by Madeline Iva

Yeah, it was mother's day this weekend.   A day of motherly love, and were was I? I went to a workshop where we discussed gender expectations in romances and how as an author you cross those readerly expectations at your own peril.

Virginia Kantra was the author who spoke to our group.  She pointed out that while heroes we love can often be violent --and if they are vampires even kill people left and right--but god forbid a heroine be sexually aggressive or slightly bitchy.

By Madeline Iva

"That lovely month when ev'ry one goes--blissfully astray."

March is when spring comes--ha! For a week out in the West maybe.  And all March brings to the Northeast is a mini-winter.

Even in the South--where the lucky folk get a glorious burst of tulips and daffodils that smite the eyes with beauty--March and April are flirty, edgy and inconstant.  

I'm in a state of anticipation.

Normally I would say I like anticipation --I adore anticipation.   When starting to read a novel, I am full of anticipation.  Will I like GONE GIRL as much as my friend did? Will the inside of the latest romance novel be as good as its provocative cover? Will it be full of hot, hot, sex--but sex that is deeply charged with strong emotional feeling?

Elizabeth Shore will be publishing a contemporary erotic romance with Wild Rose Press in the next year or so.  All I know is that it has snakes in it--a lot of snakes.  It's also set in the Deep South and it's super sexy.  A hot swampy snake-packed Deep South got me looking online and what I found were all these pulp novels from decades ago that played off the swamp woman motif.