My Romance Author Journey by LoLo Paige

It has been two years since I decided to write and publish romance novels. Once I figured out this is what I wanted to write, the entire journey turned into one big adventure. Along the way I met so many authors and made tons of new friends, which has been the best part of the whole thing.

At first, I set out to learn everything I could about romance. The thing that attracted me the most was the happy-ever-after requirement. When my first book released, readers let me know that no matter what happened, no matter how much I pushed them to the edge, I would not push them over. Readers also told me they loved reading romance as a way to escape stresses of real life, which is understandable. I do the same thing when I escape into writing my stories.

To be honest, I never read romance unless it was part of other stories as a subplot to my thrillers, mysteries, or action-adventure books. When I began focusing on love and all the different ways it’s expressed, not only between two lovers, but between friends and family as well, I developed a sharper awareness of my real-life relationships. My marriage improved, and my friendships strengthened.

I listened, rather than talked.

Everywhere I went I asked one question, then sat back and listened: Tell me how you found love. I couldn’t believe it. People poured their hearts out to me, like I was a therapist. My favorite times were sitting in the dentist chair with the different people working on me. Their stories were unique and amazing, and I’d ask for their permission to write about those scenarios. No one said no, they were delighted I was interested enough to write about the loves of their lives. It was therapeutic all the way around, not only for them but for me as well.

The thing about romance is, whether we read it or write it…it forces us to look inward at how we perceive love in our own lives. The different tropes are universal themes that many of us have experienced for real, allowing us to relate to the characters we’re reading about.

I attend yearly writer conferences, and the thing I love the most is the sheer volume of romance authors that I meet. I learn so much from them, and when we get together as a group we have so much fun. I continue to be humbled by the knowledge and talent of these fantastic authors.

For me, I started out writing action-adventure and suspense, because that’s what I always gravitated to in books and movies. I have an extensive onstage theatre acting background and a few movies under my belt, where I paid close attention to the writing and story development. I’ve delivered lines of fabulous playwrights, such as Neil Simon, Robert Harling, and Edward Albee, and loved every minute of it.

But when remembering lines became a problem for me, I gladly stepped off the stage and began writing lines for other actors. And I always wound up with a romance story.

Now I continue to write romantic suspense, and have expanded into writing cop thrillers, femme fatales, and my true love from my theatre days, romantic comedies.

Out of curiosity one time I looked up the universal themes of iconic movies and books. One thing jumped out at me, was the theme of love. Movies like Titanic, As Good as it Gets, Casablanca, Ghost, You’ve Got Mail, Pretty Woman, The Notebook, Steel Magnolias, Sleepless in Seattle…all have love as the central theme…not to mention the countless romance books that I won’t attempt to name.

All have love as the central theme.

What keeps me motivated to write romance are the iconic lines that repeat in my head. There are so many. But the ones that stick with me are those where, when people come to the end of life’s journey, nearly everyone says they take their love with them to hold forever. My mom and sisters both said it before they passed.

And when it comes right down to it, love is the one powerful force that will get us through everything. In life and in death.

And that is why I love writing romance.

Author bio:

LoLo Paige is an award-winning author and former wildland firefighter, whose debut novel, Alaska Spark, received three awards: An Indie B.R.A.G. Medallion, an Eric Hoffer award, and a Next Generation Indie Book award for romance. Alaska Spark and Alaska Inferno have ranked No.1 on the Amazon Bestseller Lists for action adventure and romantic suspense in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The true story about LoLo’s fire crew escaping a runaway wildfire won an Alaska Press Club award and inspired her debut novel, Alaska Spark. LoLo collaborated with five other award-winning and best-selling authors to write Jealousy, in the shared universe of the Sisters of Sin series, and it has been a wild adventure ever since!

LoLo has other books under the romance umbrella. Hello Spain, Goodbye Heart, and Irish Thunder, are two romantic comedies being published by The Wild Rose Press. She also has short stories in several romance anthologies. Sign up for LoLo's email list to learn more about her books at www.lolopaige.com.

What Can Happen In A Decade

 

A Toast to Romancing The Genres! Happy Anniversary!

 A ten-year anniversary is special. An entire decade of time. I reflected on my own life of what had occurred in this length of time.

This past decade I lost the last of my family of origin, my sister and my mom. I was still working my federal job with the U.S. Department of the Interior, and commuting between Alaska and Arizona every few weeks, to help my ailing sister and my mom. That period of time was one of the most difficult times of my life. And not one that I care to recall very often.

I retired two years later, but things didn’t get easier, as my husband and I both had parents who were in assisted living facilities in two different states. All of our discretionary income went to airfare between Alaska, Arizona, and Wisconsin. When all was said and done, we’d each racked up over a hundred thousand frequent flier miles on Alaska Airlines.

