I’ve written several single title length romances that have all been rejected and I’m tired of investing so much time in them so I’m trying a novella instead. I have a couple of questions, if that’s not cheating.

How do you break up the chapters in a novella? Are the about the same length as in a single title, but just fewer of them or are they shorter chapters?

Even though I have to invest less time, am I making

I’ll be forgoing the actual question this weekend. My reason for that is here. Instead I’m posting a mock query letter and I hope any authors who stop by will check it out, give a quick comment on what you think works or doesn’t, what’s worked for you, etc.

NOTE: I’m not asking for critique of MY query. This is an example only, for illustrative purposes.

I’ve added a couple of notes as to why I went the way

The question for this weekend is…

Would telling my editor where to shove her red pen kill my career? She corrected my grammar and caught my typos and pointed out plot inconsistencies, but then she goes on to “suggest” rewrites that change sentence structure. She likes long flowery sentences and this is a romantic suspense. Another example is when I used the word “stroked” and she wanted it changed to “petted”. He’s stroking her hair, and she doesn’t have four

Okay, here we go! The first weekend question. Just as a reminder, this post will stay at the top through the weekend, and I also wanted to add one thing for any authors who want to chime in. If you know of a blog post or article, either your own or somebody else’s, that you think gives great information relating to the question, please feel free to share the link in the comments.

If you’ve got a question, email

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, so I guess I’ll just get on with it.

One of my favorite things about the romance community is how generous authors are in sharing their experiences, advice and such. I can’t even begin to quantify the impact authors such as Karen Templeton, Patricia McLinn, and Deborah Hale have had on all facets of my writing. (Okay, there are many others, too. So many I’m not even going to try