To inaugurate their new Romance section, WORD Bookstore invited a group of people related to the industry to speak about romance as a genre. Thanks so much to WORD for having us all there and to Sarah MacLean for organizing, moderating, and, yes, recording.

See what I meant about all the covers being different? The double-framing device in this cover picks up not only on the leitmotif of art and artists, but also the ongoing theme of dual identities. Appropriate for a spy novel, no? Miss Grey is a governess turned spy pretending to be a governess. As for [...]

If you’re in the New York area, come join me tonight at WORD Bookstore in Brooklyn as WORD inaugurates their new Romance section with a panel moderated by the wonderful Sarah MacLean, featuring me, Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches (if you haven’t heard her speak, you’re missing out), Hope Tarr, Tessa Woodward of Avon Books [...]

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about the contest submissions is how different they all are from each other. As a governess, Laura, heroine of The Orchid Affair, spends a lot of time standing in the doorway between nursery and schoolroom, listening. Listening for her charges, listening for her employer, listening so she can [...]

Like the lady in this portrait, Laura Grey, the heroine of The Orchid Affair, is dark-haired and dark-eyed and always, always wears dark clothing. So many entries have come in that I may start displaying two a day!

This cover is really rather prescient. Although you can’t tell from Chapter One, there’s a major sub-theme in The Orchid Affair involving the art and the artists of the 1790′s. My heroine grew up in the heart of Europe’s artistic diaspora, while my hero’s (deceased) wife, Julie Jaouen, was a major painter in her own [...]

The Cover Contest fabulousness has been flooding into my inbox since last week. Once the contest ends, I’ll be posting all the covers at once so that you can vote on your favorites. But August 2nd is such a long way away… and the covers are too pretty to keep to myself until then. So, [...]

Hi, all! Mostly, I’ve been re-reading Heyer this week (along with L.M. Montgomery’s Blue Castle and Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Heyer is a favorite comfort read), but since I’ve discussed Heyer so much here on the site recently, I won’t go into details. Instead, since I could very much use some new recommendations, [...]

Ready, set… photoshop! Over the past few days, there has been some debate over the cover of The Orchid Affair. Here’s my challenge to you: to produce your ideal Orchid Affair cover, whether you do it via photoshop, collage, or interpretive dance. (Okay, maybe not interpretive dance.) This idea was brought to me by Pam, [...]

After going incognito for so long, The Orchid Affair finally has an official public face: I particularly love the writing on the sky. Orchid Affair skedaddles into stores on January 20th, but it’s already available for pre-order at Amazon, B&N, and Borders. You can find the first chapter here.