I don't read romance

but I might have to start. Take a look at the blog of Joanna Bourne, who, underneath all the romance stuff, has a bunch of awesome posts about word choice and language and query letters. (Click on the "technical" tag to get around most of the romance stuff if you must, although the excerpts she's got seem pretty good to me.)

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Monday Miscellany

1. I've been watching old episodes of The West Wing on Bravo lately, and have come to the conclusion that I love the character of Sam Seaborn. He's smart, he's earnest, he's a good writer, and he's played by Rob Lowe. What's not to love?* 2. I just bought the cutest jacket at Ann Taylor Loft. I know you care, but it's not every day that one can find a white denim jacket with styling reminiscent of Michael Jackson and a tailored waist. I'm just saying. 3. NaNoWriMo proceeds apace. There is no way that I'm going to be able to keep writing at this pace after this month is over, but I'm on track to finish. It's an interesting project...in some ways the speed is freeing and in other ways it's extremely limited, as to make the word count I have no time to go back and revise. 4. Alien and Aliens are amazing movies. Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection ? Not so much. 5. This week's Glee characterization inconsistency watch: Rache...

Jay Takes A Stand

Moonrat, still at Editorial Ass, is making me think a lot lately. She did a recent post here about sexualized violence in print ads, and connected the dots to sexualized violence in books and other media, which got me thinking about how I treat girls and women in my books. To be clear--I'm a feminist. I believe in equal pay for equal work and reproductive choice, and the whole ball of wax. I'm not going to go into detail about all that here because, frankly, there are people out there whose blogs are dedicated to that kind of thing (like Jezebel *) and they do it way better than I ever could. But that's my political orientation, in case you care. So when I was writing The Book, it was very important to me that my female protagonist S did not fall into any of those "heroine needs saving by the hero" tropes that so many books for teenage girls do. Sure, there's something very "romantic" about the hero swooping in and rescuing the heroine, right? ...

The waiting is the hardest part

As I mentioned, I entered the Fangs, Fur & Fey contest over on their blog (there's a link in the sidebar). And the results are supposed to be posted on Monday, which when all the hook writers would find out whether they should send in pages or not. Cool, cool. But, as it turns out, some of the judges are really on their game, and have been turning in entries earlier. Which have been being posted earlier. Which means that for the last two days I've been checking the website obsessively in the hope of seeing my magic number - 121 - up there. Which it has NOT been. 122 has gone up, but not 121. I'm trying to take this as a good sign. ::fingers crossed:: The contest itself has been real eye-opener. Good hooks, bad hooks, good hooks for books I would never read in a million years, bad hooks for books that I think I would love ... it's really cool. I also love the comments that the judges are making, which are usually right, but which also point out just how mu...

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