Top Five Reasons You Should Enter the Stiletto Contest
~ By Mary E. Thompson The 2018 Stiletto Contest is open now! If you’ve been on the fence about entering, we have a few suggestions for you to push you over the edge! 5. You’re looking for an agent or editor. We have some great agents and editors for the final round of judging for the […]
Writing Contests — They Shoot Horses Don’t They?
Why Pay an Anonymous Judge to Smack Me Down? ~ By Jeff Salter I could write a book about contests. So today’s little excerpt will be just a few of my rants and raves. But first a disclaimer: For those talented and fortunate few writers with positively golden entries which win or ‘final’ — contests are […]
Five Reasons You Should Judge The Stiletto Contest
~ By Mary E. Thompson The 2018 Stiletto Contest opens March 9. To make the contest a success, we need lots and lots of judges! Judging isn’t an easy job, but it’s a great job. We think you’d be perfect for it! You Get Free Books Who doesn’t love free books? You don’t get to pick […]
The Stiletto Contest is coming! Want to be a judge?
~ By Liza Keogh The Contemporary Romance Writers chapter’s annual contest, The Stiletto, opens for entries on March 9 and this year, we’ve expanded the ‘unpublished’ category! Authors may now submit unpublished works under the following guidelines: the work is a standalone or, if the work is part of a series, it must be the first […]
World Bending
~ By Molly Jameson I had a reputation for exaggerating as a kid. I liked to think of it as creative license. I don’t object to reality necessarily, so much as I’d like to rearrange some things to make it entertaining. So it makes sense for me as an author to bend the living world […]
Celebrating Seasoned Romance – Why?
~ Nan Reinhardt Note: This post originally appeared here. I’m bugged. It seems that romance novels are the bailiwick of characters who are younger than 40. If 40 is the new 30 and 50 is the new 40, then how come romance after 50 isn’t sexy anymore? Well, folks, I’ve got big news–sexy is timeless. […]
Austen’s Universal Appeal
~ By Marilyn Brant Note: This post originally appeared here. When I was a fourteen-year-old high school freshman in the 1980’s, my English lit teacher had the audacity to foist a supposedly romantic novel on our class. The story took place in Regency England and was considered a “classic,” which I figured was literary shorthand for […]
What I Screw Up
~ By Laura Trentham All right folks, we are about to get down and dirty with sentence mechanics here… If you’ve gone through the editing process with a good editor, this post might not apply, but if you haven’t, then read on. I’m going to talk about two bad habits I am still learning to shake—Autonomous […]
Backstory vs. Exposition
~ By Mellanie Szereto A lot of agents and editors comment about submissions they’ve rejected because the author either opened with page after page of backstory and no action or had a great opening action scene followed by pages of backstory. Some of the contest entries I’ve judged have had similar issues. How much Backstory is […]
GOAL SETTING FOR 2018 – GET SMART
~ By Katina Drennan Out with the old, in with the NEW, right? For most of us, the NEW means setting NEW writing goals for the coming year. Some of us have been at this a while and we know what works for us and what doesn’t. But many of us go about this task […]
The New Year’s Goal Advice You Don’t Want but Probably Need
~ By Nicole R. Locker The beginning of a new year is so exciting for some of us. People stop to reflect on the previous year, what they’ve accomplished, and what goals they still want to achieve in the next 365 days to get them a little bit closer to that pie we’re all reaching […]
A Snowy, Holiday Writing Prompt
Hello, Contemporary Romance Fans! May the holiday season bring a lot of warmth, light, and good stories into your lives! We’ll be back in 2018 with posts that’ll help you kick-start your writing in the new year. But we’re not going to let you go without a writing prompt. Ready? Things are going really well […]
