Want to show us the cover of that romance novel you're reading?

My regular column is up today at Romancing the Blog. I wrote about my aversion to sexually suggestive bookcovers and fully expected to get slammed in the Comments for being old-fashioned. To my surprise, nearly all of the commenters--including a couple of erotic-romance writers--are saying that they, too, are often embarrassed by "sexy" bookcovers.

Pop over and share your opinion--or leave it here if you prefer.

Chick lit: Was it all about the shoes, after all?

A friend pointed me to an interesting article titled, "Women's Fiction Forecast" at Writer's Digest. The article begins:

Despite periodic rants from literary critics that chick lit shouldn't be allowed in print and fearful speculation from chick-lit writers that the genre has peaked, this trendy offshoot of romance is alive and well and filling local bookstores with pink cover art. In fact, the form has prospered so enormously that nearly every sector of popular fiction hopes to institute its own particular version.

Well, that sounds very nice. Chick lit continues to prosper. But wait. Have you clicked over to the article yet? When you do, you'll see this in bold print under the headline:

Is chick lit on the way out? Don't bet your Blahniks. Instead, the genre has branched out into surprising new arenas, offering great opportunities for aspiring novelists—and even nonfiction writers.

Yes, of course they had to bring up shoes, didn't they? Because we are, after all, talking about chick lit. And people hear "chick lit" and think "shoes" just like they hear "romance novel" and think "bodice-ripper." That's why this raised my eyebrows:

What has changed is the reader's appreciation for the depth of character and circumstances that this topic can cover, [literary agent Nadia] Cornier says. "The novels are no longer just about owning that great pair of shoes. Chick lit, in all its recently varied forms, focuses on women's lives and tribulations in a fun-filled way

Strange. A few years ago, if you had dared to suggest the novels were about little more than self-absorbed, cappucino-guzzling young women searching for the perfect designer handbag, chick lit fans would have swarmed over you and pecked you until you promised to show some respect for their genre. Chick lit is not just about owning that great pair of shoes, they shrilled back then. Chick lit comes in varied forms and focuses on women's lives and tribulations in a fun-filled way.

Now we're being told that chick lit is here to stay because it has grown; it has moved beyond its former giddy focus on shopping and shoes.

I'm confused. Either chick was exactly what some of us accused it of being or it was not. And if it wasn't all about the shoes, then why are the people who love it so eager to to have us believe the genre has grown up?

Chick lit lovers and haters, have your say in the comments.

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UPDATED 2:38 PM (EST)

A just received an e-mail from Christian chick lit author Kristin Billerbeck, who said this Writer's Digest article, which carries a dateline of February 11, 2008, is in fact a few years old. She was interviewed for the article and was quoted in it, but I didn't see that because the article is showing up in my browser (even after refreshing) as a single page--and Kristin is not mentioned on the first page.

To get some idea of just how old the article might be, I looked up a couple of the book titles it mentions. They were published in 2004.

I can't imagine why WD would run an old article under a new dateline, but there it is.

Books I am not reading

We all have them--books on the coffee table or the bedside table that are collecting dust because we're not reading them. Oh, we meant to start them (or finish them), we really did, but somehow we just...didn't.

Right now I'm not reading Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams, by Lynne Withey. The first few chapters were fascinating, but I put the book down a few months ago and I haven't picked it up again because I'm no longer in the mood to read a biography.

(So that's where my silver-plated bookmark got to! I was looking for it just the other day.)

Recently my Number One Son read Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and wanted to discuss it with me. It's been twenty years since I read it, I told him, I'd need to brush up. I snagged a copy from Amazon just before Christmas, looked at the first few pages, and got distracted. Now here it sits in my office, not being read. (Behind Zen is the small rubber ball I bounce off my closed office door whenever I need to let off some writerly steam.)

Another book I am not reading is Walden. As I have already mentioned a time or two on this blog, I have been not reading Walden for years. I have tried and tried, but I just can't get into it.

What books are you not reading, and why?

Famous last words: closing lines from beloved novels

We often see lists of best opening lines of novels, but why is so little attention given to last lines? American Book Review has compiled a list of 100 Best Last Lines from Novels (PDF file).

