It’s never too late to realise a dream

My dream came true when I took early retirement from teaching after thirty-four years at the chalk face to become a published author. When I retired a colleague gave me a pillow embroidered with: ‘May All Your Dreams Come True’ and I set out to make it happen.

So far, it’s been a great journey.

I joined the Romantic Novelists’ Association as a member of the New Writers’ Scheme and took two years to write my first novel Tall, Dark and Kilted. After receiving lots of encouragement I felt the manuscript was ready to be submitted to agents. RNA friends came forward with lots of suggestions what to do next. I will be eternally grateful to Amanda Grange (author of Mr Darcy’s Diary) who suggested that ‘times were a-changing’ and I should self-publish.

Taking Mandy’s advice I self-published Tall, Dark…

NINE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF ROMANCE FICTION

Catherine LaRoche

I spend a lot of time thinking about romance fiction.  My mom reads the books, and I picked up the love of the genre from her when I was a teenager.  She always had a tottering pile of novels beside her bed that I’d rummage through for something to borrow.  Now I write historical romances and, in my day job, I’m a college professor of gender studies and cultural studies.  For the past several years, I’ve included romance fiction in my teaching while I’ve been writing an academic book entitled Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (forthcoming in mid-2015 from Indiana University Press).

My students choose romances from a big box that I bring into class and write responses on them.  We do cut-up exercises with the novels to create alternative storylines.  We write a collaborative online romance with…

…a couple months or so ago, I posted a blog piece about my time as a teenager, employed as a trainee banker in Tobermory, a township with less than a thousand souls, nestled at the edge of the beautiful Tobermory Bay on the Scottish Hebridean Island of Mull…

…many of yeez have asked for a few more snippets of what it was like living there… and I must confess, when I sit back and think of these days, I yearn for them more and more… folks had time to talk with each other…emb’dy remember what that was like?… the internet and SOSYAL NETWURKIN was a thing of the far-distant future… the stuff of H.G.Wells-type novels… what sticks with me most clearly are the mem’ries of people… every one a character… every one a real personality…. Gaelic music sat at the heart of the informal house ceilidhs, or gatherings at home…