defending Paula Deen against attacks made by Anthony Bourdain on her cooking and her attitude toward food. It seemed to me then and now that these attacks had more than a slight whiff of sexism and elitism since Bourdain had a real problem with female Food Network […]

Read More

The Stalker Hero

So I’m reading a recently reissued Jayne Anne Krentz from 1985, The Waiting Game. It has a typical Krentz hero—a solitary alpha, brooding, craggy, withdrawn, who immediately falls hard for the heroine. He recognizes right away that they’re Meant For Each Other and knows he needs to do something to claim her as his. Granted […]

Read More

You'll Be Sorry

A couple of weeks ago, I did some ruminating on the Secret Baby plot and why it sort of freaks me out. I think one of the reasons that this particular plot is so popular with some romance readers is that it works on the “You’ll be sorry” principle. And the “You’ll be sorry” principle […]

Read More

Don't Forget Me–Please!

The Book So it’s finally here: the release date for my sixth Konigsburg book, Don’t Forget Me. The story of Nando Avrogado and Kit Maldonado. The first four Konigsburg books were pretty straightforward: I had four brothers, so I needed four books. After that, I wasn’t sure whether I’d stay in Konigsburg or go somewhere […]

Read More

Secret Babies and Doody-Heads

When we Nine Naughty Novelists wrote our first serial parody, The Zillionaire Vampire Cowboy’s Secret Werewolf Babies, we knew we wanted to include the classic “secret baby” plot twist. In fact, we wanted to up the ante by making those secret babies twins (the mother was a werewolf, so multiple births weren’t exactly unheard of). […]

Read More

Food Books: A Thursday Thirteen

As I’ve mentioned before, I love to cook. I also love to read about cooking, and with Thanksgiving coming up food is definitely on my mind. So here are thirteen books that are fun to read—some of them include recipes, but not all. Most, however, include a lot of enthusiasm about food. 1. Ruth Reichl, […]

Read More