I gave the pages a quick skim and then recalled some of my favorite last lines, none of which made the list:

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
--Willa Cather, My Ántonia

When at last he turned away, hastening for fear he should be late, there in the sky before him a bank of cloud lay brightly, bearing the shape of battlements.
--A.J. Cronin, The Citadel

Her eyes were closed, and a grin was slowly forming at the corners of her mouth.
--John Grisham, A Painted House

And wherever the mist settled, its radiance sparked and then faded, and the land turned to living green.
--Laura Kinsale, Uncertain Magic

What are some of your favorite last lines?

The imperfect library

This article in The Telegraph claims that one can build a "perfect" library out of a mere 110 books:

From classics and sci-fi to poetry, biographies and books that changed the world… we present the ultimate reading list.

I would agree that most of the listed books are must-haves. But one hundred and ten books is hardly a library, let alone a perfect library. It's only a start. Even in hardcover, that number of books would take up only about three shelves of the average bookcase.

I own only 42 of the books on the list. Which means, I suppose, that my library is not perfect. But I knew that already. The library of a booklover is always growing and evolving and proving there's no such thing as a complete or a perfect library.

But that's part of the fun, don't you think?

Are there too many romance novels being published these days?

Today at Romancing the Blog, Kassia Krozser writes that she is "terrified by the number of romance novels published each month." Yeah, I think she's indulging in a little hyperbole there; I really don't think she's that easy to frighten. But she writes:

The industry is burgeoning — new players every day. The industry is changing — new formats are ascending. The industry is morphing — new genres and sub-genres are emerging.

But are romance readers really being served? Are the books being published, sold, really the best of the best? Or, as I suspect, are we seeing an increase in quantity with a slackening of quality?

Yep, that's right: She'd like to see a limited selection of books on the shelves, and she'd like all of those books to be of high quality. She writes:

What if there were fewer books but the [reading] experience was more satisfying?

Kassia knows that I admire her and have been a faithful reader of her blog, Booksquare for several years. But every once in a while she writes something downright goofy, and here's a fine example of that. The problem with her suggestion that only "the best of the best" books should be published is that she would want to decide which books were worthy of shelf space. And since she and I have very different reading tastes, I'd worry that she would advocate trashing some of the books I consider treasures.

I happen to agree with Kassia that the romance sections of today's bookstores are mostly full of junk. But since Kassia and I--and the rest of you--will never agree on exactly which books deserve to be published and which don't, I think that broad selection is a very good thing for all of us.

Confessions of a book trasher

From a Time article on "The Unabridged Laws of Library Management":

RULE #1: THE PRIME DIRECTIVE -- It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman's living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman.

Hmm. Where do you suppose Matt Selman keep all the books he has purchased or borrowed or been gifted with but has not yet read? Stacked under the kitchen sink? And does he keep all of the books he reads, or just the ones he reads and likes?

There are a number of unread books in my living room bookcases. There are also quite a few books I have begun but have been unable to finish, although I will try again one day because I suspect I'll be glad to have read them. Moby Dick and the newly deceased Bill Buckley's Brothers No More are two novels in that category.

If I love a book and believe I may read it again one day, I'll keep it. I do not keep books that I have read or skimmed and have no further use for, but I do try to find good homes for them. The way I figure it, a book that doesn't knock my socks off deserves a chance to knock somebody else's socks off. But a bad book must be punished, so into the paper-recylcling bin it goes. I never give bad books away because I don't want to play any role in promoting bad writing or what I consider to be offensive subject matter.

This morning I trashed three bad books, two of which had been sent to me, I believe, in the hope that I would mention them here on NRJW. (I gave them a glance and decided both authors were darn lucky I don't review books on this blog.) The third book was a romance novel I had to judge for Romance Writers of America's RITA contest. (On a scale of 1-10, I gave it a 2, then regretted my generosity. I wouldn't even reccommend lining a birdcage with those pages unless it could be established beyond any doubt that the bird was illiterate.)

What's your criteria for keeping and discarding books?

