Forewarning: Spoilers for Lost Season 2 here-in. I forgot to grouse about one movie idiom that I really dislike, and it happens in horror quite a bit, but it also happens all over the place.  That is the death of the romantic interest to propel plot and drama.  Now, I don’t hate it completely.  It [...]

Allow me to open with a paraphrasing of a Greek myth: And when Pandora opened the box, all of the evils of the world were let loose.  Plague, famine, pestilence, war, hatred, jealousy, and anger.  All that was left in the box was a single, small glimmer of light.  Slowly, she reached into the box, [...]

So, I may not be the most well-read person on Earth—far from it, in my experience—but as I mentioned earlier, there is an interesting fact that romantic subplots are super common, partly due to being “the most common subplot” of real life.  Yet so many, in both life and novels, are very, very poorly executed.  [...]

So, one of the comments to come out of the aforementioned “Strong Female Protagonists” panel at D*Con was that every needs to really buckle down and learn how to write a romantic subplot.  Why?  Well, because there is a reason it is the most common subplot in books: because it is the most common subplot [...]