1. BUILD THE ROMANCE!

2. DEVELOP INTERNAL CONFLICTS!

Um, okay. Obvious enough. Those things are at the core of most romances. But how, exactly, do we do that in such a short book?It’s harder than it looks, and I still haven’t found the answer. But I have a list of evolving rules—let’s call ‘em guidelines—gleaned directly from rejection and revision letters I’ve received from Harlequin and Silhouette editors. (Though I’m targeting romantic suspense at the moment, I suspect that these ideas hold true for much of category romance.)

Guideline #1: Stir internal conflict on every page.

That’s right: EVERY page, beginning with page one. If you’re doing it right, you’re going to feel like you’re beating a dead horse with a golf driver, but trust me. I thought I’d done a pretty good job of this with my last effort—which won a 2009 Golden Heart, so for the sake of argument let’s assume it doesn’t totally suck—but a blessedly patient Silhouette Romantic Suspense editor came back to me with this: “As for your characters’ internal conflicts…they need to be brought up earlier in the manuscript. We also need to see how these things affect them and add to their romantic conflicts. There’s some of this, but readers need to get a deeper understanding of these things earlier and continue to see their progression throughout.”

Guideline #2: Minimize secondary characters.

I’ve been told over and over again, not only by these editors but also by my agent, to cut down scenes that do not feature both the heroine and the hero. So just do it. Seriously. Even if you think your hero’s sidekick is deliciously bad, keep his lines to a minimum. You simply don’t have the space for it. Write them into a longer book if you love them so much. This was from a Harlequin Intrigue letter: “However, there was a lot of time spent on a secondary character…, which overshadowed any developing romance between the hero and the heroine.” From Silhouette: “Scenes and conversations with other people…dominate, and while necessary information is revealed, these instances could be shortened and/or combined as well.”

Guideline #3: Let your main characters be active.

They should be the parties who resolve the external conflict. They shouldn’t just stew about their internal conflicts while everyone around them solves the crime or saves the school or finds the cure. A savvy Silhouette editor advised me to make my secret-agent heroine more dynamic. “She’s off the page for too long, and she needs more agent work to do throughout. Get her involved more.”

Guideline # 4: Get them together.

You don’t have the luxury of space, so get them together quickly, on page one if you can. I try to not introduce any secondary characters before the hero and heroine, or at least make it very, very clear that other males are not the hero, and other females are not the heroine. A Harlequin editor cautioned me, when I played too fast and loose with this guideline, “[the] hero and heroine don’t meet until well into chapter two and it’s not clear, initially, whether he’s the hero or a bad guy. There should be no doubt in the reader’s mind which couple to root for.”

Guideline #5: Keep them together.

If you need them to be apart, they’d darned well better be thinking about each other while they’re away, at least a bit. The SRS editor had this to say: “[Hero] and [heroine] are drawn to one another from the beginning,… but you could go further. Adding a bit more interaction or awareness between them in the early chapters of the manuscript would amp up the attraction and give their romance an even stronger base….We need to see more of them in romantic and/or passionate situations.” Later, when I failed to take it seriously enough, she wrote, “[hero] and [heroine] need to spend more time together—they have to interact in order to develop their romance. In the early chapters, consider trimming some material to reach the point where they join forces earlier.”

Guideline #6: Give them reasons to love each other.

Seems clear, but it’s one of the more challenging things to accomplish. It’s also the most important. It’s not enough to show a couple drawn together by passion and circumstance. The Silhouette editor suggested that I slow my fast-paced story down at certain points, forcing them to spend more quiet time together. “This will give them more time to talk about personal things as well, allowing them to develop feelings for each other, a deeper connection. As you have it now, their feelings of love come way too quickly and with nothing really to back them up.” Ouch, right? But so true! When I looked back at my manuscript, I realized that while I knew that these people were falling in love, I’d failed to adequately convey that on the page.

There’s more, of course—pages and pages of things I’ve done wrong—but these are the things that seem to be most important to the editors with which I’ve had the good fortune to communicate.

What do you think? Have you tried writing category? Do you think these ideas apply across category genres?

And my favorite question…

Have you violated one of these guidelines, but sold to a category publisher nonetheless?

While this will remain an open forum all day, we hostesses of this event tend to pose a question of our own to get the advice rolling.

My Q for U:

What are your favorite fictional climaxes, and why?

Movies, books, whatever. I’m hungry for examples of fabulous endings.

