Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Meg Waite Clayton | In Defense of Happy Endings
Uncategorized / April 29, 2008

Happiness is boring,” and “Riding off into the sunset is not true,” insisted a Noted Author at a symposium I attended earlier this month on the proposition that happiness simply cannot make good literature. And as I resisted – just barely – the urge to pull Sense and Sensibility from my backpack, he lobbed up this comment about Austen unprompted: She is “done for” because we’ve entered “a divorce culture.” One can no longer rely on one’s mate. I flipped to the back of the journal in which I was taking notes: Pfhew, the photo of my husband of twenty years was still there. “At home later, I Googled “happy ending”: what I got was nothing about literature and everything about a massage that … well … people do seem to like. As I sat in that symposium, though, I had only my own favorite books to stack up against the Noted Author’s no-happy-endings admonishment. Among the classics, five of my eight favorites qualified, I decided, for happy ending status: Pierre and Natasha, Princess Marya and Nikolay, and even young Nikolinka all leave us with a sense of contentment and hope in War and Peace, as do Dorothea in Middlemarch…

Anne McAllister | No Such Thing As A Loose End
Uncategorized / March 6, 2008

Thanks so much, Fresh Fiction, for inviting me to come and blog with you today. I love reading all the various blogs and getting to know writers (and thus adding to my TBR pile) in the process. I’ve been writing romance fiction since the mid 80s and am currently working on my 61st book. For quite a few years I would amuse myself on long car trips by seeing if I could name the books and the heroes and heroines in order. Then I started seeing if I could name them in any order. Now I just write the books and think fond thoughts about all those lovely men in my past. Sometimes, though, there’s one who doesn’t get his happy ending in one of my books and he turns up, rather like a bad penny, demanding one of his own. That was what happened with Flynn. Six years ago Silhouette published a single title of mine called The Great Montana Cowboy Auction. It was part of a series of books I’d been doing for them since the mid-90s called Code of the West. TGMCA ran to 97,000 words, which should have been long enough to give everyone in Montana…