But the one thing that a book must have to count as a romance novel at all is either a Happily Ever After or Happily For Now. The reader goes into the story knowing that everything is going to turn out all right in the end, better than all right, no matter how dire the circumstances may seem.
And in knowing better, and understanding that romance is both subversive and aggressively feminist and forward thinking, I now hold it to a much higher standard than I ever did in the past.
Passionflix is the Netflix for romance lovers. It’s the Hallmark and Lifetime channels without the handholding and with all the kissing bits left in. It’s the future we, as a genre, have been waiting for for a long time.
I first published my senior year of college, early in 2014, and let me say that there are a great many things I have learned about writing, romance, desire and business since then. Here are just a few.
As many of you likely know, I write romance novels under two pen names. Last week, I talked a little about how this makes for certain challenges, keeping up with marketing and publishing schedules, and more. Despite all of that, however, I still genre hop within each of the pen names, and here’s why--I can’t stop.
People often ask if there’s anything I would tell the younger-writer version of myself, any advice or information I wish I had known then, and the answer is a resounding yes. Start with one pen name.
This past week I returned from Orlando and the 2017 Romance Writers of America annual conference. It was my second year attending the event, and the experience was overwhelmingly fantastic and inspirational. Here are just a few of my favorite highlights from this year’s RWA17!
