Romance MFA

2022 Romance Podcast List Update

It’s true! After a two year hiatus, I’ve managed an update of the Romance Podcast List, with over one hundred active podcasts and more than seventy archived podcasts tracked in a Google spreadsheet. Working with a spreadsheet has allowed me to access some vintage computer skills from employment past and use a MailMerge to convert the data into a readable webpage with minimal pain. There may be a…

Top Posts of 2020

It’s the time of summing up, so let’s take a look at the top posts from the Romance MFA in 2020. By page views, here they are. 10. Victorian Language of Flowers List A surprise burst of traffic in December put my Victorian flower language decoder on this year’s list, with almost 2% of my annual traffic. 9. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: Shades of Jane Eyre With my thoughts on classic novels which…

I did an image search for "three day stubble" and then next thing I knew, I had a dozen tabs open for research about beards and facial attractiveness ratings. So I might as well share my findings, right?

I’m working on my third Whitford Crew book and came to a place where I had to go back and count how many days it had been since my hero had an opportunity to shave. That led to an image search for “three day stubble” and then next thing I knew, I had a dozen tabs open for research about beards and facial hair attractiveness ratings. So I might as well share my findings, right?

Most of the…

Romance Writers of America and Racism: Long story short, the RWA has officially come down on the side of "pointing out racism with rude words is worse than acting in racist ways" and it is no longer my professional organization.

It’s been quiet here since I spent October finishing a book draft, then jumped directly into Nanowrimo to write another one which is just about finished and I was going to come back in the New Year with the reading lists and new reviews and whatnot but here’s what needs to be said right now: my professional organization, the Romance Writers of America, has made the decision to uphold an ethics…

If autocorrect has ever ducked up your words, this installment of #romancewriterproblems is for you!

Hey, there was supposed to a post on the blog yesterday. But I’m sick! And starting to worry about my deadline at the end of October! So here’s a filler post to hopefully make you snicker: #romancewriterprobelms with technology.

Most romance writers these days rely on our computers, smart phones, and all the programs they contain to get stories out of our heads and into the world. But sometimes…

Living in the future gives me amazing access to the past: here's a list of the primary sources I often use for free from Google books

In my own writing and research, I’m very lucky to have chosen the late nineteenth century, or Gilded Age, of American history as the setting for my books. It’s an era when there was plentiful printed material being produced, nearly all of which is now in the public domain and a great deal of which has been scanned and made available by Google. Today I want to share some of my Gilded Age…

Mary Balogh’s Slightly Married

My next Regency read is Mary Balogh’s Slightly Married, which came to my attention from NPR’s 2015 list of top 100 romances.  In terms of research and plot, it was reminiscent of Heyer—but definitely not Heyer.

Book details:

Title:  Slightly Married Author: Mary Balogh Original publication date: 2000 Setting time & place:  1814 England He is…a 30 year old ducal heir with an over-developed sense of…

Romance hot takes: so formulaic they could be mad libs! So easy we could let robots write them #amwritingromance

Have you read the latest hot take think piece on romance novels? Romance Twitter was all atwitter about it yesterday.  I only skimmed over it briefly because, as Cat Sebastian pointed out, we’ve all read it before.

https://twitter.com/CatSWrites/status/1163192913456705541

This particular piece included the realization that contemporary romance was “suddenly, shockingly, pretty good.” High praise…

It’s August and I’m going to a music festival on an island. No fancy post this week, but here’s a compilation of Romance Writer Problems so you can snicker over the words of some funny people and, who knows, check out their books if you need something to read for your own vacation–or staycation…

This time we’re looking at the Romance Writer Problem of “Everything is Dirty.” Do we write smutty…

Authors from the Romance MFA Syllabus: film, interview, & letters from Daphne Du Maurier

This is part of an ongoing series to find interviews with authors whose books appear on the Romance MFA syllabus. Previous installments have featured E.M. Forster, E.M. Hull, and Margaret Mitchell. Today I’m looking for Daphne Du Maurier interviews. She’s on the syllabus for Rebecca, one of the not-quite romances I read in 2018.

Du Maurier interviews are a bit thin on the ground, however. She…

Julia Quinn's The Viscount Who Loved Me has an A+ croquet game and a silly corgi, but also echoes of Taming of the Shrew and some old skool elements.

Last time, we learned from Johanna Lindsey that large families can be hilarious. So why not make an even larger family for even more hilarity? While this may sound implausible, as far as I can tell, Julia Quinn pulled it off with the Bridgertons, a family of eight alphabetically named siblings who all get their happily ever afters. I no longer recall exactly why I calculated it better to put the…

Gentle Rogue: an Old Skool romance made up of improbable circumstances, blistering dialogue, and comedic family dyamics, probably best described as a "romp.

I think I would have enjoyed Gentle Rogue much more if I weren’t still cringing and jumping at the slightest shadows after Whitney, My Love. Gentle Rogue is the sort of over the top set of improbable circumstances that is probably best described as a “romp.” This isn’t a book for historical accuracy—it’s for sheer ridiculousness. Just look at the original Fabio cover, one of the old skool covers…