Mature Romance

It happens to the best of us. It happens to the worst of us. But we’re lucky if it happens to us at all.

Getting older.

As we tally off the years, we get a little soft around the middle, our knees creak when we climb stairs, our muscles complain if we try a new dance move, our fifty shades of youthful tresses dim to one shade of gray.

And yet, we still crave romance, we still yearn for love. Because, even though we’ve grown older, we’re still human. We may not have the raging hormones of youth, but the heart still desires emotional satisfaction.

So it is with romance novel characters. Continue reading

My Bisexual Heroes: Extended Version

Hi Everyone, I’m blogging over at AReCafe today about my bisexual heroes for LGBTQ Pride Month. But I had to keep it short and was only able to promote my books listed on AllRomanceeBooks. I got a lot more stories with bisexual heroes. Below is the extended version of my blog post.

Remember Torchwood? The Dr. Who spin-off show set in Cardiff? There’s definite sexual chemistry between Captain Jack Harkness and Gwen Cooper, and we the viewers so want something to happen, but we know Gwen already has a boyfriend who is a nice guy and she can’t just have an affair without consequences then suddenly…

OMG. Continue reading

Celebrating National Library Week (with Spoilers)

This week, April 12-18, 2015, the American Libraries Association celebrates National Library Week:

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April. It is a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation’s libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support. All types of libraries – school, public, academic and special – participate.

I am a librarian, although I no longer work as such. I received my Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of California at Berkeley way back in the day when it had a School of Library and Information Studies (the School was rebranded in 1994 and no longer graduates librarians). For over thirty years, I worked in a bunch of different libraries and archives – public, academic, and special (corporate and museum) – mainly as a freelance librarian. My specialty was cataloging.

So how does this inform my writing? Plenty. Continue reading

Cover Reveal: Where Destiny Plays

‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

It’s here! The official cover reveal for Where Destiny Plays, Harwell Heirs Book 3: Continue reading

My Real-life Book Boyfriend

I’m over at Delilah Devlin’s blog today — my 18th wedding anniversary — talking about heroes, including my husband. You can read the post over there (which includes an excerpt from Disobedience By Design), or you can read it here, below.

Regina Kammer: My Real-life Book Boyfriend

As romance readers we talk about our “book boyfriends”. These tend to be Alpha Heroes: ruthless, implacable, protective, possessive men who attract with their charisma and buffed-out good looks, who keep us yearning with their potency and skill. I readily admit that my favorite book boyfriend would quite possibly be the very worst actual boyfriend ever. Continue reading

Amazon’s Adult Filter Buries Your Naked Bodies

[UPDATE: I’ve had to delete old, broken links in this post.]
Recent news about my publisher Ellora’s Cave is not good. Freelance editors and cover artists have been laid off – including both my editors. I’m worried about my cover artist since she is a freelancer, although she is still listed on the company website. [UPDATE: Alas, she is no longer.]

There was a lot of hullabaloo in the blogosphere and on Twitter about this news, which was originally a private communique to EC authors. Some people complained that Ellora’s Cave charges too much for ebooks especially since so much self-published material is so cheap, some people ruminated about financial concerns at EC, some people wondered about poor business practices at EC (this one about Farrah Abraham’s advance is interesting), and some people thought it was disingenuous of EC to blame Amazon although perhaps Amazon’s launch of Kindle Unlimited had something to do with it.

But what no one seems to be gossiping about is Amazon’s adult filter and how that is quite possibly the reason for EC experiencing a “sharp decline of ebook sales via Amazon.”

And as an indie erotica author, I have some personal experience with precisely that. Continue reading

Meet My Character Blog Hop: Joseph Phillips

I’ve been tagged in another blog hop!

This blog hop highlights a main character from an author’s work-in-progress (WIP) or recently published or soon-to-be-published work. I was tagged by the witty and always fascinating Karysa Faire, who has a sexy character named Rodger in her WIP Swashbuckler, but she decided to introduce Hannah on this blog hop, a character from an entirely different book in a projected series that sounds absolutely wonderful. I’ve put all her links at the end of this post.

Now on to meeting one of my characters… Continue reading

A Sweeping Romantic Epic

Harwell Heirs series update! Notes on Book Two and Book Three!

Disobedience By Design, the sweeping romantic Book 2 of my Harwell Heirs series finally has a release date: July 25, 2014. You can add it to your wishlist on the Ellora’s Cave site. Continue reading