Category: Author’s Alley
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Cinnamon Roll vs. Grumpy Alpha: The Ultimate Book Boyfriend Showdown
Alright, bestie, pull up your favorite chair and let’s get down to business. We are deep into August, Read-a-Romance Month is reaching its peak, and our Kindle highlights are getting borderline scandalous. It is time to address the eternal debate that has completely split the romance book community into two passionate factions. I’m talking, of…
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The Quiet Year
There had been a year — their fourth — when very little had happened between them. No crisis, no milestone, no defining moment worth telling people about. Just months of ordinary Tuesdays stacked on top of ordinary Tuesdays, a year that, if asked to summarize, Petra wouldn’t have known what to say. She’d worried about…
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The List
She kept a list on her phone titled, simply, “Things.” It had grown over the years into something close to four hundred entries — small observations about him, things he’d said or done that she didn’t want to lose to the ordinary forgetting that happens to a life. *Hums when he thinks no one’s listening.…
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How to Prep Your Bookshelf and TBR List for Cozy Autumn Reading
I know, I know. Take a deep breath and don’t throw your iced coffee at me, bestie. It is still late August, the sun is still blazing, and you’re probably still wearing shorts. But if we are being completely honest with ourselves, the romance book community is already mentally living in October. The second the…
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The Translation of Tired
She had four different kinds of tired, and after nine years, he could tell them apart without her saying a word. There was work-tired, which wanted silence and a specific blanket. There was emotionally-tired, which wanted to be asked a direct question rather than left alone. There was the-world-is-too-much tired, which wanted distraction — something…
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The Anatomy of a Slow Burn: Why Waiting 300 Pages for a Kiss is Worth the Torture
Let’s be completely honest with ourselves, bestie. As romance readers, we are absolute masochists. It is late August, we are celebrating the final stretch of Read-a-Romance Month, and what are we doing? We are willingly paying money to read 300 pages of two fictional characters making intense eye contact across a room without so much…
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The Defense
He’d never raised his voice for himself. Not once, in the eight years she’d known him — not at bad service, not at unfair treatment, not even when he probably should have. He raised it for her, though. Exactly once, memorably, at a dinner where her brother had made an offhand comment about her career…
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The Ultimate Summer Romance Tropes Bingo: How Many Have You Read?
We are officially in the home stretch of August, bestie, which means two things. One: the sun is actively trying to melt us. Two: Read-a-Romance Month is almost over, and we need to audit our reading habits. It’s time to play a game I like to call Romance Tropes Bingo. The romance book community on…
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The Photograph Wall
Every year on their anniversary, they added one photograph to the hallway wall. Just one — chosen carefully, sometimes after genuine debate, meant to represent the entire year in a single frame. It had started accidentally. Their first anniversary, neither of them had planned anything elaborate, and Theo had simply printed a photo from a…
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The Understudy
He learned her job. Not formally — he had no reason to, no professional overlap, an entirely different field. But over six years of listening to her talk through cases at dinner, he’d absorbed enough of family law to occasionally, accurately, predict how a judge might rule. “You’d have made a decent lawyer,” Solange told…
Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 