In romances, villains can be redeemed, but few villainesses get that opportunity. The villainess in a classic romance may try to control or ruin the heroine’s life, but her real purpose is to win the hero away from the heroine. It’s a tougher job description than just being a villain. And she almost never gets  … Read more

Sometimes there’s an attractive character in a romance who acts like a villain, but in every other sense is not. Georgette Heyer, the grand dame of Regency and Georgian romances, was so taken with her villain in The Black Moth that she wrote These Old Shades to redeem him. It was unusual at the time  … Read more

This week, people who live in urban areas who do not like loud bangs are in trouble. Because whether fireworks are legal or illegal, somebody will be almost continuously setting off firecrackers, the noisy type of firework with no pretty sparks. Just a sudden, loud disruption of the peace. People who live in the country  … Read more

It has been a month since the movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” opened to enormous fanfare. I’m going to assume that you’ve seen it, or else you don’t care. Either way, spoilers ahead. To be honest, I don’t remember a lot about the previous Indiana Jones movies. I remember how  … Read more

Sons and fathers notoriously have bad relationships. They don’t understand each other. They don’t appreciate each other. One’s too sissy for the other. One’s too macho for the other. They cause the fights at family reunions. They order wives and mothers and grandmothers and daughters to shun the offending other, as if their own anger  … Read more

Recently there were some lengthy debates at another romance-oriented site about race and ethnicity in romances. What I realized from reading and contributing to them (yes, I put in my two cents) was that things have changed a lot in romances since the Big Change. As almost everyone knows, about 30 years ago, modern American  … Read more

Romances in which the woman is the older-and-wiser character are beginning to be more frequently seen. Sometimes a romance hero is a few years younger than the heroine. Or a lot of years younger. Whatever, in these romances the power in a relationship that is based on age alone is definitely on the woman’s side.  … Read more

Men of Iron is writer-illustrator Howard Pyle’s popular tale about the adventures of knights in shining armor. Originally published in 1891, it’s full of colorful detail about the 15th century English system of attaining knighthood, a lengthy and often bloody process. It also contains a romance. The hero, Myles Falworth, woos and eventually wins Lady  … Read more

I know someone who has nothing better to do in the morning than read a lot of newspapers in the Internet and then e-mail his friends all the articles relating to our shared interest in comic books. These days, there are a ton of them (which is definitely a change from when I was a  … Read more

It’s Mother’s Day. Restaurants are packed, because the very first thing on people’s minds is to relieve mothers of the classic burden of cooking for their families today. Yesterday and earlier this week, stores were packed with desperate shoppers trying to find a gift that in some way measures up to all their mothers have  … Read more