Steve Jobs: people don't read anymore

Apple Inc. co-founder and chairman Steve Jobs was quoted in last week in The New York Times:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product [Amazon's Kindle book reader] is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

I haven't been impressed by the Kindle either, but if Mr. Jobs honestly believes people don't read anymore, I'm curious to know what he makes of the fact that in 2006, the book industry racked up $6.31 billion in net revenue from retail sales. (According to Romance Writers of America's 2006 ROMstat Report, romance novels accounted for $1.37 billion of that amount.)

That might not be big money to Mr. Jobs, but it sure impresses me. And it means that somebody is reading books. Lots of books.

Will the WGA strike turn watchers into readers?

I suppose this is downright unAmerican of us, but my hunk o' burnin' love and I own only one television set. Now that we no longer have kids in the house, the appliance often stays dark for days at a time. Our TV is never turned on "for company" in a quiet house--when we want noise, we listen to music. For us, TV viewing is a deliberate act that can be accomplished only by going downstairs to the finished basement and the room that is used exclusively for that purpose.

In the past seven days, I have watched exactly one hour of television. (I caught "House" on Tuesday night.) And let me tell you, it wasn't anywhere near as entertaining as a good book.

As you might surmise, the film and TV writers' strike, even if prolonged, will affect my life not at all. Maybe I'm a little unusual in that respect. Still, I can't help wondering whether the studios and the Writers Guild of America are about to (unwittingly) sign the death warrant for their industry. I'll be surprised if droves of TV-addicted Americans don't find it easy to kick the habit once their viewing choices have dwindled to endless reruns interspersed with cobbled-together "reality" shows.

I just found this interesting bit in the Los Angeles Times:

Almost 2 out of 3 Americans, or 63%, said they were more inclined to side with writers in their dispute with major studios, according to a survey by Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business Management that is scheduled to be released today.

Will that percentage increase as time goes by and Americans get cranky because they're missing their shows? Will the disgruntled viewers settle down to watch bad television, or will they abandon their TV habits? This from the Times article:

[Pepperdine labor economist David] Smith said the public support could wane if the strike disrupted consumers' TV viewing habits. Though several shows have stopped shooting, viewers won't notice much change until early next year, when reruns, sports and reality shows replace scripted programs.

When asked about the prospect of reruns replacing new shows, and 35% said they would spend more time on the Internet.

42% of the respondents said they would read more.

Just three months ago, The Washington Post reported this:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday [August 21]. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year _ half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

It'll be interesting to see if the Writers Guild of America strike drives book sales up.

Will you be reading more than ever this winter? Have your say in the Comments.

On cheeseburgers and book snobs

I saw this in The Guardian's Books Blog a couple of weeks ago, but haven't had time to blog about it until now. Under the title, "Live first, write later" comes this subheading: Bookshops are littered with underdeveloped work by young authors. It takes a mature novelist to write a masterpiece.

Wow. Surely no reasonable person would suggest that bookstores should peddle only masterpieces. But the post begins:

Should all novelists under 30 be banned from publication? That might sound a bit extreme or even absurd, but let's dig a little deeper. How do you begin to validate such an outrageous proposition? For starters, consider these authors: James Joyce, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Richard Brautigan, Knut Hamsun, Sherwood Anderson and Mark SaFranko. The later work of all these writers is undeniably superior as it is more rounded and contains greater emotional depth.

Most writers take years to get to grips with their chosen craft. And to produce anything of literary worth, they need to have lived a little, taken jobs, travelled, had a series of love affairs, shot a man in Reno. How can you write about life if you haven't even lived it?

It continues in the same obnoxious vein: authors have no business writing, publishers have no business buying, and booksellers have no business peddling books that are not masterpieces. Take a look at this conclusion:

Ultimately, publishers and marketing folk have to take some responsibility for this systematic denigration of our precious culture. Brilliant writers will be lost forever, and publishing young, not-yet-ready authors and hyping them into oblivion does the writers themselves few favours. Where do they go from there? If they are told they are good when they've yet to develop, how can they judge the validity of everything they do afterwards?

Maybe banning all novelists under 30 is a fanciful idea, but if publishers used this awkward notion as some sort of yardstick, our bookshelves might contain a good deal more than just pretty covers, pretty pictures and problematic prose.

Is this guy serious? Does he really believe a book isn't worth reading unless it's a masterpiece? (And whose definition of "masterpiece" is he using, anyway?)

