Recently, I’ve been reading a series written by a Prominent Romance Writer in her salad days. It concerns a family of sisters and the men who love them, and it’s pretty enjoyable, except for one thing. All the sisters seem to loathe the men they end up with, at least initially. And they show this […]
As I’ve said time and again, I love critique groups. They provide a writer with that most valuable of commodities, feedback. Not all of the feedback is good, mind you, but even lousy feedback can tell you something. I can still remember when I started critiquing, though, and I remember the biggest problem I had—what […]
If you’ve ever entered a writing contest, you’ve probably seen remnants of the great font controversy. Some contests nowadays allow writers the choice of Times or Courier, but I’d guess the majority still go with Courier. And writers who choose to use Times run the risk of encountering judges like the ones I ran into […]
When I was just starting out in fiction writing, I took a short story workshop at a venerable San Antonio writers cooperative. I wrote a story I thought was okay and brought it to class for critiquing. Most of my classmates liked it, and some liked it a lot. One man, though, sat through the […]
You all remember Basil Exposition in Austin Powers—the stuffy intelligence chief played by Michael York whose sole purpose was to provide background information for the plot, i.e., exposition. I thought about ol’ Basil today as I was reading one of my favorite suspense writers because it seemed that he’d wandered into the book while I […]
I’m a big believer in critique groups, as I’ve said many times and in many posts. Most of us have trouble looking at our writing objectively. Critique partners can give you an outsider’s take on what you’re doing (or not doing). So nothing I say here should be taken as an attack on critiquing in […]
Lately, I’ve been working my way through the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Fairies for some research. It’s been sort of interesting but also sort of monotonous because so many fairies in so many cultures are basically alike (water fairies, house fairies, forest fairies, etc., etc., etc.). However, there’s one thing I’ve learned (which I actually already […]
Note: This post was supposed to have been published in The Samhellion yesterday. For reasons that aren’t clear to me, it never made it up there. So here it is today where I can make sure it gets posted! From time to time, I like to examine the criticisms that are aimed at romance by […]
I first read Gone With the Wind when I was in middle school. One of the girls in my English class recommended it, and I got a copy from the library. Like a lot of readers, I was totally engrossed—I remember not wanting to put the book down for about a week as I read […]
I just stopped reading a novel by an author I like a lot because the heroine got a disastrous dye job. Now that may not mean much in itself, but let me give you some context. She’d also discovered her boyfriend had cheated on her, her sister had moved in with her and made a […]