The meaning of my life in a six-week class? I would have laughed out loud if I hadn’t so desperately wanted it to be true. I was in my mid-twenties and had fallen into early success in a career that I occasionally liked but didn’t love. I felt quiet panic at the thought of continuing down that path, but I found it hard to give up on something that made other people proud of me and that made me feel important.

So I arrived on the first day of class ready to learn, ready to listen, but mostly, ready to be directed. I wanted someone else to take the wheel for a little while, or at least point out which road I should follow. Surely there was a test I could take that could access the secret corners of my mind and tell me who I was meant to be.

But it wouldn’t be so easy. On day one, the course instructor informed us that there would be no quick answers, no quizzes or personality tests. The meaning of your life, he said, is within you, and no one else can know it but you. Moreover, he cautioned, if you let someone else guide your life, you’ll only end up living that person’s life instead of your own.

Let me rephrase his concept in these writers’ terms: If you use someone else’s motivation to determine your goals, you’ll never overcome your own conflicts. It’s as true for our fictional characters as it is for us.

It seemed sensible enough to me, but reversing the habits of twenty-five years took some doing. The instructor began by asking us to consider the times in our childhood that someone told us “no,” or told us what we were supposed to do.

Well, all the time, right? Don’t touch that hot stove. Don’t run into traffic. Go give Grandma a kiss. Girls wear dresses, not jeans. Get out of the dirt. Good girls don’t call boys; they wait for boys to call them. Go to college immediately after high school. Don’t get married until after you’re 30. And for girls, the most important message of all: don’t get pregnant. For God’s sake, just don’t get pregnant!

Now, the way I see it, kids take this information in one of two ways: do what they’re told, or do the exact opposite of what they’re told. But either way, you’ve let someone dictate how you live your life, and by the time you realize it, you can hardly separate what you believe from what your mother told you to be true, or what your father demanded you do.

So how do you untangle someone else’s motivation from your own?

We’ve waded into treacherous water, friends, because before you can understand your motivation and set your goals, you have to be very honest with yourself. Honesty is painful and slippery. You have to peer into your present and sort out what it is you currently want, and then you have to poke around your past to figure out why you want it. It’s an arduous, backwards process, but it’s not unlike the journeys our characters undertake in our novels. Isn’t it hard for your widowed Navy SEAL to admit that he’s taking on dangerous missions not just because he’s brave and wants to serve his country but because a big part of him has wanted to die ever since his wife passed away? And won’t it be hard for him to decide that he doesn’t want to die anymore? He’ll have to recognize the origin of his self-destructive urges, and he’ll have to decide whether he can move on from his wife’s death or not. He’ll probably need a reason to live, some light at the end of the tunnel, and in our line of work, that light is often provided by the heroine.

For real people, life is full of such character-defining moments. Like, when faced with the shiny new promotion you thought you wanted, you feel only dread. You try to pretend it’s just a natural fear of change, but maybe it’s really the slow, grim realization that you’re in the wrong field altogether. Faced with that conflict, you either trod the well-labeled path you’ve been walking, or you take the time to search your soul for a new direction, It isn’t easy to strip away harmful motivations and establish new, true goals for yourself, but I tend to think that it’s the only way to discover the meaning and purpose of your particular life.

I’m not entirely sure what the point of this post is, except to suggest that the lessons we learn as genre-fiction writers translate to our personal lives. We, like our characters, have goals we strive for, motivations that spur us forward, and conflicts to overcome. We, like our characters, are motivated by positive and negative events that occurred in our pasts. We, like our characters, sometimes chase goals that have nothing to do with what will really make us happy. We, like our characters, face character-testing conflicts that have the potential to show us the truth of our selves, if only we have the courage to look deep inside our hearts for the answers.

Have you ever fought to achieve a goal, only to get it and realize that it wasn’t what you really wanted?

Just try? How does one “try” to be funny? If it doesn’t come out naturally, it seemed to me that it shouldn’t come out at all. But she’s a smart woman, so I decided to give it a shot. I borrowed “The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You’re Not” by John Vorhaus, and set about learning how to be more like Jennie Cruisie.

Vorhaus grabbed me by the throat right away. “Comedy is truth and pain,” he writes. Things are funny when they highlight the truth and pain of fundamental, shared human existence.

We hear this credo in romance writing, too. We’re told that to generate sympathy from an audience, we must touch upon shared human experiences. We must make the audience nod and think, “I never thought of it that way, but that’s exactly how the world works.” Even if that world is paranormal, audiences still like to feel drawn into a story that reveals something fundamentally if unexpectedly true about the nature of existence.

