The Writers' Desk

In 2003 the site promised a members area where romance writers would trade and rate manuscripts. It never quite opened. The name was too good to waste.

These pieces are written for the restored archive. Some lean on the old data, the subject index, the character lists, the reviewer guidelines; others are for writers who would have signed up for the Desk in 2003 and are still at it. Each ends with its sources.

Writing a Caribbean Romance: The Dominican Republic as Setting Paradise is the laziest word on a back cover. The books that make an island work treat it the way a good historical treats a century: as part of the conflict. Historical Romance Settings: An Era-by-Era Guide Readers of the old archive tagged books into dozens of historical periods, and each one came with its own pleasures, its own heroes and its own ways to trip a careless writer. Category Romance Lines: What the Name on the Spine Promised In 2003 a reader at the supermarket rack trusted the line name more than the author's, and she had good reasons. Romance in the Classroom: Studying the Romance Novel Scholars stopped apologising for romance decades ago, and a student who picks one for a literature paper has a real body of criticism to stand on. Heroes and Heroines: What 3,661 Names Say About Romance We counted the titles and first names in the Leading Ladies and Leading Men indexes, and the peerage turned out to be very crowded. Critique Partners for Romance Writers: Finding and Keeping One The old Writers' Desk plan never fully launched, but the idea behind it, writers trading honest notes on each other's chapters, is still the cheapest education in the genre. How to Write a Romance Review People Will Use A good romance review tells a stranger whether to spend her Saturday on this book, and the old site's rules were built for exactly that job. Plotting a Romance Novel: Beats, Conflict and the Ending A romance has two fixed points, the meeting and the ending, and the craft lives in everything you build between them. A Field Guide to Romance Subgenres, Shelf by Shelf Eleven shelves, 199 themes, and fifteen years of arguing about where a ghost story with a duke in it belongs.