Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.
I remember when I was a kid, going to The Jones Store and Macy’s around Christmas time gathering our Santa choices, then wandering around to find a clerk to take your money. Unfortunately, “there was no one there to take my money and they wasted my time by making me go fetch them” isn’t a good defense for walking out of the store with what you want, even if you can break it out on a wage basis and demonstrate adequate opportunity loss.
Harlequin. Bite me.
I’d like to see new and different in romance. It took Ellora’s Cave and Loose Id and Samhain to break you out into genres you wouldn’t touch before (and no, they’re not all erotica).
I’d like to see you lead the way into e-publishing but again, you didn’t get in gear until the above-mentioned trailblazers kicked your butts. Apparently not even Baen was able to get to you like those three did.
.
The consignment system of inventory management is, I believe, in its late afternoon and Barnes & Noble CEO Riggio wants to push it into that good night. Agent Richard Curtis (and foresightful creator of e-Reads) points out that it’s not going away–on the dead-tree book brick’n’mortar playground, but, he says,
My first full-on real-life romance novel was Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss. Naturally, it’s on my keeper shelf right next to The Wolf and the Dove. I have the ones with the original covers, though they are far from mint. The namby pamby covers on the ones with the links are meh. Unlike most of my contemporaries whose first (or close to it) romance experience was Woodiwiss, mine wasn’t with The Flame and the Flower or Ashes in the Wind, neither of which I cared for.
But she’s not my guilty pleasure.
It’s Carole Mortimer of Harlequin Presents circa 1979 through, oh, I guess around 1986.
See, the thing is, I keep getting these great ideas to blog about, but then I get distracted and they don’t gel and I have about 6 half-written posts in my drafts folder that kinda sorta mean something to me now, but not really. Prepare for leftovers, kiddies, because mommy’s tired and she doesn’t want to cook dinner.
This is what’s apparently called “good” gossip. I shall take the liberty of bragging.
In my review of Phyllida, I made a reference to an average review it earned at Amazon with the caveat that the reviewer “stayed up all night to read the last two hundred pages, because I was engrossed with the characters’ stories.” To which my response was, that’s the mother lode.
I’ve thought a lot about this lately, what I pick up, what I put down. I’ll finish a book regardless; it’s just something I do. I can’t stand to leave a book unfinished, no matter how torturous. Also, I’m not one of those readers who has to be absolutely captivated by the first or third page. I’ll give an author a good 50 pages to live up to the blurb (which is what would have hooked me enough to buy it), sink that hook in my mouth, and reel me in. (Which is kind of a moot point anyway, since I’m going to finish it.)