I enjoy fine dining, and have had some meals in five-star restaurants that I've talked about for weeks afterward. But last week I had a really good cheeseburger from Wendy's. The beef was juicy, the lettuce was fresh and plentiful, the onions were sweet and crisp. It was good. Just because it was cheap, easy to obtain, served up quickly, and pretty much forgotten an hour later doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it from first bite to last.

I've read books that were almost as easily forgotten as that cheeseburger--but while reading them, I enjoyed myself immensely. They were, emphatically, not masterpieces, but they had value to me, at least for a time, and I like to think that made them worth writing, worth publishing, and worth the space they once took up on bookstore shelves.

That's why I'm not offended when people criticize my books or make derogatory statements about the genre I write in. Tell me my latest book is not a masterpiece and I'll heartily agree; while I have some small talent, I'll never be a great romance writer. But tell me my book is not worth the paper it's printed on and I won't be crushed because I simply won't believe you. Tell me you hated my book and I won't question the quality of my writing, I'll just wonder what's wrong with you.

An author doesn't write for publication unless she feels she has something to offer the world. Publishers don't buy books unless they believe readers will want them. Bookstores don't stock books unless they have a pretty good idea the things will sell. Admittedly, most published novels don't even approach greatness. But many of them are good. To maintain that such "non-masterpiece" books should never have been written because the authors weren't (or weren't yet) capable of producing "gourmet" fare is just plain dumb.

Doing the continuity series dance

In just over a week, I must submit the complete manuscript for the continuity series book I've been working on. I said some time ago that I would explain the writing process for this kind of book, and since it's difficult to wrap my mind around anything else right now, it looks like today's the day.

In the romance world--and by that I mean the Harlequin world--a continuity series is a set of interrelated books written by different authors. There are generally 6-12 books/authors involved, and the novels are usually released one a month. Readers just eat these things up, and will watch for each book in the series because they're eager to revisit the setting and the characters they've come to care about. They want to know what happens next.

The series I'm involved in, Love Inspired's "Homecoming Heroes," will feature six books, to be released from July through December of next year. I'm writing the third book in the series. As is usual with these novels, each will feature a complete love story, but will contain subplots that will run the length of the series. That means that although you'll get to know my hero and heroine and will see them make a commitment to each other by the end of my book, there will be three subplots that will remain unresolved. You'll have to read books 4, 5, and 6 to find out how those are wrapped up.

To tell you the truth, that's not very attractive to me as a reader. I've never been wild about books that aren't finished by the last page (which is part of the reason I still haven't read a Harry Potter book). But apparently, I'm an odd bird. Romance readers love continuity series books. So when my editor invited me to write the third book of Homecoming Heroes, I decided to give it a try.

Each of the Homecoming Heroes books will feature either a hero or a heroine soldier who has just come home to our fictional Army base in Texas following his or her deployment to the Middle East. The series will have a small town feel, and you'll see most of the characters dance in and out of the other books.

These stories are tricky to coordinate. As is usual, Homecoming Heroes began with a series "bible" which was created by the Love Inspired editors. They dreamed up basic character sketches for the heroes and heroines of each book and provided a simple storyline for the three subplots that run through the series. Next, they discussed which authors they wanted to invite to write each of the books. (The copyrights on these books won't be held by the individual authors but by Harlequin, because the original concept for the series was theirs.)

When all six authors were on board, our editor e-mailed us and suggested that we set up a private e-mail loop. As I recall, that happened around the middle of June, giving us about three months to write our books.

Each of the authors jumped into the project in her own way, but a great deal of research had to be shared via the private loop. There were many details in the bible that just didn't work for our story once we got going, but I understand that's par for the course. What sounds like a good idea in the editor-prepared bible can become problematic when the authors begin researching and putting the stories together. For example, in our series a certain hero was meant to be an Army pilot who flies a foreign national--an orphaned child--to Texas for medical treatment and subsequent adoption. The authors were charmed by that storyline until we learned that Army aviators fly helicopters, not fixed-wing aircraft; hospital planes are flown to the U.S. by the Air Force. Also, while our orphan could get a medical visa to come to the U.S., we learned that such a child couldn't stay here and be adopted. There is no visa for that. So some changes had to be made in the bible.

