Help fund an important #GenreRomance event: Billie, the organizer of Bookstore Romance Day puts in a lot of generally unpaid labor into organizing these events; she's currently unemployed and needs help in order to keep things going for another year. If you can, chip in; no matter how little, it all adds up.
Note: change GFM tip to $0--they charge fees regardless.
#BookstoreRomanceDay2026 #Romancelandia @bookstodon
https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-make-bookstore-romance-day-2026-happen
Watching a SciShow video about how "the first computer was a loom, actually", and fondly remembering that I learned about that back in the 1980s (because punch cards) from Jude Deveraux' _River Lady_ (1985, and totally bananapants).
I am not mad about this, actually.
75 years of Harlequin:
@romancelandia I missed this lovely piece on genre romance, from the September issue of Atlanta Magazine.
At its core, the romance novel satisfies a fundamental human desire to experience love. In a world that often feels less and less safe, the assurance of an “HEA” (happily ever after) or “HFN” (happy for now) that a romance novel provides is comforting.
Via genre romance historian Steve Ammidown, "50 years of Black romance history"
@romancelandia
Found via @tuphlos on twitter, this piece has some blood pressure-raising bits; the most important is the assumption that changing the covers of genre romances of different heat levels/sexual content, changes the actual content.
"oh, these books that are no longer coded erotic romance are actually good stories/writing/characters, but I couldn't have known unless they had acceptable covers" is a thing said there.
#PuritanWank #Publishing
#GenreRomance
https://pudding.cool/2023/10/romance-covers/?mc_cid=714e175360&mc_eid=8bf78c98f8
from @Shelflove: "Inspiration is a story and stories do have power, but the recipient has to do something with it.
...we should always be aware of the choices made in the work’s production (including which work was NOT chosen) and be aware of the trade-offs and boundaries around how far it can reimagine the world."
#Barbie #GenreRomance
@romancelandia
https://shelflovepodcast.substack.com/p/barbie-romance-novels-our-feminism
Jen Comfort, on twitter, NAILED this one:
"No one asked but I think the secret to making the enemies-to-lovers trope work is respect. They can loathe each other, but they have to loathe each other as equals. Like "sorry but no one else is allowed to murder this man but me" + "it's an honor & privilege to despise you"
Loving this!
Two Nerdy History Girls (aka, Loretta Chase and Susan Holloway Scott) at the Ashland Public Library in MA:
Steve Ammidown, RWA's Librarian of the Year for 2019, is a genre romance historian who does important work on preserving a history that has too often been considered trivial, when not outright erased.
Cue his latest blog post on men writing genre romance:
https://romancehistory.com/2023/01/26/men-who-write-romance-ken-casper-1941-2021/
azteclady
