Reviewers and book bloggers: Medium Well is now available for review on Net Galley! As someone who just wrote three ghost stories (the first, Medium Well, will be released by Berkley InterMix on February 19), I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about being scared—how to do it and why. I’ve always had a […]
This isn’t a post about Nora Ephron. I’m going to write one, honest, as soon as I can process all my feelings about her but I haven’t done that yet. However, Ephron was the author of one of the great revenge books of our time—Heartburn. In case you’re not familiar with the book, it’s a […]
You may have seen the stories last week. RJ Ellory, British mystery writer, was caught writing highly laudatory reviews of his own books under an assumed name. Among other things, he cautioned readers, “Ignore all dissentors and naysayers, this book is not trying to be anything other than a great story, brilliantly told. Just buy […]
So how long should it take for the hero and heroine to get it on? Once upon a time, the buildup to the big event took most of the book, but lately the trend seems to be to shorten that period by quite a bit so we get to the good parts early on. I’ve […]
I recently read a novel I’d define as chick lit—first person, hapless heroine who eats and drinks too much and then berates herself, comical plot in which heroine at first seems headed for personal and professional disaster but where she ultimately triumphs, and perfect boyfriend. That last one may come as something of a shock, […]
There have been several plagiarism scandals in the online writing community lately—from lifting somebody’s free story and offering it under your own name to (I’m not kidding) lifting Dracula from the Bartleby Project and offering it as a new book under an assumed name. Now all of this pretty straightforward. You steal somebody’s words and […]
You can always spot a heroine who’s a spoiled darling. If it’s a regency, she stamps her foot a lot. If it’s a contemporary, she pouts. In both time periods she tosses her head quite a bit. Her family indulges the hell out of her, of course, because she’s a spoiled darling. She’s always gotten […]
I’m a fairly eclectic romance reader. Although there are a few genres I don’t read much, I’m open to most of them and I’ve sampled lots. There’s one big exception, though: I’m just not a fan of time travel. I think my problem with time travel is that it strikes me as a somewhat limited […]
So I’m reading the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes one fine Monday afternoon, just because it’s an entertaining quick snapshot of how a particular movie did over the weekend, and I stumble across the reviews of The Lucky One. For those of you who have already forgotten, this was the latest Nicholas Sparks movie, starring Zac […]
The Kay Manning plagiarism scandal from a few weeks ago (Dear Author describes the debacle here) has revived memories of perhaps the most notorious plagiarism scandal in the romance writing world: the Janet Dailey/Nora Roberts face-off in 1997. For those who need a recap, Roberts sued Dailey for plagiarism after a reader pointed out that […]