It was sometimes frustrating but ultimately satisfying to hammer out those and other continuity details. To solve some problems in the bible, we had to invent another secondary character. Then somebody got the idea to kill the guy for dramatic effect. "No, he can't die before Book Three," I whined. "I need him. Kill him in Book Four if you want." (Was that callous of me? I blame the pressures of working under a tight deadline.)

The loop has been fairly quiet in the past couple of weeks. We're all finishing our books. When we turn in the manuscripts, our editors will comb through them carefully, looking for small continuity errors, like a character having blond hair in Book One and red hair in Book Six (without any apparent assist by chemicals), and serious problems, like a guy having a glorious death scene in Book Two and then drinking a cup of coffee in Book Three. We authors have tried hard to stay on the same page: "Does our orphan have a stuffed animal?" I asked a week or two ago. "I just gave him a teddy bear, so if somebody has him cuddling a stuffed rabbit, please speak up." "What's the name of the ice-cream parlor next to the town green?" someone else asked. "We decided to call it The Creamery," another author replied. "Fine," said the first. "What's the interior like? Red vinyl booths?" When I needed to know just how well our foreign-born orphan handled the English language, the author of Book One posted a scene containing dialogue to the e-mail loop.

Romance novelists are often accused of slapping books together without regard for quality, but I can tell you that we're working hard to make Homecoming Heroes as entertaining and as believable as possible. A month or so after we turn in our manuscripts, we'll get revision letters from the editors, who will have carefully read all six of the stories and identified problems in the big picture that we've been unable to see. Then we'll go back to work tightening our own stories and the series as a whole.

That's the process. And now if you'll excuse me, I must get back to it. This puppy goes in the mail next Friday.

Leaving books behind

For quirky news on books and literature, I always look to the Brits, especially the Telegraph:

Alistair Campbell, the former Downing Street communications chief, received an unwelcome literary accolade today.

His book The Blair Years topped the charts of a list of the latest literary works most often left behind in hotel rooms, compiled by hotel chain Travelodge.

This cracked me up. Why on earth is Travelodge tallying left-behind books?

Never mind. What interests me even more is why the Telegraph believes it's a shame to top the list of left-behinds. Why assume that people abandoned the books because they didn't like or weren't able to finish them? For all we know, the books were thoroughly enjoyed and digested and then left by oversight or to lighten suitcase loads.

The new Harry Potter book was Number 10 on the left-behind list.

So. What books have you left behind on planes, trains, and in hotel rooms? And why did you leave them?

How to read a book

From Bookselling This Week:

An Associated Press/Ipsos poll, released on Tuesday, revealed that 27 percent of the approximately 1,000 U.S. adults polled had not read a book in the past year. However, the study showed that more than half of those who did read a book in the past year had read more than six books, and over a quarter had read more than 15.

Why don't more people read books? Could it be that they're simply afraid of trying something new?

See if you don't get a good belly laugh out of this video:



(Hat tip to The Internet Writing Journal for the link.)

Respecting books

There's a good question in today's Telegraph.:

Do you ever start talking to an incredibly boring person at a party and say to yourself, after five minutes: "Well, he's incredibly boring, but I'll talk to him for another 30 hours. He's bound to get better." Or, when you've finished with a newspaper you've enjoyed, do you ever put it on a shelf on prominent display so that you can admire it from a distance and never read it again?

No? Well, why do so many people do the same with books?

Beats me. As I've said before, one of the reasons I'm not a good book reviewer or contest judge is that I simply can't finish a book I'm not enjoying. But I never dreamed that would be a problem yesterday, when I finally got my hands on The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes, which I believed would be an adorable story because it was co-written by Jennifer Crusie, a favorite of mine.

I didn't make it to Chapter Two before I started skipping and skimming pages. The story just bugged me. It's not like I have anything against magic in romance novels, because I dearly loved Laura Kinsale's Uncertain Magic. But if you've ever watched the TV show "Charmed," you have already seen everything in Jenny's latest book. Seriously. The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes are three twentysomething sisters who live together and must join their magical powers (each has a different power--sound familiar?) to defeat their wicked witch of an aunt while simultaneously discovering their true loves.