When my mom passed, she generously left me her modest little house in Arizona, where my husband and I spend much of the winter now. Alaska had a harsher than usual winter the first three months of 2021, so it was easy for us to bail to the lower forty-eight.

After our parents passed, we faced all this free time and what seemed like extra money we weren’t spending on travel. I dove at the chance to do some world travel with my California cousin’s travel group. We did two tours of Europe before the pandemic stopped us in our tracks.

I’ve always kept journals, and once I started traveling, I resumed my journals. It was because of these journals that I was able to write two novels and an award-winning short story, starting in 2015. 

The summer of 2015 was the second worst wildfire season in Alaska. Anchorage had a health advisory in place for the better part of a month, due to the dense smoke that collected in the Anchorage Bowl. I could barely see my neighbor’s home across the street. Many homes were destroyed in outlying areas north of Anchorage and a total of 5.1 million acres of wildlands burned. Firefighting resources were stretched so thin, only fires that threatened lives and homes were being suppressed. Channel 2 News in Anchorage did a story of a near miss a fire crew had on a fire.

Memories came avalanching back on a near miss our crew had experienced in the late 80s. A friend of mine suggested I write up the story and submit it to The Anchorage Press newspaper. So I did. Six months later it won an Alaska Press Club award for best historical piece in all media, and a judge suggested I write a novel centered around that experience.

If you would have said to me back in 2015, I’d have several novels in different stages and published the first two, I would have stared at you like you’d shifted into a moose, exclaiming, “No way!”

A lot can happen in ten years. I’m sure you could list a trillion things that have occurred, and one of them was, we never saw this global impact coming. Although my biologist husband announced to me back in 1978 a virus like this would hit at some point. Of course, we poo-poo’ed it and got on with our lives.

In one way ten years seems like a long span of time. In another way it seems it zipped right by. That’s the funny thing about time. I remember sitting at my desk at work, watching the clock in late afternoons, as the minutes dragged. Suddenly, I’m at my retirement party, wondering how it all whirled past me so fast.

What I’ve learned from this is, to carpe the heck out of my diem! Each day when I think of something new or challenging, mostly relating to my new writing life, I say to myself, “What do I have to lose?”

Absolutely nothing.

There’s a ton of things that I was afraid to do at first. Dare I ask a New York Times bestselling author to endorse my second romantic suspense novel? What do I have to lose? She might say no. Then again—she said yes! After I picked myself up off the floor, I set to work, making my writing the best it could possibly be to be worthy of this honor.

If you’re celebrating a ten-year wedding anniversary, ten years at a fantastic job, ten years of overcoming a life-changing event or surviving a life-threatening health situation, celebrate it! Give yourself a pat on the back for your achievement. You deserve it. Especially after this past year and the challenges each of us has faced.

When we were forced into lockdown a little over a year ago, no one had a crystal ball. And being a tad older I couldn’t help but think I didn’t want to leave the planet until I published a book. For two years I had worked to get a traditional publisher. So, when covid hit, I pulled all of my submissions back from the Big 5 and learned to do it myself. Now I’m writing my third book.

So carpe the heck out of your diem!

Ten years from now, you’ll be glad you did.

I'm thrilled to announce that my second novel, Alaska Inferno, releases May 31st! 

Preorder ALASKA INFERNO!

Watch the book trailer for ALASKA INFERNO!

LoLo Paige was a wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Alaska Fire Service. She's an award-winning author of two novels in the Blazing Hearts Wildfire Series, Alaska Spark and soon to be released Alaska Inferno. Her stories contain edge-of-the-seat, invigorating action, strong-willed female firefighters and romantic suspense. LoLo and her husband divide their time between their oceanside beach house in Kachemak Bay, Alaska and sunny Arizona. 

What readers have said about Alaska Spark...

"I could almost feel the heat of the wildfires that surrounded the crews as they staved off threats..."

"The men are wild and yummy and the women are strong and lovingly feisty. The plot moves along at a fast pace..."

Website / Bookbub / Goodreads / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Pinterest

 

 

Finding the Action (genre)

by M. L. Buchman

I LOVE writing! Who'd have guessed 27 years ago when I started writing fiction that it would turn into a full-time career potentially set to last me a lifetime. Not me, that's for dang sure.

But it has. And just so that I can abuse the metaphor thoroughly let me say that all the action has been a thrilling adventure. (Is it dead yet? Not quite? Well, I tried.)

Genres are peculiar

Fiction genres (and non-fiction ones too for that matter) were designed and institutionalized for one major purpose, to help readers find similar kinds of books in the stores. "You want Westerns? They're right over there with their feet together in a bunch." (Mark Twain joke, anyone?) 

