Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies [antikvár]

Foreword /admit it: When I wrote my first romance book, I didn't know what I was doing. Of course, I was only nine years old and didn't know what I was doing most of the time. What I did know was that I loved writing, and I took great joy in creating these rambling, cliched stories that swooped in and out of different characters' points of view as the plot galloped from one country to another — all without a single chapter break. I knew what chapters were; I just didn't care. All that mattered was telling the story. My love of writing never faded. 1 eventually learned to break the tale into chapters (just as I learned the rules of grammar), although I still hate all that wasted white space on a page. Margins are for sissies. Do you know how many words you can get on one sheet of paper when you make your handwriting really, really tiny so you can actually get two lines of prose inside one ruled line of notebook paper, and write from one side of the paper to the other? A lot. And I wrote on both sides of the paper. I think one sheet held close to 1,500 words. Ah, the good old days. Now stories have to be typed and double-spaced on only one side of the paper; not only is a lot of white space wasted, but the challenge of seeing how small I can write and having the words still legible is gone. But fast-forward a couple of decades, roughly. I was still writing. I had never stopped, and writing was the great private joy of my life. I wrote westerns; I wrote science fiction; I wrote fantasy; and I wrote thrillers — but they all had one thread in common: They all had romances in them. I connected to romances, but I wrote everything by the seat of my pants. I hadn't researched or studied anything and had no idea of any do's or don'ts — I just had the stories. Finally, one morning I woke up and decided to see whether I was good enough to be published. Then 1 did some research. I found out how to prepare a manuscript (margins were required) and how to submit it. Everything else, 1 did the usual way: by the seat of my pants. I wrote a book and sent it to Leslie Wainger, my dear friend and editor of over 20 years now, who bought it. That's how she became my dear friend and editor. I was a newbie in the business; she was fairly new herself. What I knew about writing would have rattled around in a peanut shell, but I loved what I did know. Leslie loves books, and she taught me the publishing lingo, how a manuscript gets into book form, and ail the other details that become part of a writer's life. Her editing — good heavens, how I needed editing — taught me more about the structure of writing than anything else I'd learned since learning the English language.