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

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There is not a more common hero archetype in historical romance than the “rake”. In my early days of reading, I always viewed the “rake” as a sign of virility of the hero.  In romance novels, the women titter about the rake’s scandalous reputation while parading their young in [...]

In today’s First Page, Laura Kinsale brought up a question in the comments regarding unfamiliar terms in a story.
I have a question, as a writer, about one of the comments. This isn’t a loaded question, or any sort of commentary on this excerpt itself, it’s input for me.
DS said
I had to look up “drafts on [...]

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There are passages in books that are so memorable that you need only say a few descriptive words and the reader knows exactly what book you are talking about. These are scenes that I don’t think could be duplicated by the same author or even other authors without invoking [...]

I’m feeling the paranormal/fantasy fatigue. What are you feeling?

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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. [...]

MSNBC decided to run a poll about romance novels in conjunction with its feature of fiction writer Danielle Steele. Why MSNBC jumps from Danielle Steele to romance, I’ll never know but it just goes to show how culturally illiterate the MSNBC poll writers are.
Apparently MSNBC believes that romance books are still called [...]

Some readers have argued in the comments at Smart Bitches that the romance genre definition does not include a happy ever after. I had a long and somewhat contentious debate with Robin over the definition of romance. Her argument is that the academic definition of the genre is that romance is a story [...]