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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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@romance-mfa
2022 Romance Podcast List Update
2022 Romance Podcast List Update
It’s true! After a two year hiatus, I’ve managed an update of the Romance Podcast List, with over one hundred active podcasts and more than seventy archived podcasts tracked in a Google spreadsheet. Working with a spreadsheet has allowed me to access some vintage computer skills from employment past and use a MailMerge to convert the data into a readable webpage with minimal pain. There may be a…
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Top Posts of 2020
Top Posts of 2020
It’s the time of summing up, so let’s take a look at the top posts from the Romance MFA in 2020. By page views, here they are. 10. Victorian Language of Flowers List A surprise burst of traffic in December put my Victorian flower language decoder on this year’s list, with almost 2% of my annual traffic. 9. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: Shades of Jane Eyre With my thoughts on classic novels which…
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10 WORST TIPS FOR WRITING ROMANCE
say it with me... I CAN DO THIS
I wanna hear these Opinions on steampunk color palettes, if you’re willing.
tbh “the Victorians did not go to the trouble of inventing aniline dyes so that we could wear neutrals” mostly covers it?
they went to a lot of effort to bring affordable screaming bright fuchsias and acid greens into the world, and we should honor their tacky, tacky choices.
let’s not forget the tacky patterns, too
oh yeah
oh fuck yeah
(TELL ME that last one isn’t a steampunk look. just try and tell me)
yes! thank you, these are EXACTLY what i meant. tomorrow I’ll take a picture of the bafflingly tacky goldenrod-and-maroon gown I’ve got at the shop
also
this is wise, and correct.
This is 100% true.
Oh no, no those are tasteful compared to what wild color shenanigans the 19th century got up to. Most of them being mid-century are only ~2 colors excepting the plaid. By the 1890s, five colors per dress was the fashion. They…didn’t all coordinate the way we would.
PUMPKIN WORTH
I have seen mid-century dresses in electric blue. Barbie pink
Black with photo-realistic brocade oranges. Royal purple with GIANT POLKA DOTS.
Hey hey did you know lime green and lavender was a favorite color combo in 1895?
This one is not so much tacky as…vibrant
Okay at ~1903 it’s not really Victorian but I love the melting ice cream explosion look of it
This dress has faded but it would have originally been a quite eye-catching shade of violet.
Not that past eras were any less fond of colors even if they weren’t artificial dyes. I’ve seen canary yellow Regency dresses and an 18th century man’s coat in turquoise velvet printed with leopard spots. Steampunk isn’t really Victorian so much as it is ‘drapery store vomited on a sexy colorblind school marm’
Et le piece de resistance…
Yes, those orange blocks are outlined in green chenille fringe.
brb, saving that green one to my ‘Malfoy estate sale’ pinterest board
Steampunk isn’t really Victorian so much as it is ‘drapery store vomited on a sexy colorblind school marm’
Pair a brightass fushia dress with a top hat and gears you cowards
MORE PUMPKIN ORANGE AND FRINGE YOU COWARDS
If you’re not using blood red and forty pounds of lace and trim what the fuck are you even playing at
The Pragmatic Costumer calls this “The Hot Mess Dress.” It dates from around 1878. They say: “This dress has more trims than my entire collection of detash combined (detash or destash means all the little bits, pieces, and leftovers from crafting something)! On the outside alone I spot: black lace, bi-colored sandy-brown/cornflower-blue ruffles, tawny velvet, cream silk, beaded netting, cream lace, ribbon bows, ribbon rosettes, cornflower-blue buttons, and that fluffy lace collar. For even more trim-tastic fun and draping pandemonium, here’s a shot of the back:”
The Pragmatic Costumer: “Trims were all the rage in the mid 1870s and 1880s, and this dress is raging harder, faster, and more extravagantly than most.”
And here’s a Worth tea gown from 1895. This really needs to be worn by a mad scientist. Especially one interested in fish.
@gwengrimm Some of these are just amazing, and others sink worse than the sink we just unclogged.
I would wear that bright orange pumpkin monstrosity, just saying 🤣
Is this the point where I tell you that I found a book with knitted and crocheted lace patterns from the Victorian era?
that orange and green chenille one os proof that someone had lead poisoning and somehow launched forward to the early 1970s, snapped back like a rubber band, and went I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE, AND IT IS OLIVE AND TANGERINE
TBH I would wear a solid half of these, and that 1895 Worth tea gown in green is my dream Worth dress. That blood red and gold one I posted is also a dream dress, tbh.
That orange and green chenille one is not one of those that I would wear.
But yeah, the Victorians invented Aniline dyes and went absolutely wild with them, and we owe it to our great great grandparents to not dress in neutrals all day.
Beard Science: the attractiveness of male facial hair
I did an image search for "three day stubble" and then next thing I knew, I had a dozen tabs open for research about beards and facial attractiveness ratings. So I might as well share my findings, right?
I’m working on my third Whitford Crew book and came to a place where I had to go back and count how many days it had been since my hero had an opportunity to shave. That led to an image search for “three day stubble” and then next thing I knew, I had a dozen tabs open for research about beards and facial hair attractiveness ratings. So I might as well share my findings, right?
