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 […]
I’m in the throes of prepping for the release of Slippery Creatures, book 1 of my new 1920s pulp adventure/romance series, and I realised something startling. This will be my twentieth novel. Twentieth. (26th book if you count novellas/novelettes, but then you have to think about short stories and look I’m trying to homeschool my […]
There is an ongoing debate on whether and how to use italics for non-English words in English text. This used to be convention, most often in speech, and sometimes for words in the narrative. “Bonjour, Madame, I am Inspector Blanc of the Sureté .” I piled my plate high with tamales, frijoles refritos, and chile […]
I have read a lot of books this year. In fact I have read 275 books that I reviewed on Goodreads, plus however many more that I DNFd without reviewing or which were second reads. That’s a lot of books. You could just trawl through my reading (here and feel free to follow or friend), […]
I read an interview with Booker Prize winner Bernadine Evaristo that got me thinking. (Evaristo is one of the UK’s most exciting writers, and if you haven’t discovered her yet, RUN DO NOT WALK. Mr Loverman is an absolutely cracking story of an elderly British Caribbean gentleman—married but with a long-term male lover—finally facing up […]
You want Victorian jewel thieves? I got Victorian jewel thieves! I am extremely pleased to say I have two new books coming in the Lilywhite Boys series that started with Any Old Diamonds. This is late Victorian (1890s) and covers the romantic and criminal shenanigans of thieves Jerry Crozier and Templeton Lane, and their fence […]
One of the trickiest bits of writing a book is the part when you realise you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. The problem is, when the author is in the weeds, it can be extremely difficult to see what shape the story ought/wants to be, and this can make or break a book. […]
Romance has a phenomenon that doesn’t occur to anything like the same degree in other genres: the linked books with different MCs. You don’t get murder mystery series with constantly changing sleuths, and it’s pretty rare for epic fantasy trilogies to pick out a new humble farm boy or feisty vizier’s daughter in every book. […]
I have just read a review of a British-set histrom. The hero is a duke, but he has a problem: the conditions of the title stipulate that if he isn’t married by the age of thirty, he will be stripped of the dukedom and it will pass to the next heir. Great romance set-up, right? […]