HEA=Happy Ever After, MC=main character, MS=manuscript If you ask a reader what they need to get out of a romance, you’ll probably hear “A Happy Ever After, duh,” accompanied by a menacing look in case you were even thinking about screwing with that. They might also offer variations on ‘love’, ‘kindness’, ‘communication’, ‘consent’, and other […]
After much agonising, indecision, rewriting, and, frankly, fannying around (see last post) I am pleased to report that Subtle Blood is out. At last. This is the final part of the Will Darling Adventures trilogy, which really does need to be read in order as otherwise it won’t make nearly so much sense. (Words are […]
This one’s about getting very, very stuck on a book and how I got it written. I can’t promise it’ll help anyone else, but it’s what I did. Warning: epic length. If you don’t want to know how the sausage is made, look away now. So. Back in the Before Times, I decided to write […]
This is almost certainly completely useless to aspiring writers and how-do-you-get-your-ideas questioners out there, but I find it fascinating how books emerge from seeds, so here you go. For much of the last year I have been trying to write Subtle Blood (Will Darling 3). This has been gnarly because pandemic brain, and I’ve been […]
Five years ago (five and a half, really) I bought myself a treadmill desk. I wrote a blog post about it at the time: find it here. I wrote it partly because I couldn’t find any personal accounts from people who’d spent their own money on one, rather than journalists trying out a freebie. Recently […]
It’s been a twat of a year. How much of a twat I don’t need to tell you, but I have been through a dizzying switchback of reader’s block followed by compulsive reading, followed by total inability to read fiction followed by compulsive glomming of bizarrely specific subgenres. I have no mysteries to recommend because […]
There’s a common theme to my last four romance DNFs: the overuse of inner monologue. Now, I like a good inner monologue as much as anyone. They can be superb ways of conveying character issues and emotional development, so nobody should take this blog post to mean “inner monologues are bad”. But there are two […]
Here is is: The Sugared Game, book 2 of the Will Darling Adventures, my 1920s pulp adventure series. Meet some of the cast! Will Darling: soldier turned bookseller The Messer: Will’s emotional support knife Kim Secretan: disgraced aristocrat and secret agent, apparently? Phoebe Stephens-Prince: Kim’s emotional support flapper Maisie Jones: it would save a lot […]
I was heating up the oven this morning to put on a sourdough loaf (yes, yes, I know, but I’d run out of yeast by April) when I got embroiled in the current Twitter conversation about the ‘black moment’ in romance. This term, which could be retired any time, refers to the very common practice […]
This post is about writing consent in sex scenes so there will be quotes from sex scenes accordingly. It’s about active consent: I’m not going into noncon or dubcon here. __________________ I was an editor at Mills & Boon at the beginning of the millennium, during the Great Condom Crinkle Crisis. The what? Well, this […]