There was a time when I enthusiastically bought every contemporary romance I saw in the bookstores. Then, so many publishers decided to cash in on the popularity of these romances that they started publishing huge numbers of them. At one point there were 150 contemporary romances being published a month. More than I could afford  … Read more

I just had an interesting thought. A romance usually is an intimate, even a domestic story. Often, it’s about women who are quite content to be anonymous in their world—known by relatives, friends, and coworkers, but with no ambitions to achieve the kind of significance on the world stage that would lead them to become  … Read more

I’ve always been a sucker for a good cover. At the recent Romance Writers of America annual national conference in Washington, DC, I met or picked up the promotional pieces from several authors who have been lucky enough to get strikingly attractive covers for their latest books. Their book promotional material—most of it printed at  … Read more

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it  … Read more

The RWA is the Romance Writers of America, a 10,000-member-strong writers organization that maternally tries to look out for the welfare of its members. When epublishing started out, only a few years ago, the ethics, business behavior, and capital backing of some epublishers were shaky—to say the least. Some epublishers were downright crooks, soaking writers  … Read more

It isn’t fair. The most interesting and romantic book covers these days are not on romances at all. They’re on science fiction and fantasy novels. Take The Dark Reaches, for instance, by Kristin Landon. There’s a hunky guy on the cover, wearing a long leather coat, a subdued ponytail, and a stalwart expression. He’s got  … Read more

In Defense of Women is a sly polemic written by H. L. Mencken almost 100 years ago, basically accusing women of trapping men into marriage because, according to him, we are much smarter than men but they are our economic main chance. Okay, simmer down. Times have changed since 1918. Women did get the vote.  … Read more

There are a million reasons women read romances. Here’s another: In romances, heroes do all the rotten, complicated, difficult, and annoying chores that heroines put off for lack of funds, lack of strength, or lack of will. And heroes do them Without Being Asked. Oh, boy, that’s a big one. Sitting as I am currently  … Read more

I don’t usually comment on celebrity doings on this blog. Or much of anywhere else, for that matter, because, really who cares? But a recent event got me thinking about a classic romance situation: David Letterman finally married the woman he’s been living with for over 20 years, Regina Lasko, a woman who bore him  … Read more

Okay, here’s a silly romance plot: The heroine is found asleep in the wrong man’s bed. She’s a sleepwalker, thus not responsible for her behavior. But the hero, her fiancé, does not know that, so he thinks she has betrayed him. She doesn’t know she’s a sleepwalker either, so she’s utterly confused. But she knows  … Read more