Since I didn’t stay offline as much as I should have and stumbled into Discourse, I’m going to go on record stating emphatically that no one owes you a relationship. No one owes you a debate about whether they owe you a relationship. No one owes you “closure” of the relationship they don’t owe you. […]
The Green Banana Lovers didn’t tap out this time until there was only one banana left, which isn’t enough to make banana bread.[efn_note]One of two acceptable uses for bananas, the second being bananas Foster (sans booze for me).[/efn_note] I considered making a half batch of the batter and baking it in a cake pan to
The following is written with a presumption of intact sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. I am not qualified to lead a discussion about sensory impairments in writing. I apologize to everyone excluded by this falsely “all-encompassing” treatment. Observational Hierarchy In the absence of sensory impairment, there is an observational hierarchy of things that demand
Years ago, I read a romance novel in which the main characters had basically resolved all their conflicts by the midpoint. The story could have ended right there and been a satisfying novella, but somebody wanted 300 pages instead of 150, so on page 151, Evil Cousin Alphonse burst onto the scene with not one
I read a book earlier this month that caused an urge to write a salty email to an editor who should have done a lot more work than they did and sugary emails to the editors who’ve kicked my ass over the years and taught me to self-correct a lot of problems before a manuscript
I recently attended an editing workshop hosted by a trad-pub romance editor who said, “Head hopping is fine! All the greats do it, and it works fine!” I didn’t catch much after that because of the steam whistling out of my ears, but I’m pretty sure we’d disagree on other fundamentals. Then I came home
I woke up earlier this week to find that all of my spoons were gone. I had to declare spoon bankruptcy. I felt for several days like I would never be able to acquire another spoon for the rest of my life. As a result, I crawled into my shell and bolted the doors closed
I’ve been having a hard time reading contemporary romance lately, with an 80% didn’t like/didn’t finish rate. These aren’t books I randomly selected—I read samples and negative reviews and didn’t see any red flags to keep me away from the buy button. When I spent my money, I believed I had made a good decision
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled into a group of writers complaining about the internalized misogyny of reviewers. Many of the points were valid. A man can screw his way across a continent and still be lovable, but a woman who isn’t a virgin is a filthy whore. A man can be an asshole and
The category of Shit Never to Be Done presented today falls under the heading of “show, don’t tell” in the grandest sense of the meaning. A lot of things, frankly, aren’t important enough to be shown, in which case I’m all for briefly telling what needs to be known and moving on to showing the