Breakups were never more painful, and the HEAs never better. — Romance writers and readers everywhere know three things must happen in a romance for it to be truly a romance: 1) the two people must fall in love, either in a meet-cute, a friends to lovers slow burn process, enemies to lovers or fake dating scenario. Romance readers love their…

A Love Story from 1965 Beatrix and William were introduced by mutual friends from work. Theirs was the quintessential mid ’60s love story. It is a story of a successful man (who happens to be an engineer) meeting a secretary (that would be Beatrix, though she wasn’t his secretary) and…

Our use of language in fiction needs to be more inclusive — I recently wrote my first novel. And hopefully not my last. My main character is a twenty-something Indian American aspiring designer working in New York. She lives in a multicultural, multilingual America. And she speaks American English–which I define as a language in the process of shifting and expanding to…

The Heroine’s Journey — My husband, a writer, former director and stage actor (which yes, feels intimidating) recently read a chapter from the second half of my current novel (I now have a completed rough draft!), and gave me the best compliment ever the other day, “Yeah, it sounds like a book women would…

“Kill Your Darlings” — My novel is written. All 93,000 words. A acceptable length for a rom-com. In a previous incarnation, it was 120,000 words. Yep. Waaaay too long. It was actually 150,000 words before I realized it was two novels and extracted the sequel. This was clearly BEFORE I did my research and…

I wrote my dissertation for exactly five people — my five committee members. My goal was to have my dissertation passed with no changes during my defense. I succeeded. My committee told me, after maybe three hours of animated discussion, that it was the first time in twenty years that…

Driven by Desperation During the Pandemic Until the pandemic struck, I had only ever written dry academic prose filled with jargon and lengthy arguments. The kind of articles that are typically only read by other academics, and likely not many of them, to be honest. Prose that could bore you…

And it can jumpstart yours too, for free — For starters, anyone can write fiction. It’s a myth that you have to be a good writer to write. You only need to be good at it if you want other people to read it. Or read and like it. But if writing for yourself, pour your heart out, mix it up, and say whatever comes…