Of late, I’ve been seeing more passages that are chock-full of imagery. And this is good, right? Because that’s what The Rules say to do: use vivid words!
But at what point does this become stilted and forced? Does every noun in a sentence need a modifier? For example:
“His rock-hard pecs and chiseled abdominals were almost more distracting than the summer-blue of his penetrating eyes.”
Think of adjectives like salt-they’re only good in moderation. A little sprinkling in the sentence for [...]

I love to write. It is a passion that only writers and those who wish they could be writers can fathom. My family members, God bless them, think I’m crazy. That writing gene must have gotten crimped somewhere in my DNA. I was probably supposed to be a rocket scientist, or brain surgeon.
But man, oh man, how I love to write.
I get to make up larger-than-life characters who fight against immeasurable odds for love in all sorts of exotic [...]

Sitting in the park yesterday, on a perfectly lovely autumn morning, I did a little writing the old-fashioned way. I’m usually all about the electronica, but when the little one needs some fresh air, I’m perfectly willing to leave the battery-challenged laptop at home and scribble away in a notebook. No, not the cute Apple kind of ‘notebook’ that comes in so many lovely colors. I mean a cheap, three-subject, spiral-bound block of paper I bought at the drugstore. And [...]

Got me thinking a bit. Please, I do occasionally think about something beside my own books! A question I asked myself, but am still pondering. By e-book statistics erotica wins out. If you go by the sales figures erotica outsells the other genres. The question then is why. I haven’t figured out exactly why that is so. Certainly both groups of writers are equally good at their craft, and certainly some authors can write both.
I’ve tried to do [...]

The Secret to Writing Romance
By Kathleen Mix, Author of Beyond Paradise
The other day, a beginning writer asked me: What is the secret to writing a romance? How can I get published, too?
I smiled like a Cheshire Cat. The secret is obvious, but new writers often overlook the need for something I call ‘creative love’.
In a romance, the developing relationship between the hero and heroine is the main plot and the skeleton of the book. If the characters’ interactions lack [...]