Please. I've never read the book's other two authors, Eileen Dreyer and Anne Stuart, but I would hope they're better than this. I know Jenny is.

As to the other part of the question in the Telegraph article, I don't keep books unless I mean to read them again. Bad books, I throw away.

Right now The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes is in my kitchen trash can underneath a pile of used tea leaves. Sorry, Jenny.

Has Harry Potter boosted novel reading?

Because I've been out of the country (read: vacationing in Texas) for two weeks, I just now got around to reading a July 15 Harry Potter piece in The Washington Post. No, don't yawn. The article makes several thought-provoking points. Check out this bit about adults reading Harry Potter books:

I'd like to think that this is a romantic return to youth, but it looks like a bad case of cultural infantilism. And when we're not horning in on our kids' favorite books, most of us aren't reading anything at all. More than half the adults in this country won't pick up a novel this year, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade.

That statistic startles me, even though I hear it again and again. Whenever I confess to people who work for a living that I'm a book critic, I inevitably get the same response: "Imagine being able to sit around all day just reading novels!" Then they turn to each other and shake their heads, amazed that anything so effete should pass for a profession. (I can see it in their eyes: the little tufted pillow, the box of bonbons nearby.) "I don't read fiction," they say, suddenly serious. "I have so little time nowadays that when I read, I like to learn something." But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"

Of course, it's not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it's an invitation to recite the loyalty oath.

Every time I tell someone I'm a writer, I get the Harry Potter question: What do I think of the books? My answer is invariably, "Nothing at all, because I've never read any of them." I'm a busy woman, and my novel-reading isn't determined by popular vote. I'm not very interested in juvenile literature and fantasy stories, so I've never been curious enough about the Harry Potter doorstops to pick up one and read the back-cover copy, let alone actually open the book.

We commonly hear that J.K. Rowling's work has motivated kids and even adults to read fiction. But where's the evidence for that? From what I can tell, nobody's been reading anything but Harry Potter books. If the series has truly whetted our culture's appetite for novel-reading, we should have already noticed an upswing in non-Harry fiction sales. After all, it's been ten years since the world first met the young wizard. And we should be hearing talk of other novels at kids' soccer games and at our office water coolers.

But that's not happening, is it?

Have your say about Harry in the Comments.

Reading big books in little bites

From yesterday's Washington Post:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Never had time to read "Moby Dick" and want something weightier than spam to read on your Blackberry on the way to work?

A new Web site is offering to send classic books in bite-size installments to your handheld device or e-mail every morning before you go to work, or whenever you want, for free.

The e-mails from www.dailylit.com are designed to be read in under five minutes.

Sounds like a fun idea--for other people. For me, a daily five-minute reading from a really good book would be like Chinese water torture.

To be continued...or not

Here's a giggler from Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen on her move to writing fiction:

People are fascinated that somebody who is a journalist can suddenly start making things up.

The cynic in me is just dying to comment, but never mind that. What I meant to blog about was this interesting answer to a question put to Ms. Quindlen in last week's Kansas City Star:

Do you like that as a novelist you can stay with your characters longer than you can as a journalist?

You’re with them longer, but the truth is in some ways you have a different obligation to them. When you stop writing about people you cover as a reporter, they’re left with their lives. When you stop writing about your characters, their lives cease. So you feel an obligation toward them as you’re writing because you’re keenly aware you’re going to put a period at the end of the sentence. People will ask, “What happened to Robert after Black and Blue,” and I say, “I left when you did.” But in the fast and dirty of journalism you walk away, and that has caused me more than a few pangs of guilt.”

People often ask me what happened to certain characters in my books after the stories ended. This baffles me. I'd like to follow Ms. Quindlen's lead and say, "I left when you did," but I'm afraid readers would find that a bit abrupt. So I usually make something up on the spot. Seriously.

Like most writers, I have trouble letting go of my characters when it's time to finish the book. If readers have a similar letting-go problem, I'm thrilled because that means I did my job and wrote some memorable characters.

When readers and my editor clamored for me to bring back a secondary character from my popular first book, Finding Hope, I held out for a while and then caved and wrote Tom Hartman's story. But as things turned out, my editor didn't want to buy it. I have explained that to a couple of hundred readers (no exaggeration), adding that I might one day rework that finished manuscript and try again to sell it. But at present I'm much more interested in other projects.

