Arrow recently spoke with Roberto Goiriz, a renowned graphic novel artist and writer living in his native Paraguay. Goiriz has illustrated a number of graphic novels for Arrow’s MyRomanceStory imprint including Love Match, Throb and Love Makes Headlines. He is the creator, writer and artist of That Damn Comic, as well as his long-awaited next … Read more
Is it love if the guy doesn’t say he loves you? When writing that sentence, I began to realize that I had used the word “guy” because I don’t think of a “man” as afraid to say he loves me. But a “guy” might try to weasel out of such an admission. In the personal … Read more
This post has been hijacked. I planned to talk about mad scenes and the 19th century belief that women were hysterical, unreasoning creatures. Lucia di Lammermoor has her famous mad scene. Elvira in “I Puritani” has hers. My latest example was Ophelia’s mad scene in “Hamlet,” the opera. We don’t see mad scenes in romances … Read more
It should be an embarrassment of riches. A typical romance heroine—a virginal young woman with a big problem that keeps her from enjoying love and life—suddenly finds not one, but three boyfriends. Yes, Sookie Stackhouse, the Louisiana barmaid heroine of Charlaine Harris’ paranormal romance series now on television as “True Blood,” definitely starts as a … Read more
We know you love romance fiction and the chance to win romantic prizes, so we wanted to tell you about a new sweepstakes sponsored by St. Martin’s Press that combines both of these passions. Take a sneak peek at Fireworks Over Toccoa, by Jeffrey Stepakoff, between March 10 and 30, for your chance to win … Read more
A UK newspaper, the Telegraph, has a hot news story—“proof” that Anne Boleyn was guilty of adultery after all! Nearly 500 years ago! A scholar has decided to give credence to a vicious contemporaneous poem which most other scholars have discounted as mere character assassination. You remember Anne Boleyn, of course. King Henry VIII of … Read more
Someone used the word “camp” in a novel I just read. The novel is The President’s Daughter, by Mariah Stewart. It’s an irresistible thriller, full of intrigue relating to Washington, DC in the 1970s. But the word “camp” became fashionable in the 1960s, and then quickly faded away. It’s strange to see it used in … Read more
Did you ever read a romance so wrongheaded, so annoying, so stupid, you wanted to re-engineer it? Possibly from beginning to end? A romance with such a domineering hero and such a wimpy heroine that you couldn’t decide which one you wanted to slap around first? Him for being a bully, or her for being … Read more
I’ve been looking at a wealth of comic book covers drawn by Bob Brown, and thinking about what art needs to be on the cover of a book. Why are there people on the covers of books? Why aren’t they all paintings of sunsets, or flowers, or big honking weapons, or fangs? It’s not that … Read more
The world and characters an author creates can be tremendously seductive. When we finish a novel we love, we hate to leave that world. And thus is born that abomination, the sequel. If “Son of Kong” or Spider-Man 3” springs to mind, you might as well know that Hollywood did not invent the sequel, nor … Read more
