Slushpile readings – Professionals panel

Concept: Moderator reads a manuscript until all the panel signal they are out. Panel then give reasons why they would stop reading. Kelly Hunter (Tule), Hailee Nash (The Nash Agency), Alex Adsett (The Adsett Agency), Kathleen Scheibling (Harlequin US), Moe Ferrara (Bookends Literary Agency), Rachael Donovan (Harlequin), Kate Cuthbert (Escape Publishing)  Reading 1:  Warzone, terrorists, […]

Breakout 1: Kelly Hunter – 10 tips for character development

Kelly Hunter is an Australian author who is a USA Today bestselling author, a three-time Romance Writers of America RITA finalist and loves writing to the short contemporary romance form. She is also Editorial Director at Tule Publishing. I missed the start of this due to a scheduling conflict, so I’ve done a summary of […]

Ross Grayson Bell – Writing for a Screenplay versus a Novel (pt 3)

The Hero’s Journey One way of telling a story. Stage 1 – The Ordinary World  Stage 2 – Call to adventure  What is the call to adventure?  What new force appears to challenge hero?  How is hero’s flaw tested?  Stage 3 – Refusal of the call  Heroes initially reject the call to adventure  Stage 4 […]

Ross Grayson Bell – Writing for a Screenplay versus a Novel (pt 2)

7 ways to engage an audience 1. Premise  Your point of view and how to live it.  Eg romance writers have a perspective on love  Eg in Fight Club, the only way to evolve was to break yourself apart to move on. Not the same as the book, where he ends up in an asylum […]

Friday workshop: Ross Grayson Bell – Writing for a Screenplay versus a Novel (pt 1)

Ross Grayson Bell is a screenwriter, producer and story consultant with over twenty-five years of international experience in story development and film production. Having started as a creative executive for legendary, Hollywood producer Ray Stark, Ross developed and produced Fight Club for Twentieth Century Fox and executive produced Under Suspicion with Gene Hackman and Morgan […]

“Basically Quite Weird”: The Queer Medievalist Virtual Romance of Alexis Hall’s Looking for Group

Kristin Noone (Irvine Valley College) Session 12.4: Love in Other Worlds Abstract: In a recent blog post, award-winning romance author Alexis Hall comments that “something we’re grappling with as twenty-first century people is the way our assumptions about relationships are changing and that’s something I tried to explore in the new book, both explicitly and […]

“Outlander’s Tactile Caress: a Multisensory Romance”

Athena Bellas (University of Melbourne) Session 12.3: Love in Other Worlds Abstract: Much of the existing literature on television series Outlander (STARZ 2014– ) emphasises its prioritisation of a female gaze at the scene of erotic pleasure. This is important to a discussion of shifting representations of gender and sex on the contemporary screen. However, […]

Representations of Otherness in Paranormal Romance: Nalini Singh and J.R. Ward

María T. Ramos-García (South Dakota State University) Session 12.2: Love in Other Worlds Abstract: There is currently a very heated debate in progress regarding diversity in the romance novel in the USA, both in terms of the characters represented and the authors published and promoted. In this context, the paranormal subgenre is an especially rich […]

Love is (Color) Blind: Race, Belonging, and Nation in 21st Century Historical Romance Fiction

Mallory Jagodzinski (Indiana University South Bend) Session 11.2: Subversions of Race, Culture and History Abstract: This paper incorporates the space and place theme of IASPR 2018 by examining how three American authors — Theresa Romain, Meredith Duran, and Courtney Milan — utilize the British/Indian colonial relationship in their historically set romances (Secrets of a Scandalous […]

‘You stayed’: Love, law and the reservation in Jenna Kernan’s Apache Protectors series

Johanna Hoorenman (Utrecht University) Session 11.3: Subversions of Race, Culture and History Abstract: Native American themed romance has long been one of the most popular subgenres of popular romance. For a number of years, the Romantic Times had specific Reviewer’s Choice Awards for “Best Indian Romance,” “Best Historical Indian Romance,” and “Best Indian Romance by […]