I remember the hubbub in 1983 when my favorite science fiction store (that I drove 20 miles to every week to hand over a fair slice of my paycheck), split apart science fiction. Suddenly there were two new racks. Small and narrow, but new.

One was horror. It broke out first with Stephen King and The Omen, but horror used to be shelved in SF.

The big change was fantasy. The rack was two face-out books wide and maybe eight shelves tall. And it was Terry Brooks fault. When it was just JRR Tolkien it wasn't that big a deal. But with the sudden and overwhelming popularity of The Sword and Elfstones of Shannara, it was suddenly too confusing. Over the next months, the store's owner would occasionally pick out another title and shift it across the narrow genre divide. I now had to look in two places for my weekly SF/F fix. I think I was the one who suggested he shift over Narnia, because this was before YA or religious sections. Then we'd debate where the C.S. Lewis Planet Trilogy belonged. I argued for the purism of space adventure being in SF. I think it bounced back and forth a few times before its final move to fantasy—though it made the crossing well after The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

The new genre divide served its purpose. I would see people come in and sweep through one section or the other, but not both. Remember, genres are to help people find books similar to what they already enjoy. Wide-ranging readers often have to scout far and wide through a bookstore (we'll get to action-adventure in a bit).

These merchandising genre divides, and the knowledge of them, also helped publishers select books. Any book that didn't fit neatly into a genre only had one of two places: Literature and Fiction when it crossed genres so successfully that there was nowhere else to put it...or the reject pile.

Genres Explode

Then e-books happened. For all intents and purposes, the two great gatekeepers of genre went away:

1. The limit of theoretical physics...er...physical layout. There is only so far you can subdivide a store before genre becomes a meaningless tool even more confusing to the readers than the shelvers. 
2. The unwillingness of publishers to purchase titles that didn't slot neatly into a genre.

Suddenly romance was no longer enough. It was so massive that it had already leveraged its way to 7 subgenres while still in the stores (though only the biggest collections broke those out). Online, they rapidly grew to 21, and now Amazon lists over 40 subgenres of romance. In the last decade my military romances have evolved (with no changes in what I was writing) like this: contemporary romance > romantic suspense > military romantic suspense > military romance > romance action-adventure. And given time, if military romance retains at its current popularity, it will split into "military romance" and "military romantic action-adventure" for those with military heroes vs. those that actually go to battle.

Electronic sales, of both eBooks and Print, have allowed the great proliferation of genres. It's supposed to make discovery easier for readers...provided they only read in one narrow genre rather than reading widely (but that's a bugaboo for another time).

Back in some prehistoric dawn when I wasn't paying attention, there was a single genre called: Mystery. Under that heading was everything from cozy mystery to blood-and-guts thrillers. Yes, Miss Marple and Hannibal Lecter would have been cozied up together on that bookstore shelf. Something had to occur and that genre too began subdividing, though not as drastically as romance.

Mystery and Thriller went their separate ways. Alas for me, Women Sleuths remained firmly in Mystery rather than adventuring into the testosterone-laden world of the thrillers where my heroines in both my Dead Chef and Miranda Chase series firmly hold the reins (of runaway horses...we are talking thrillers after all).

Except something else was going on that I didn't even see despite writing in the genre. Thrillers too had a split. A divide that dated way back into the early days of popular fiction.

Action-Adventure Genre

I don't know when this broke off from thrillers, or more likely when thrillers broke off from it, but action-adventure had its roots back in the Old West dime novels, the Sea Adventures, the mega-bestseller of 1880s She, and a hundred other sources. But break apart they did. 

So how do we subdivide these and ferret out what's what. For that I recommend this fine post by Liz Schrift. She notes, absolutely correctly in my opinion, that the essential difference is pacing. And I'll add another in a moment. She notes that:

• Suspense is all about the pacing. The slow build of tension. 
• Thrillers are faster-paced and will keep you at the edge of your seat with cliffhangers and unknowns. 
• Action-adventure is a flat-out race.

Pace: Slow to Fast to Breakneck (per Liz Schrift)

The second element is in the very name of "Action-Adventure" itself. These stories go places. Exotic locales, changing environments. Fast switches from one place to another, one point-of-view to another. It is, quite literally, a fast-action adventure.

Here's a fun experiment. Click on the three searches below:

Best Suspense Movies

Best Thriller Movies

Best Action-Adventure Movies

Rear Window > Silence of the Lambs > Jumanji

The Sixth Sense > Psycho > Jurassic Park, Fast & Furious, anything by Marvel...

There's some overlap (think of it as they've hit #1 in multiple categories), but you get the idea. 

Oh, except wait! BISAC (the folks who oversee American genre definitions) just added Superhero as it's own genre, distinct from its subcategory under "Comics & Graphic Novels". (If you really want to make your head hurt, explore the full BISAC listings HERE...they are "enhanced" every year.)

