My Recent Comments

Oh, Christyne -- I'm SO happy for you! Welcome to the SSE family! Is Charles going to be your editor?

Never heard it sung better, m'dear.

If you come up with a title -- either for the book or a series -- that works, marketing-wise, and hasn't already been used in your line (or it's been at least two years since it was last used for another line*), you might be able to keep it.  If not, usually the editor will ask for suggestions and the two of you will work it out together.  In ten years, I've only had one book actually titled by my ed -- one I couldn't title myself for love nor money -- but even my very first title stuck! 

* For reasons unknown, there was a Super out this past March with the same title as my April SSE -- Baby, I'm Yours.  As titles have to be cleared before they can be approved, we can only guess that our eds must've been checking on the same day, so they both assumed it was clear!

 

 

 

That was great!  Reminds me of some of the stuff my #2 son wrote/writes (he's got a somewhat ghoulish outlook on life, too, heh.)

Interestingly, I'm reading Stephen King's BARE BONES, which is actually a compilation of interviews he gave in the late seventies to late eighties, where he talks about the subtext of horror writing -- that the baddies are really metaphors for whatever's most troubling society at the time, i.e. all those irradiated gigundo bugs of the fifties were actually about our fear of The Bomb.

Tell him good job.  Especially in that short word count (I'm sooo envious!) 

...partly for the same reasons as Karen S. -- I'm too darn nit-picky (which might be why I do at least four passes through my own stuff, too!).

I am, however, doing a one chapter aimed-at-SSE critique for the Jo Leigh auction. <g> Will post more when they notify me that the auction's gone live.

SSE is the perfect line for me.   My characters are people I know (or would like to!), my stories ones that could happen to anybody.  Just resolved more quickly than often happens in real life!

And I love the covers, too!  I used to dread mine for SIM, because they never matched my stories.  No more purple people, huzzah!

Betty -- all you have to do is go up to the "Alternative formats" drop-down menu, click on "Podcasts," and find the one you want.  Just make sure your sound is turned up!  (But take heart -- I didn't realize how easy they were to access, either!) 

Hmmm. Based on my own experience -- as in, every "round" heroine I've ever written for H/S has miraculously lost weight by the time she reached the cover -- my gut tells me a truly overweight heroine is probably going to be a hard sell in category romance. There's been so much made about the health issues that go hand-in-hand with obesity that readers may fear for the couple's long-term happy-ever-after. Besides which, IMO, there's almost no way to have the weight not be an issue, just as it is, for good or ill, in real life.

While I'm a huge proponent of authors writing the story they have to tell, I'm also a pragmatist. There may well be a perfect market for your story -- because heaven knows the genre could use a little more diversity! -- but I'm not sure the traditional Harlequin/Silhouette series romance lines are your best bet.

 

...because I learned a loooong time ago if you take life too seriously, you're doomed!   True survivors can see humor even in the midst of life's darkest moments -- otherwise they'd go nuts!

But a droll outlook on life isn't the same as writing comedy, which I don't.  At heart, my stories all deal with some pretty heavy-duty issues which form the backbone of my characters' conflicts.  While there might be the occasional scene written expressly for laughs -- just as in life, there are funny moments -- most of the humor in my books comes from the characters' reactions and observations, not the set-up.  Slapstick ain't my schtick, the occasional shaggy, stinky dog bathing scene notwithstanding. <eg>

Thanks, Linda C!  Although the MOMC books were actually written for Intimate Moments, the only difference between them and my SSEs is that the SIMs are/were longer.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason my backlist SIMs are all being listed as Silhouette Romantic Suspenses in the fronts of my current books, which is completely misleading -- my niche has always been in home-and-hearth stories, no matter what the imprint!