In the fall of 2014, I had the very good fortune to be invited to travel to Scotland as part of a group of seven exceptional women—Deborah Barnhart, Lorraine Heath, Liz LeCoy, Cathy Maxwell, Kerrelyn Sparks, Bonnie Tucker and myself—romance writers all, […]
I liked James and Lizzie but had a hard time understanding why they made the choices they did. James, in the name of his work, allows Lizzie to suffer tremendously while claiming to love her. Lizzie, bedazzled by sex with James and still hell-bent on being independent, behaves in ways that are at times unsympathetic and flat-out self-destructive. And for all the thinking they do about each other — and Ms. Essex spends a good deal of time relating her characters’ thoughts — neither really sees the other very clearly until, perhaps, the end of the novel. This lack of unambiguous relationship development combined with too […]
One of the primary pleasures in revising these works is that I had the opportunity to revisit the characters that first made me want to write romance—those voices in my head that would not be silenced until I paid proper attention and wrote them down. Strong, sure, quick-witted […]
