Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Are you looking for a review of Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life? We’ve done some housekeeping here at Dear Author and the link can be found here.

Dear Ms. Guhrke:

Except for a quick skim of Conor's Way a year or so ago, The Wicked Ways of a Duke is the first of your books I have read. And after finishing it, I think I understand the source of your popularity: an ability to create a vivid portrait of characters who are standard Romance types brought to credible life through solid and accessible prose. A year or two ago I might well have been enchanted by this book, because the characters would have been newer to me, their story fresher. Like the story's hero, however, I am a bit too familiar with the various turns these characters take on their path to love to be swept so easily away, and so when the story ended I still had my somewhat jaded sensibilities intact. While entertaining, The Wicked Ways of a Duke was not a love match for me.

Girl-bachelor Prudence Bosworth, unmarried at 28 and convinced she is plain and plump, is a seamstress living alone in London in a women's boarding house. Rhys De Winter, the Duke of St. Cyres, has just returned to England …

Author Julie Leto offers up a guest review of Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon. Boy’s Life was a book challenged by a parent in the Hernando County School District as “inappropriate” because of bad language. Mr. McCammon flew to the Hernando County School Board meeting to defend his book and prevailed.
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At its most basic level, Boy's Life by Robert McCammon is the story of Cory Mackenson, a twelve-year old boy growing up in Zephyr, Alabama in the late fifties. But McCammon, a lyrical author with a flair for seeing the world through the eyes of a child, has skillfully framed the story by telling it in a balanced combination between Cory's perspective as a child and his adult point of view. There's no flashback&emdash;or, in a way, the entire story is a flashback, with only the first and last chapters happening to the adult Cory. But this is not a new literary device and it works especially well here. The reader is immediately drawn into Cory's coming-of-age story and we live his experiences with him, …

As if you couldn’t tell. We’ve some complaints about how slow the website loads so we’ve (I’ve) re-designed the blog. There will be some growing pains and not all the pages have been recoded but I hope that this provides a good compromise between the old site’s familiarity and the new site’s convenience. Please feel free to comment on what you like and what don’t like so that we can make Dear Author a better community for everyone.

Edited to add: If you don’t like it, let me know why. You can even comment anonymously. My feelings won’t be hurt.

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Author Sandra Schwab of The Lily Brand and Castle of the Wolf bought a new Cybook and wrote up a wonderful review of it. I asked for permission to republish the posts here for the Dear Author readership. The Cybook can be ordered directly from Bookeen, a French company, or through Baen’s Bar.
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So last week I finally got my Cybook Gen 3, the new e-reader from Bookeen. Since this is my first e-reader EVAH!, I was extremely excited and documented each step of the unravelling of the FedEx package:
The FedEx package:

If you open it on one side and peer inside,
that’s what you see:

And here’s the Cybook box itself (pretty cool, eh?):

And inside this box, there’s another white box.
And when you opened it, you’re presented with this view:

The leather cover for …

Maybe this has always been true, but as I was reading Romance Writers Report, the RWA monthly publication, I noticed that Avon is seeking new authors and accepts unagented queries. According to its new submission guidelines, any romance or women’s fiction author can submit a query by e-mail to avonromance@harpercollins.com.

The word “QUERY” should be put in the subject line and the query should be brief, no more than a two-page description of the book. No chapters or synopsis at this time. A response is promised in one or two weeks! Zoinks that is a quick turn around.

I have been debating for a month or so about starting a new Saturday feature for DearAuthor. At Fangs, Fur, & Fey, a large (almost too large in my opinion as it is hard to keep track of everyone now) fantasy author community, the members posted their queries, pointing out what worked and what didn’t work. It was very interesting reading. I thought it might be fun for authors with new books coming out to share their queries, to show what caught an agent/editor’s eye, and …

Dear Ms. Drennen,

There’s no way to sugarcoat this review. I found “Mauvelous” to be just ghastly. Sorry but that’s the word that comes to mind. This book is bad. It’s supposed to be about some agents from a security firm called Aztec. I have no idea what they do but mention was made of villains being traitors so I guess there’s some tie in with the government. If they’re what’s standing between civilization and anarchy then God help us all.

The hero comes across as a smarmy used car salesman with a bad toupee who still thinks he’s the hottest thing on two legs where women are concerned. He smirks when women check out his “package,” drives a muscle car because it seems to be a projection of his manhood, and flubs up almost everything he tries to do.

Mauve, the heroine can’t get her mind off the one night of hot luvin’ they shared and the multiple orgasms he gave her. Never mind he was blowing off enough booze fumes to fell an ox, damn he gave her some fine sex. Oh, what…watch for the villain. Yeah, but she’d rather think of …

One thing that Julie Bindel’s piece has done is peak my interest in Harlequin Presents books. In addition, a few weeks ago, I did a piece on category romances and how I was coming to appreciate the Blazes, Harlequin Historicals, and so forth that I have been reading. A couple people suggested authors in the Harlequin Presents line and I have since started reading them.

I don’t think that I had read them since my early reading days (maybe 20 years ago). My recollection of this series were that it was peopled by really rich men and their secretaries. In the last month, I’ve read 20 Harlequin Presents. 7 of them were by Sara Craven but most of them were in the Harlequin Presents One Click Buy. It’s a program where you can buy all the HPs for one month in one big package. Incredibly, you can buy the entire 8 books at Books on Board for $9.49.

I think it’s a bit interesting to read the entire collection. I felt like I was reading an album versus a single record. The collection itself was varied, as if the editors make an attempt …

One reason I was so disgusted when Kindle debuted with its super proprietary Mobipocket format was because of the history of companies, both big and small, to stop supporting the proprietary format of the month, leaving its consumers high and dry.

Wal-mart has announced that it will end its video download service after just one year of being open. Users who have downloaded movies through this service can continue to watch them on the device that contains the downloaded movie and the necessary software to view the movie. Because of DRM, though, it means that the movie cannot be transferred or viewed on any other device. So if the harddrive crashes on the unit that contains the movie or you choose to upgrade, the movie is lost forever.

Via Endgadget.

According to the bio, Patrice Michelle is “a natural with a point-and-shoot camera, likes to fiddle with graphic design and, to the relief of her family, strums her guitar to an audience of one.” To those members of the online romance reading community, we know Patrice to be a straight shooter and all around nice person which puts paid to the notion that nice folks finish last. As Patrice’s first sale stories tells us, the road to writing, from inception to delivery, can be a long one, but one that can be done.
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When did I decide I wanted to be an author? When I was fifteen.

When was I mature enough to tackle writing a book? When I was in college.

When was I experienced enough to follow through and complete a book? Twelve years later, after I thought the computer file holding "the book from college I never finished" was erased from the computer.

It's amazing how motivating that scare was. After that, I started writing again. I was a woman on a mission—an author who'd finally found her passion!

Fast …