Writing as adventure

So, what do I write? 

• Miranda Chase: Political/military-technothrillers with Woman Sleuths in the Action-Adventure genre. (By the way, Miranda #1, Drone, hit the Amazon #1 Bestseller List in both Thrillers and Action-Adventure.)
• Dead Chef: Lighthearted foodie-thrillers with Woman Sleuths in the Action-Adventure genre.

...until they subdivide everything another layer. 

Genre is a marketing tool. That's its sole purpose for being. But it is getting so fractured that how to market a single title becomes a massive challenge. What "shifted" categories are my old books under? And what categories do readers search on? Have they even heard of Action-adventure, or are they still shopping under thrillers? It is turning into a testing and guessing game. A month as a thriller and a month as an action-adventure...which month sells better? And who has the time to test all that?

More importantly, how are readers addressing this? I observe changing reading habits. Instead of browsing a genre, they are finding a favorite author and then plunging in to read that author massively. The safe haven is shifting from "Genre" to "Author." 

Yay! Good news for me the author. 

The only challenge? "How the heck to they find me in the first place?"

Maybe here!

Explore Miranda Chase Now

Explore Dead Chef Now

USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestseller M. L. "Matt" Buchman has 60+ action-adventure thriller and military romance novels, 100 short stories, and lotsa audiobooks. PW says: “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more.” Booklist declared: “3X Top 10 of the Year.” A project manager with a geophysics degree, he’s designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, solo-sailed a 50’ sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and he quilts. More at: www.mlbuchman.com.

It's a Matter of Life or Death!

by Madelle Morgan

Source: trueclassics.net

Yeah, action-adventure stories are big on drama. I write romantic suspense, which is action-adventure fiction with a romance subplot. 

Besides the oh-so-important romance between the hero and heroine, in my opinion a good action story has to include the following:

An Important Goal

At least, the goal has to be important to the characters. If they don’t attain their goal, something REALLY BAD will happen.

Time Pressure

You’ll recognize these time pressure plot devices:

• Race against time to stop something before disaster happens.
• Catch the killer before he strikes again.
• Outwit the bad guys to be first to get the MacGuffin*.

*From Wikipedia, “a MacGuffin is a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues”. Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term. George Lucas described a MacGuffin as “the object of everybody’s search.” Well known MacGuffins include the golden ring in Lord of the Rings, the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and in Star Wars, R2D2 – the robot with the secret plans. 

In my novel Diamond Lust, the MacGuffin – what the desperate smugglers are after, and will kill to obtain – is, you guessed it, diamonds. 

Non-stop Action

The story must be packed with page-turning, adrenaline-pumping events that get the hero and heroine into worse and worse trouble. Typical action sequences could include one or more of: an Abduction; a Chase; a Theft; an Escape; a Rescue; an Explosion; a Fight; etc.

Mountie Dudley Do-Right Saves his love Nell from Snidely Whiplash

The More Danger, the Better

The more complications the author adds and the more in doubt a happy ending, the more exciting the story will be. When writing the pivotal Black Moment scene in Diamond Lust, I used an abduction, fight, explosion and attempted rescue to ramp up nail-biting tension.

Diamond Lust excerpt set up: Heroine Petra is bound and tossed into a fuel dispenser building at the diamond mine along with her old buddy Carter.

“These smugglers covered all the angles. They will never let us live. We are so screwed,” Petra moaned.

“Didn’t you notice the AN/FO over there?”

She followed the direction of his nod to a fifty-five-pound sack wedged between two fuel pumps, the label indicating the trade name of an ammonium nitrate blasting agent. A wave of dizziness had her chin dipping to her chest. The smugglers planned one mother of an explosion. Ignited, the dispenser building and its fuel storage tanks outside would erupt into a cataclysmic fireball.

A white ignition cord dangled from a hole poked into the side of the packaging. When the white flashes behind her eyeballs faded, she knee-walked over to the sack, and with her teeth yanked out the cord and metal blasting cap on its buried tip with the intention of gently depositing it on the floor in a far corner.

“A lot of good that’ll do. They don’t have to enter this room to start a fire. They’ll open an exterior valve to flood the ground with fuel, or drop a match into a tank, or—”

“Enough, Carter! I need to think.” Why plan a massive explosion? If eliminating her and Carter was the objective, why wait? A small fire lit at the time they were dumped in the building would have killed them quickly. 

“They intend to create a major diversion,” she said slowly, “to give them time to escape in the confusion.”

Will Mountie Seth Cooper fly to the rescue of his love Petra before the diamond smugglers blow her to smithereens? Find out by reading Diamond Lust!

Diamond Lust is available in print and e-formats. The digital version is a steal at $1.49 or less at retailers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Ellora’s Cave, etc. See www.madellemorgan.com for more info. 

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