romance romance novel romance tropes time travel fiction

A Word About Billionaire (and Other Scummy) Romance Tropes

Warning — this is a rant about romance tropes that get under my skin and not in a good way. Plus recommendations for good romance reading. Did I get your attention when I mentioned billionaire? That category of fiction that’s blowing through old sales records, reinventing the romance genre, and — in my opinion — leading young readers astray.

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Valentine’s Day & My Favorite Love Stories

LOVE STORIES! My favorite love stories in fiction span a variety of genres and authors. But there are some common threads. I like love stories that feature a heroine who has to shed her illusions to find love. Most of my favorites aren’t what we’d technically classify as romance novels. The stories are often broader.

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My Favorite Fictional Sweethearts

Valentine’s Day approaches, and over on Goodreads, someone asked me what are my favorite fictional couples. I cheated, of course, and managed to get in three pairs of lovers. First, I’d have to say Romeo and Juliet. There’s nothing like starry-eyed and highly sexed young lovers spouting the world’s most enchanting, poetic love lines  as they barrel toward their doom. Right behind that pair are, for me, Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy in the book…

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What If Your Heroes Won’t Play Nice?

What if you can’t get your two favorite heroes from history to play nice? That’s the problem my main character, art historian May Gold has in my WIP novel The Renaissance Club. She has a plan to get her idol, Gianlorenzo Bernini, the rock star artist of the Renaissance, and his chief rival, architect Borromini, to play nice and work together. Trouble is, she has to travel four centuries to bring it about. Time isn’t…

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Time-traveling in Italy

While researching time-travel novels as I work on my novel, The Renaissance Club,  I saw that Google can grab plenty of articles that answer the question, “When is the best time to travel to Italy?” But none answered, “The Seventeenth Century.” It seems Rick Steeves and Frommer’s can’t propel me back in time to the Renaissance and Baroque to watch splendors of art and architecture arise from the workshops of  Gianlorenzo Bernini and his competitors.…

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Happily buried in the Italian Renaissance

I’m coming down the home stretch (= two-thirds through) of what I sincerely hope is the final revision of my time travel novel, The Renaissance Club. I’m past fallen-in-love with Gianlorenzo Bernini — I’m in the forming-a-fan-club stage. If only for this sculpture of Apollo and Daphne, made early in his magnificent career as a sculptor. He was also the official architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome under two popes.  When I say buried…

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