Welcome to First Page Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a first page read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. You may comment anonymously.
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“I will not give this assignment to just anyone.”
Caroline Deteroit groaned inwardly. Dr. Alan Carruthers, loved to lord the fact [...]

Welcome to First Page Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a first page read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. You may comment anonymously.
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I glanced out at the Great Lawn as I sat alone on an iron park bench, trying to be inconspicuous as [...]

Welcome to First Page Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a first page read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. You may comment anonymously.
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Men do not go into heat. When faced with a line of willing women, frustrated refusal was not the correct reaction. [...]

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Last week we saw yet another author/reviewer contretemps in which an author, upset over a review, engages the reviewer in a comically bad mannered way. When we’ve witnessed this in the past, it almost always seems to be over a C review. An average review. A review that says this book is competent [...]

I read over at GalleyCat that a new book review blog is starting up called LitMob.com. It’s a very easy to look at blog that is well organized with the rankings easily identified on the left hand side with sparkling stars. The blog has some experienced individuals at its helm. The creators include [...]

The New Yorker’s cover this month features about every Obama slur possible on its cover. It’s obviously meant to be satiric but is it? My thinking is that if you put McCain on there as a Manchurian candidate, while ironic and satirical, it would also be offensive. Of course, media shouldn’t shy [...]

Welcome to Query Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a query or a first page to be read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. Published authors may do so under their own name or anonymously.
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Present Time
Beliel rocked back, the bare skin of his feet [...]

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I just watched the first episode of Bones which I downloaded from iTunes. I’d been thinking about watching it for some time and was holed up in the basement working on a project and thought that running the show while I was working would be a great way to pass some time. [...]

Chick lit is a taboo term in publishing right now and even in its heyday, the sub genre took alot of heat for being substantiveless pap. Joanna Trollope blogged for the Guardian that the effortless entertainment of chick-lit is actually difficult to write.
The thing is, it’s hard to write good romantic fiction, [...]

Welcome to First Page aka Query Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a first page (or query) read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. Published authors may do so under their own name or anonymously.
Readers, though, the way that I look at it is [...]

From the Teach Me Tonight blog:
This is a Call For People, rather than a Call For Papers. It is time for an academic society for the study of popular romance fiction, with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereunto, like a journal and conferences. So we have decided to start one! “We” being myself, Eric [...]

Jennifer Crusie, the writer of one of my favorite contemporary romances, Welcome to Temptation, wrote the following:
Somebody asked me in an interview once what the responsibilities of the writer and the reader were. I knew the responsibilities of the writer inside out, but I’d never thought about the responsibilities of the reader; to me, anybody [...]

Over the past couple of months I have read a handful of books in which the heroine resists a relationship with the hero. I’m not talking about the ‘Oh, I really shouldn’t’ women, or the ‘no means yes’ girls, the females who are just playing coy so as not to appear desperate, or even [...]

Romantic Times convention took place a couple of weeks ago. Since the convention, a few people spoke up about their experiences which included a negative reaction to the antics of the Ellora’s Cavemen. SB Sarah said that the Cavemen acted like cavemen and were overly grabby. JC Wilder reported [...]

Welcome to First Page aka Query Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a first page (or query) read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. Published authors may do so under their own name or anonymously.
Readers, though, the way that I look at it is [...]

In my morning blogrolling, I read the post at the Smart Bitches site about a discussion that erupted on the political blog, Obsidian Wings, about romance novels.
The starting point for the discussion was the part of the post where Hilzoy, the poster, said the following:
Second, romance novels* (update below the fold) are not “books”, as [...]

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There’s a couple of things that I wanted to blog about this morning. First off is the irritating number of press articles about romance as we lead up to Valentine’s Day. This is frustrating for me because we don’t read romances for the “romance”, do we? We read it for [...]

British critic and literary editor suggests that one of the reasons for the shrinking print media coverage of books in the US is the dull book reviewing.  William Skidelesky says “book reviewing in [Britain] is in fairly robust health . . .  A lively chatter surrounds the British book scene, of which newspaper review sections [...]

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Romance is an easy target for dismissal by critics, both insiders and outsiders alike. Respect that the genre deserves isn’t being earned despite the tremendous buying power that the genre readers command. Science fiction and mysteries are more honored and more respectable by mainstream press and critics.
This past summers brou ha [...]

Don’t get too excited, authors, the title is just a tad hyperbolic. In light of the recent debate about Mills & Boons books being part of the paternalistic propaganda, Dear Author, Smart Bitches, and Teach Me Tonight have banded together to read, review, and analyze Louise Allen’s Virgin Slave, Barbarian King. [...]

The Courier Mail book reviewers took time to identify some of their favorite books of 2007. Kate Cuthbert, one of the romance reviewers, listed three of the best of 2007: Demon Angel (The Guardians, Book 2) by Meljean Brook; And Then He Kissed Her by Laura Lee Guhrke; and Passion for the Game [...]

Louise Allen’s book, Virgin Slave, Barbarian King, was one cited by Julie Bindel as part of the patriarchal propaganda designed to “feed directly into some women’s sense of themselves as lesser beings, as creatures desperate to be dominated.” Ms. Allen’s response was on the Guardian today.
I wish Allen had talked more about the historical aspect [...]

The dueling essays featured at The Guardian about Mills & Boons books sparked some significant debate here and here and some name calling. Julie Bindel took to calling the genre trash and argued that it was anti-female propoganda perpetrated by Mills & Boons.
Some readers suggested that she needed to get laid more often [...]

Yesterday, Normal Mailer was the winner of the 14th annual Bad Sex writing award, announced by Literary Review magazine. His winning entry was:
So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as [...]

Dr. Sarah S. G. Frantz, assistant professor of English & Foreign Languages at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, and Dr. Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English and a former Humanities Center fellow of DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, have teamed up to edit a collection called The Mind of Love: New Approaches [...]