Romance is written in third person. That’s not an absolute rule, but it’s close enough. Occasionally, an author will be successful with a first person romance—Kristan Higgins has a few, for example—and chick lit is notoriously first person. But what we might call “traditional” romance never ventures far from third personhood. Of course, romance isn’t […]
Okay, this excerpt comes from my first Konigsburg book, Venus In Blue Jeans. The hero (Cal) and the heroine (Docia) are getting ready to make love for the first time–so it’s their first view of each other naked. Here we go! Cool fingers wrapped around his shaft, measuring him, sliding lightly down the length of […]
Janie could feel the smooth plane of his body pressing against her breasts; an ache had started low in her body that had nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with Pete Toleffson. She closed her eyes and let her cheek rest against his chest for a moment, feeling warm skin and smelling […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 It has a typical Krentz hero—a solitary alpha, brooding, craggy, withdrawn, who immediately falls hard for the heroine.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 […]
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 […]
Congrats to Emily Tardy for winning the copy of Don’t Forget Me. Happy holidays, everybody! […]
