Thank you very much for the Bet Me shout-out. Plus I'm teaching PR to my romance writing class this week and we've been discussing buzz, and here you are, so thank you again.

Your buddy is wrong. A lot of us got our start in category romance, and Harlequin has reissued our old books as single titles under the Mira imprint. The only complaint I get about them is that they're shorter than my later books. While some romance is formulaic, so is some SF, fantasy, mystery, and horror. The…

Did they rank their choices? I wonder if nobody thought it was the greatest scene but it was suggested a lot. I think it's terrific and I'd put it on a list of greatest moments, but not at the top.

Yep. A lot of academic fiction is interior, or as my prof used to call it, "sitting' and thinking' scenes." But action is always a better way to characterize because it's how we evaluate people in real life. If somebody says, "I love dogs" and then kicks a puppy, we believe the action. Another prof I had used to…

My first drafts are always freeform because I discover a lot as I write. Then I outline the first draft to organize what I've got, cut what I don't need, and write what I've missed. Lather, rinse, repeat. But I have friends who are natural storytellers who just write the stories and do little or no revisions. It…

You can structure your story any way you want, but the most common is linear structure in which the events escalate, raising the stakes as the events happen faster. And the easiest way to do that is to list your scenes (one good way is to label each scene with the protagonist and antagonist of that scene and what…

Or you can put the eggs in cold water, bring them to a boil, put a lid on the pan and move it off the burner and let them sit for fifteen minutes, then shock them with cold water. Shells come right off those, too.

Actually, you can do exposition without infodump by weaving it through the story. It's only infodump when the writer says, "The hell with it," and just dumps a lot of it on the page all at once.

Oh, yes. And what info dump he can't cram into the story, he puts in footnotes, and it's all wonderful.

I love that scene. They're not even pretending it's a conversation, they just pass the info dump while Jack yells at the insurance company.

Yeah, that's more info dump as backstory, but it's beautiful backstory.

I loved the way the exposition became a mystery. "How can he know what questions I'm going to ask if he's on a tape?" Wonderful.

That was the point of the episode. Except for Giles, none of them could really sing, but they were cursed by a demon so they had to. If they'd had good voices, it wouldn't have been so funny, or so awful for them. The bad voices were in character. And it's still one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard. "I'm…

Yep. Absolutely chilling.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

Yeah, that's why I finally thought, "Oh-kay," and just let her be.

"Also, "ilk" is a perfectly cromulent word. You're imputing irrational preconceptions to it."

I'm not demanding that anybody lower their standards. I'm just saying that I get to set my own standards, as do you. And that neither of us get to impose them on other people.

Well, that degenerated into name calling quickly.

Oh, I wasn't offended. I just disagreed that there's any consensus outside particular groups as to what literature is. I agree the Slate article is dumb. And I apologize if I came across as hostile. It truly wasn't my intention.