Often writers get rejections that say in essence not enough emotional tension.So what is strange creature “Emotional Tension” It is the No 1 essential ingredient. It’s what hooks your readers…and keeps them turning the page. In romance…it equates to sexual tension.So how do you create it?The first thing a writer should do, and this applies to […]

Why is romance such a popular genre….this is a question that has occupied many a mind over the centuries. In the Georgian and Victorian eras husbands exhorted wives not to allow their daughters to fill their minds with trashy romance novels. Why? Girls were paraded through the Marriage Marts of the day and marriages were arranged […]

Sex scenes are something a lot of writers struggle with, especially novice writers. A lot of this can be traced back to personal hang ups about sex in general. For older writers who grew up thinking that sex was regarded as “dirty” there was good reason for stumbling over writing such scenes. The days of the romance […]

In every workshop we are bombarded by the the importance of the beginning. It has to be crisp…it has to immediately engage the reader…it has to introduce the characters…set up the conflict….delineate the plot… And yet we have very few workshops and pointers on how to finish the damn book.It is the part of writing […]

The more I see of world news the faster I reach for a good uplifting romance novel. After the recent devastation in Christchurch we are again seeing the appalling destruction wreaked by mother nature in Japan. That this time the devastation is on the other side of the world makes it no less terrifying. And reinforces how […]