Molly Ringle

If you've ever found yourself thinking, "Molly, these goblins and Greek gods are lovely and all, but you need to put them aside for a bit and write me a swoony contemporary coming-of-age male/male romance with a lot of new wave song references in it," then you are in luck! Because I have written one, and I've just signed with Riptide Publishing (who specializes in the whole rainbow of LGBTQ stories) to get it out next summer! It will probably be titled Dramatically Inclined, though its working title was Boy in Eyeliner, so both of those are possibilities, as are any last-minute ideas we may get.

I've loved my small press experiences so far--with Central Avenue Publishing and The Wild Rose Press--so I'm confident I'll have a similar happy experience with Riptide, another excellent small press. And I can't wait to have you all meet Sinter and Andy.

[A few of you will remember them from 32 and Raining, an earlier incarnation of this story, though it is much changed since then. It now has a more "rom-com" feel (romantic comedy) and includes a lot more text messages. You might also know Sinter from Relatively Honest, in which he was Daniel's dorm roommate with a theater major and a goth fashion code. So technically this could be counted as as a spinoff novel, but is also completely a stand-alone and requires no knowledge of Relatively Honest.]

More info to come, naturally! For now, happy holidays and thank you for listening to me through all my strange creative projects. :)

As the latest stop on my blog tour, here's another giveaway you can enter--this time for either What Scotland Taught Me or Relatively Honest (winner's choice). Even if you have those ebooks already, you can always enter to win a copy for a friend. Because you're nice that way.

Also this past week on the blog hop, I visited Dean Mayes' blog to talk about settings I've used in writing. Dean's new novel is out now, and you can enter to win a copy of that too! I highly recommend doing so. By the way, if you're an avid reader and haven't created a login at Goodreads.com so that you can browse the book giveaway section of the site, you're missing out on serious kid-in-candy-store action.

Norelle Done at the Seattle Wrote blog also invited me on for a quick Q & A about NaNoWriMo. Norelle is a great writer herself, who generously features all the Seattle-area writers she can get a hold of, and I'm honored to be in the same list alongside so many shining stars.

Finally, in chocolate news, we made these Chewy Chocolate-Cinnamon Cookies last night and they're awesome. Easy recipe, too. It's odd; Hershey's chocolate bars/Kisses don't impress me much (even the Special Dark), but their baking cocoa is excellent, and we've loved the cookie and cake recipes we've tried from their kitchen so far. They must know their stuff, so I wish they'd create some higher-quality eating chocolate for us fans.

The endlessly asked question: what does Young Adult mean? I'm a lumper rather than a splitter, so I'd be more or less happy to see bookstores divided into merely "fiction" and "nonfiction." Well, nonfic requires more subdivision to be helpful, but as a writer, and a reader too, I don't like all this pondering I have to do along the lines of, "It's kind of teen lit but kind of adult, and it's part paranormal, or maybe we should say urban fantasy, but part romance, and with both comic and tragic twists..." Yeah. It's fiction!

On a related note, I really like writing/reading the age 18-24 range--basically, college age--because a lot is changing in life then, as compared to high school. That's the true "young adult," if you ask me, and I'd call the high school stuff "teen lit." But it's far too late to change the industry terminology now. Some people have called books about the college age "new adult," and I've seen it applied to my books of that category (RELATIVELY HONEST and WHAT SCOTLAND TAUGHT ME), but introducing that distinction is splitting more instead of lumping more, so I don't think it's necessary.

Thanks to modmerseygirl for pointing me to that article and getting me rambling about it.

When you write for certain genres, there are rules you have to follow, or you'll likely get rejected. And the rules for romance include a couple of--if you ask me--unrealistic and silly ones that I simply cannot always follow if I'm going to write an interesting story.

The big one is about cheating. Infidelity on the part of the hero or heroine is an absolute big-time no-no in the romance genre. Now, I understand it's a sensitive topic, and that cheating has hurt lots of actual people, who therefore don't want to read about it. However...yeah, it does happen to lots of actual people. Therefore it's a pertinent issue. And while infidelity is usually not the *best* idea, I wouldn't qualify it as pure evil in most cases either. And, more to the point when we're talking about writing, it usually makes for juicy plot twists. Therefore, though I don't want to include it in all my stories, I do sometimes explore the sticky and interesting issue of being not 100% faithful to one's significant other.

Mind you, in both the published books where I've gone into that territory--What Scotland Taught Me and Relatively Honest--I was dealing with teenagers, not married adults. Age 18 is a time when plenty of us make questionable decisions, and learn from them. I was going more for realistic coming-of-age than strictly for romance. Nonetheless, I think a love story benefits from a dose of reality--and a dose of juicy gossip.

Also: how come we modern romance novelists have to stick to this no-cheaters rule when some of the most acclaimed love stories on film--and on paper--had infidelity in spades? A couple of whopping examples off the top of my head:

Gone with the Wind: All right, it's more like historical fiction masquerading as a bodice-ripper, but it's still considered to have set many a standard for romance. And, dude! Scarlett marries two other guys before giving Rhett a chance--stringing him along all the while--and, in the meantime, does her best to seduce Ashley, a (mostly) happily married man. This would never fly with a modern romance editor. But it's a great book, and Scarlett's ruthless, clueless flirtations make for a ripping good read.

Sleepless in Seattle: Again, held up as a contemporary classic of the romantic film genre. But Meg Ryan's character, throughout, has a fiance, a nice guy, who she's sleeping with throughout most of the film, and lying to about her crush on this stranger in Seattle. Again, romance editors would send this a tidy rejection letter. But if she didn't have the fiance, she'd have no particular reason to be so conflicted about checking out Tom Hanks, and you'd have no story.

Can you think of other examples? Do you have non-negotiable rules for the love stories you read? Or are there no deal-breakers as long as the story is well written?