Just in case your New Year's resolutions had something to do with reading, too, here's a title for anyone who loves a good, suspenseful yarn involving creepy old houses, mistaken identities, and ghosts from high school past. In NEVER TELL A LIE, Ivy and David Rose seem to have the perfect life--a Victorian fixer-upper, a happy marriage, a first baby on the way--until a woman who claims to know them shows up at their yard sale. She introduces herself as Melinda White, but she looks and acts...

• Vicki Pettersson The Outlaw Demon Wails
• Denise Rossetti Lord of Scoundrels
• Shauna Reid Wuthering Heights

First Meetings with Impact

In most romances, the first meeting between the hero and heroine sets in motion the emotional plot. The more clearly impactful and dramatic that meet­ing, the more believable it is that it represents a major turning point in the life of the hero and heroine, and the more gripping and interesting the romance that evolves. The reader becomes committed to following the romance from that point.

An aspiring author recently told me she was “amazed that you’re allowed to get away with four pages of backstory before the hero and heroine meet.” My immediate mental response was, “Only four pag­es? Which book was that?”

There’s a very real difference between setup for the first meeting and backstory. If you have not given suf­ficient information about one or both of your principal characters for the reader to feel empathetic enough to comprehend the impact of the first meeting before it occurs, then you will have a weak first meeting, and you’ll have to explain the importance of the meeting in retrospect, usually a less effective alternative.

Stephanie Laurens, author of It Happened One Night

• 10/2/2008 The Post and the Courier covers Romance

  Charleston newspaper's article Georgian...

• 10/2/2008 Carol Alt on GMA

  Author of Next Year's Model on GMA

• 9/15/2008 Lois Greiman at RWA

  Romance author Lois Greiman answers...

• 9/9/2008 Carol Alt on The Today Show

  Author of This Year's Novel on The...