The other evening I was dining with a batch of old friends from the comic book business. As conversations do, the talk turned to what each of us was working on, and thus to my long stint in romances. An otherwise nice fellow made the mistake of asking me about “bodice rippers.” I almost leapt  … Read more

To the degree that popular fiction is a lie, it doesn’t live beyond its original moment. It has to be revisited for this to be obvious, though. So go back to an old romance you read many years ago, and read it again. Do the circumstances of the heroine strike you as quaint? Does her  … Read more

My library reading group (it’s practically a law that women must join one) just read a classic tale of Norwegian pioneers of the late 19th century in the Dakota prairie, Giants in the Earth, by Ole Edvart Rolvaag. It was on a lifetime list of important books to read that I’d had knocking around in  … Read more

One reason that fairy tale heroines have been in style lately (actually, aren’t they always in style?) is that they embody old traditions of femininity, plus current ideas of female heroism. Appealing to old-fashioned value systems while acting on new ones is quite subversive. On the surface these fairy tale romances don’t rock the boat,  … Read more

Why is marriage of convenience such an enduringly popular romantic theme despite the fact that marriage as a life goal is losing popularity? Why like such a story? Maybe the simplest reason is that it’s a very efficient means of getting the hero and heroine into the same building, indeed, the same bedroom, for much  … Read more

At romance writing conferences, some author usually stands up and humbly asks the editors “What would you like me to write?” The editors always tell her vaguely and rather helplessly to write something “good.” Everybody goes away frustrated, yet what they want is no secret: Authors look for direction, and editors look for imagination. The  … Read more

I’d never heard of the term “red-headed stepchild” before a friend of mine started editing a professional wrestling magazine and sought in vain for any kind of cooperation within that industry. He and his magazine were treated like a red-headed stepchild, he told me. Ignored, pushed aside, not given a fair share of the family  … Read more

A young, handsome actor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, is currently playing Henry VIII of England as a young, handsome king on the Showtime television series, “The Tudors.” It’s a startling new angle for the oft-told tale. It seeks to erase the classic image of Henry VIII as a fat, middle-aged monarch, an image made famous by  … Read more

There are other blogs. As I was making comments on a romance blog, Smart Bitches (there’s a link on our sidebar), I was thinking how wonderful it is that finally, finally, we who read romances and love romances have places where we can talk about romances. You might think that editorial meetings provide that place,  … Read more

Okay, I admit it. In addition to loving romances and comic books, I am an opera freak. So there I was, watching Smetana’s “The Bartered Bride” (the major Czech opera that set the standard for all others), and suddenly the hero did something that heroes used to do all the time in romances. And sometimes,  … Read more