Advertisers sometimes do a great job with this in commercials. Let’s look at the “Where’s the Beef?” Wendy’s spots from the Eighties. I just found one on YouTube, and it’s still pretty funny, even after all these years, but why? What’s true and painful about that little old lady looking for the beef?

It’s true that old people can develop senility. It’s painful to see an old person wandering around, looking for something she’s sure she needs. Her desires and needs have even been whittled down to one single object: beef. She needs the beef. Wants the beef. Can’t understand why no one will give her the beef! Beef becomes a symbol for her lost home, her lost health, her lost loved ones and friends. I want her to stop looking for the beef, because she’s making me sad. But she just won’t quit! She’s ridiculous, of course, because we all know she can’t have the beef. It isn’t just that it’s missing, but rather that there is no more beef for her in this world. She’s willingly made herself into a figure of mockery by lusting after what she cannot have. It’s ugly and painful, but sadly, reflects reality.

Okay, not “reality,” but something like it. The commercial shines a spotlight on a shared human fear of growing old, forgetful, and ridiculous. We worry that no matter how hard we try to keep ourselves together, we will inevitably become the “Where’s the Beef?” lady, mocked for her intense yet ridiculous search for something she cannot have. We fear that we will grow old and forget our purpose, forget our selves, forget to put on pants. I doubt there’s a culture on earth that so venerates its elders that its members still don’t worry about growing old. These cross-cultural fears bind us together as humans.

So I laugh, because not only is the situation too-often true, but it’s also painful. “That silly old woman!” I say. “I will be a silly old woman one day,” I whisper.

I never knew that comedy could be a vehicle for delivering a lesson on the hardest parts of being human, but Vorhaus knows his stuff. I began to think about things I find funny – often awful, dark things that make me laugh only because I’d otherwise cry – and realized that they’re funny because they dare to show me the truth in the dark side of the world. (I’d give you an example here, but none of my favorite dark jokes are even remotely family friendly.)

In writing comedy, Vorhaus advised that we admit reality. Show it clearly. Admit pain, too. Just don’t make your audience work too hard to understand it.

So, dear friends, tell me: what makes you laugh? Do you, like me, laugh at things that frighten or sadden you? Or do you refuse to find humor in the truth and pain of being human?

I don’t know. So, in the spirit of fun and discovery, I’ve pulled a dozen short sections from romance novels written by ten of our genre’s modern superstars.

How many voices do you recognize without turning to your bookshelf (or the Internet)? Do you hear a voice similar to your own among the samples? Are there any that go completely against the grain of your writing – or that you itch to “fix”?

The first printings of these works range from 1988 to 2009. (I’d have added more variety, but my personal collection is shamefully small and the local library is closed today due to a dusting of snow on the roads. Grr.)

Honestly, I think it’s nearly impossible for anyone to guess these correctly, but I realize that many of us are devoted romance readers, so I’ll wait until 4 PM EST to post the list of possible authors. I’ll drop back again later in the evening to post the answers (and give these fabulous authors credit for their work!).