Most of the…
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Does Cthulu count as “something old”?
Asking for a friend.
please do not raise old gods, new gods, borrowed gods, or blue gods
It’s your wedding day honey you raise whatever the hell you want.
What did RWA do, if I may ask?
I included a link to a thread that explains everything that is going on, but basically, the Romance Writers of America association has decided to side with ethical claims against Courtney Milan, because she fired back against racism in the genre.
Y’know, the thing an association that claims to be progressive and inclusive should want people to do. But yeah, nah. Certain authors were white—I mean—quite upset at Milan for calling out their racism, and this is apparently the hill the RWA has chosen to set itself on fire on. So go off, I guess.
Romance Writers of America and Racism
Romance Writers of America and Racism: Long story short, the RWA has officially come down on the side of "pointing out racism with rude words is worse than acting in racist ways" and it is no longer my professional organization.
It’s been quiet here since I spent October finishing a book draft, then jumped directly into Nanowrimo to write another one which is just about finished and I was going to come back in the New Year with the reading lists and new reviews and whatnot but here’s what needs to be said right now: my professional organization, the Romance Writers of America, has made the decision to uphold an ethics…
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Romance Writer Problems: Prudish Technology
If autocorrect has ever ducked up your words, this installment of #romancewriterproblems is for you!
Hey, there was supposed to a post on the blog yesterday. But I’m sick! And starting to worry about my deadline at the end of October! So here’s a filler post to hopefully make you snicker: #romancewriterprobelms with technology.
Most romance writers these days rely on our computers, smart phones, and all the programs they contain to get stories out of our heads and into the world. But sometimes…
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Gilded Age Bibliography: Primary Sources Available Free in Google Books
Living in the future gives me amazing access to the past: here's a list of the primary sources I often use for free from Google books
In my own writing and research, I’m very lucky to have chosen the late nineteenth century, or Gilded Age, of American history as the setting for my books. It’s an era when there was plentiful printed material being produced, nearly all of which is now in the public domain and a great deal of which has been scanned and made available by Google. Today I want to share some of my Gilded Age…
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Mary Balogh's Slightly Married
Mary Balogh’s Slightly Married
My next Regency read is Mary Balogh’s Slightly Married, which came to my attention from NPR’s 2015 list of top 100 romances. In terms of research and plot, it was reminiscent of Heyer—but definitely not Heyer.
Book details:
Title: Slightly Married Author: Mary Balogh Original publication date: 2000 Setting time & place: 1814 England He is…a 30 year old ducal heir with an over-developed sense of…
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Romance genre hot take generator
Romance hot takes: so formulaic they could be mad libs! So easy we could let robots write them #amwritingromance
Have you read the latest hot take think piece on romance novels? Romance Twitter was all atwitter about it yesterday. I only skimmed over it briefly because, as Cat Sebastian pointed out, we’ve all read it before.
https://twitter.com/CatSWrites/status/1163192913456705541
This particular piece included the realization that contemporary romance was “suddenly, shockingly, pretty good.” High praise…
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Romance Writer Problems: Everything is Dirty
It’s August and I’m going to a music festival on an island. No fancy post this week, but here’s a compilation of Romance Writer Problems so you can snicker over the words of some funny people and, who knows, check out their books if you need something to read for your own vacation–or staycation…
This time we’re looking at the Romance Writer Problem of “Everything is Dirty.” Do we write smutty…
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Author Interviews from the Romance MFA Syllabus: Daphne Du Maurier
Authors from the Romance MFA Syllabus: film, interview, & letters from Daphne Du Maurier
This is part of an ongoing series to find interviews with authors whose books appear on the Romance MFA syllabus. Previous installments have featured E.M. Forster, E.M. Hull, and Margaret Mitchell. Today I’m looking for Daphne Du Maurier interviews. She’s on the syllabus for Rebecca, one of the not-quite romances I read in 2018.
Du Maurier interviews are a bit thin on the ground, however. She…
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Julia Quinn's The Viscount Who Loved Me
Julia Quinn's The Viscount Who Loved Me has an A+ croquet game and a silly corgi, but also echoes of Taming of the Shrew and some old skool elements.
Last time, we learned from Johanna Lindsey that large families can be hilarious. So why not make an even larger family for even more hilarity? While this may sound implausible, as far as I can tell, Julia Quinn pulled it off with the Bridgertons, a family of eight alphabetically named siblings who all get their happily ever afters. I no longer recall exactly why I calculated it better to put the…
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Johanna Lindsey's Gentle Rogue
Gentle Rogue: an Old Skool romance made up of improbable circumstances, blistering dialogue, and comedic family dyamics, probably best described as a "romp.
I think I would have enjoyed Gentle Rogue much more if I weren’t still cringing and jumping at the slightest shadows after Whitney, My Love. Gentle Rogue is the sort of over the top set of improbable circumstances that is probably best described as a “romp.” This isn’t a book for historical accuracy—it’s for sheer ridiculousness. Just look at the original Fabio cover, one of the old skool covers…
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