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

This is hilarious. These women are in it to win it. Oh and if anyone has the story about the Nora Roberts/Susan Elizabeth Phillips smackdown, I want to hear about it in the comments. Even if you have to make it up, I want to hear about it.

Link here if the embedded video doesn’t work.

There’s something wonderful about these homegrown videos. My vote for the Contemporary Rita would be Holmquist Holquist but I admit to actually not having read any of the other finalists so my vote is pretty invalid but, hey, we should have a poll for the RITAs. Will start that tomorrow.

Dear Ms. Kelly,

I’m not usually a fan of Blaze books nor of anthologies. Often elements of a story I love such as characterization and believability are sacrificed for the hot sex that the imprint is known for and anthologies in general sometimes irk me due to the short word count that demands I believe that two people who just met are in love forevah after 80-100 pages. When you offered us a copy of your latest book, I debated with myself if I really felt I could read it and do a decent review. In the end, I took the plunge. While I’ve not been turned into a babbling proselyte, I was rewarded with a fun, fast, and yes hot, story of five couples enjoying themselves immensely.

My usual sticking point with short stories, novellas and anthologies is trying to believe that two people who just met have now fallen hopelessly in love. Love at first sight will only carry so many stories for me. After that, it’s up to the author to wisely use her word count to convey an entire story arc in a manner that doesn’t strain credulity. Since you were …

Boys of Summer

This whole “acknowledging your illness as the first step to recovery” is not working for me. I have already said that I don’t like anthologies but I keep buying them. I blame this mistake on the fact that I love sports and who can resist the ass on that guy? No straight woman or gay guy that I know of. Boys of Summer is a compilation of three short stories featuring heroes who are employed by the Louisville Slammers, a major league baseball team. The sex scenes are quite explicit in this story, as explicit as the ones sold at Ellora’s Cave. Do Elizabeth Bevarly or Jill Barnett or Jan Butler know about this? Because these stories and the authors who wrote them are every bit as pornographic as those accursed epublished books.

These stories all suffer from the same problems

1) lack of showing
2) minimal dialogue
3) attempt to fit an entire romance into a compressed space
4) a blushing herione

Dear Ms. Leto:

Your story set the stage for the entire collection and involved baseball errors so large that I could not get past it to enjoy the …