Tell the truth: Do you wish we could go back? Because lately, it feels like many of us are looking to the past with longing. We pine for yesterday somehow feeling that the past was better—love was purer, books mattered more, and people knew how to treat each other. It is a seductive premise, is…
Sometimes, a book is more than just a book. It’s a refuge. Lately, almost everyone I know feels anxious and uncertain. Right now, life feels like a pressure cooker—though, let’s be honest, no one under 50 knows what that is. (For the younger set, imagine an Instant Pot that never releases steam, just rattles ominously…
Lately, I’ve lost my appetite for angst in romance. Not conflict—romance needs conflict. A love story without obstacles isn’t a story at all. But these days, I have no patience for the ones steeped in suffering, where the characters aren’t just working through the barriers between them but are also drowning in personal misery, trauma,…
Some readers are here for him. The hero is the reason they pick up a book, the reason they stay up too late reading, the reason they ignore texts from actual men who will never, in a million years, deliver a grovel as satisfying as the one on page 327. Maybe he’s brooding and broken,…
Imagine: A brilliant, kind, and compassionate heroine—we’ll call her Avery—has just gotten home from an awful date. This time, the guy–we’ll call him Chandler–had the nerve to talk mostly about his fantasy football team, and she caught him sneaking glances at her cleavage. What a loser! Clearly, this guy—and every man she’d ever gone out…
In romance blurb after blurb, books with love scenes in them are referred to as spicy. Why? I suspect it’s because spicy sounds less sexual than sexy. Which, given that these are sex scenes seems odd. It’s my personal sense, as someone who reads many blurbs every day, that the language used to describe carnal…
Writing a historical romance is like throwing a Regency ball: you need the right setting, the right characters, and a scandal simmering just beneath the surface. But before you embark on your literary journey, let’s discuss a few rules—or, shall we say, guidelines—to ensure your historical love story doesn’t end up feeling like a history…
One of the perks of my job is access to upcoming releases before they’re released. Every day, I look at Edelweiss and NetGalley and check out what’s coming out in the near future. This means I have a pretty good sense of what publishers and authors think will sell in 2025. And maybe they’re right….
This year I discovered TV Time, a well-designed app that makes it easy to keep track of the shows you’ve watched and want to watch. Thus, I can tell you with complete confidence that my favorite TV show of 2024 is Hacks…. or Black Doves … or The Diplomat. I CAN’T CHOOSE–2024 was a year of so…
Increasingly, the short novel seems to me to be the ideal literary form for our tired, distracted but still story-hungry age. The above is from a recent column by Margaret Renkl, a regular guest columnist at the New York Times. I’ve read that our attention spans are shrinking and are, perhaps, more than 30% shorter…
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