Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary

Dear Ms. Knight:
There are so many blocks against reading this book that I wonder you ever had the audacity to put pen to paper. The story is told from the first person present tense in alternating points of view.  It features a gay/bisexual/quasi-queer man who purportedly falls in love with a Hollywood actress.  I got [...]

Dear Ms. Mitchell:
Considering I put this book both on the Recommended Reads for December and on my Best of 2008 list, I figured I should actually review it. Not that it’s not a pleasure to reread such a great story.
I love the way this book starts:
Eighties dance music blasted through the Yaris’s speakers as Joey [...]

There I was, sitting at my computer, reading a review copy of Pepper Espinoza’s gay male triad novella from Samhain, Falling in Controlled Circumstances. I’m feeling pretty nifty that I’m reading a review copy—like, OMG, people are actually giving me free books in the hopes that I’d write something nice about it. And [...]

Dear Ms. James:
Angela James (no relation, I assume), Editor Extraordinaire at Samhain, has been Twittering about your book for weeks as she edited it, saying how good it is.  She then had a Twitter competition to give away five review copies of the book and while I missed out on that, she sent me [...]

I emailed Jane a couple of days ago, wondering if she’d be interested in reviews of BDSM romances (BDSM is a combination acronym of the sexual practices/identities of Bondage/Discipline, Domination/Submission, and Sadist/Masochism and covers under its umbrella many sexual paraphilia and fetishes). While I’m a contributing blogger at Teach Me Tonight and at Romancing [...]

Dear Ms. Amara,
There’s a continuing discussion among fantasy circles about non-Western settings and non-Caucasian characters in fantasy. Or more to the point, the lack thereof. I confess I count myself among their number. I realize many people take it as a given that a fantasy setting should be faux medieval Europe but these [...]

Dear Readers,
Since this review covers my responses to nine short stories and two novellas, I’ve decided that for the sake of clarity, it would be simper to address this letter to you rather than to eleven authors.
Tangle XY is an anthology featuring a variety of same-sex love stories. All the romances here have two [...]