I’ve recently read two back-to-back bad books, written by experienced authors and issued by large publishers. Bit fed up, tbh.

The ultimate reason both books were bad was that they read like first drafts, with (as I said while ranting on Bluesky about this) good ideas not yet coagulated into a plot, elements that had been chucked in but weren't fully incorporated, and characters that were visibly acting according to the demands of the plot, rather than shaped so you felt their actions were natural.

This contract is asking for a definition of ‘Editor’, can you supply something? How about ‘irritable, tea drinking pedant’? I’ll put that in the boilerplate.

What editors do all day has been brilliantly summed up in this handy pie chart from Sarah Fletcher (www.sarahjhfletcher.com and @sjhfletcher).

I can’t better that, but it made me think of some of the other things that I have done as an editor aside from make tea and swear at Word.

As per last month, I am now doing monthly roundups of my romance reading here. There will be two roundups this month, because this one is purely dedicated to the Trans Rights Readathon on 17^th-31^st March.

This is an annual event in support of Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV) on March 31st, in which we read and uplift books written by and/or featuring trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming authors and characters.

Last week brought the sad news that longstanding romance review blog All About Romance is closing down. This in turn made me reflect on just how many review outlets we've lost--it seems astonishing to recall that we literally used to have Romantic Times magazine, published in a print edition.