Maybe this will change as I continue to grow as a writer. But for now, my aim is to write stand-alone books that are over when they're over-- except for any daydreaming readers may care to indulge in regarding what might happen next. Yes, I realize that writers who hook readers on a series of books are ensuring great sales. But I don't like sequels and I especially don't like romance-novel series. If you want to see me yawn, offer me eight books containing the love stories of eight hunky brothers called something like The Westons of Renegade Ranch.

As a reader and a writer, I want a completely new experience from every novel. I want each book to lure me into a new world populated by characters I haven't met before. But that's my preference. What's yours?

Famous first words

Debra Hamel has come up with a fun idea: TwitterLit.com. This from her page:

What is TwitterLit? Twice a day, at about 12:00 AM and 12:00PM GMT, I post the first line of a book, without the author's name or book title, but with a link (to Amazon.com) so you can see what book the line is from. Why? Because it's fun! A quick literary teaser for you twice daily. The posts are also available for subscription via RSS and Twitter.

I'm always interested in collections of first lines, so I've snagged the RSS feed and will probably glance at the site every few days. All the best, Debra!

Falling in love with romance novels

Here in the U.S., clueless people often ridicule romance novels by calling the books--even those by other publishers--"trashy Harlequins." In the U.K., meanies like to snicker at Mills and Boon books. As it happens, Mills and Boon is owned by Harlequin Enterprises. Of course, not all romance novels are published by Mills and Boon or Harlequin, but those brand names have for many years served as lightning rods for people who love to despise our genre.

Romance readers are made, not born, and it's a fact that many converts to the genre were once some of its most vocal critics--until they actually read a romance novel. One such story has been recounted in The Guardian's book blog. It begins:

The combination of a dead phone, a frozen iPod and a distinct lack of any reading or writing material whatsoever on a recent train journey down from Leeds forced me to do something I've never done before. I picked up a discarded Mills & Boon book from the seat opposite me and read it. And I loved it.

Having spent a lifetime looking down my nose at the genre I would like to praise them for their honesty, dependability and fail-safe ability to cheer. Free from literary pretension, marketing babble, or anyone else's convoluted opinion brandished on the front, the book was refreshingly honest with me from the start.

At a glance I was provided with the essence of the story; image, category and title. On the bottom right corner of the book you learn what kind of tale you're in for: Modern Romance, Romance, Historical Romance, Medical Romance and Blaze, the spread of which ensures that there's something for everyone, using an orderly system of filling that is appealing in itself.

By the time she got off the train, she was a fan of "category" romance novels. How's that for a happy ending?

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My monthly(ish) column is up at Romancing the Blog. Check it out, and be sure to read the Comments, where people are sharing their favorite romance-reading rituals.

New trend: teenagers buying books

This morning Sarah Weinman at Galleycat linked to an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I clicked over to the PI and got a giddy little thrill from the headline, "Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades." Here's a juicy excerpt:

It's a time of strong writing and strong sales as readers in the 12-to-18 age group rock the marketplace.

"Kids are buying books in quantities we've never seen before," said Booklist magazine critic Michael Cart, a leading authority on young adult literature. "And publishers are courting young adults in ways we haven't seen since the 1940s."

Credit a bulging teen population, a surge of global talent and perhaps a bit of Harry Potter afterglow as the preteen Muggles of yesteryear carry an ingrained reading habit into later adolescence.

Not only are teen book sales booming -- up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005, by one industry analysis -- but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.

That's very good news for society and for the publishing industry. And for romance writers, too:

Fantasy and graphic novels are especially hot, and adventure, romance, humor and gritty coming-of-age tales remain perennial favorites.

There are a lot more kids in this new generation than I realized:

There are many reasons for the turnaround, not least the sheer size of the teen population -- well over 30 million kids with ready cash in their pockets. Called Gen Y or Millennials, they trail only the baby boomers in number.

"The publishing world has recognized that teens have a lot of disposable income, and they're willing to spend it," Nelson said. "They buy books. They (especially) buy paperbacks."

Excellent. I think I'll go write one.