1. “He had no idea how old the guy was. His sun-leathered face had more lines in it than a weather map. But the outdoors had a way of aging a man’s skin that had nothing to do with the accumulation of years. There was more gray than brown in in the stubble of a beard that shadowed his cheeks. [Character] rarely bothered to shave but never let his whiskers grow long enough to qualify as a genuine beard.”
2. “I’d known [Character] since he was five. I’d gone to grade school with [Character]. We ate lunch together in grades one through three, and I would forever associate him with peanut butter and jelly on Wonder bread. I’d lost touch with him in high school. I knew he’d gone to college, and that after college he’d gone to work selling appliances in his father’s store.”
3. “The sailor was a large man, and obviously strong as an ox, which was doubtless useful on boats. He might have been twenty-eight or thirty. His brown hair was cut close to his skull and lay in layers, like shingles. His eyes were a dark, colorless mixture of shades, like the sea itself, a sort of gunmetal gray. The lower half of his face was dark with stubble. None of this should have made him handsome and yet, to her, he was.”
4. “He realized, as she drew closer, that she was sporting a new hairdo, and that it was this which underscored her already-pronounced similarity to her grandmother. Her dark glossy hair had been cut short in a sort of sleek bob. It was chic and obviously of the moment, and yet to him it had the look of the 1930s. It brought to mind the film stars of his youth…and the elegant [character] he had known and admired as a boy.”
5. “[Character] looked at his beautiful wife. Spun sugar candy was what she always reminded him of. No matter what time of the day or night, she always looked like she just stepped out of a bandbox. Perfectly coiffed, expertly made up, exquisitely dressed, subtle perfume that never seemed to fade, and always with her twenty-four-carat smile that was as phony as the caps on her pearly white teeth.”
6. “The face was charming, with its little pointed chin and its pert nose, its big blue eyes mirroring the color of the sky. A pixie cap of glossy brown hair completed the picture.”
7. “[Character] wore black—a black greatcoat that fell to boot top and a black, low-crowned hat with a wide brim. A scarf of raw wool, colorless in the streak of light from the high, barred windows, covered nose to neck and hid what the gloom didn’t.”
8. “He didn’t look like a damn farmer, she thought. Oh, he was tanned and lean, and his hair streaked from the sun. His jeans were old and his shirt faded blue. There were sunglasses hooked carelessly by one earpiece in the breast pocket. What he looked like, she decided, was some Hollywood director’s image of a young, prosperous southern farmer who could ooze charm and sex appeal with one easy smile.”
9. “He wore a blue sweater, the same color as his eyes, and hanging loose over the sweater was a black jacket. His jeans, faded as if they were his favorite pair, showcased his waist and legs. His dark hair looked a little tousled, as if he’d been running his fingers through it.”
10. “She had to be dreaming. No man hereabouts would leave his house in shirtsleeves. Or leave his shirt open at the throat to reveal a smattering of chest hair. Or wear pantaloons so tight they showed every well-defined muscle in his thighs. He was such a delicious specimen of manliness that he fairly took her breath away.”
11. “She appeared rumpled, as if she’d fallen asleep after a vigorous hour of lovemaking and had only now awakened for more. Her eyes were slightly uptilted, the lids at half-mast and shadowed by long dark lashes. Her nose was small and dainty, her lips still red and lush. And her skin…more was revealed, smooth amber-rich, each pulse point hammering deliciously. A large cruise covered the left side of her jaw. Her breasts—“
12. “[Character] squinted to see the medium-height woman between the redhead and the blonde. She was dressed in a dull, boxy, gray-checked suit, and her round face scowled under brown hair yanked back into a knot on the top of her head.”

“I’m sorry, J. We’re gonna be a few more minutes.”

“It’s okay. Are you lost?”

“No. Your brother—he’s—his shirt’s off. There’s a guy on the ground…”

“Huh?”

“There was an accident—“

Panic. I begin to imagine where they might be, and if I could sprint there. “Are you okay? Where are you? Where’s (my nephew)?”

“We’re fine. No, this guy, he was sitting in his car, and your brother saw him. He’s helping him.“

“Oh. Oh! Good Lord. Where?”

“I don’t know.” She doesn’t drive much, so she doesn’t know her way around town yet. “Somewhere close to you?”

I hear sirens wailing. “I think so. You’re getting help soon. So, what happened, exactly? And why is (my brother’s) shirt off?”

She laughs. “I don’t know. He’s…doing something to him.”

It’s an odd picture, but the explanation would have to wait. I don’t want to distract her if my brother or nephew might need her assistance. I hang up and head back inside the terminal.

Not too long afterward, my brother calls. “Sorry ‘bout that. Just had to save some dude’s life. I’ll be there in five.”

And he was, just like he promised, wearing a clean pair of a jeans and a police officer’s jacket zipped up over his bare torso. I had to laugh, but then I began to think:

This is an awful lot like a romance-novel setup. Is my brother an Alpha Hero?

I rolled my eyes at the notion. My brother? Blah! I love him and all, but come on! He’s my brother! He’s no hero. I mean, okay. I know he’s heroic—he’s always been willing to put himself on the line to save a stranger—but come on. An Alpha? Women write long, lusty books about guys like that. This is my BROTHER we’re talking about here!

Ewwww!

But he was shirtless, and it was Christmas Eve. Something about this situation had me thinking in Times New Roman. A romantic suspense novel began to compose itself in my brain, and, horribly, my brother was the handsome man who arrives to save the fair maiden in distress.

Soon enough, though, my brother told us what had actually happened.

On his way to the airport, he’d seen a lone car dead in an otherwise busy intersection. Two cops were already on the scene, gathered around the driver of the car. To some people, that’d be enough. They’d drive on, presuming help had already arrived. To my brother, the single-car accident looked like a medical emergency. He has great respect for police officers, but he’s a battle-tested Army combat medic. He’s knows he has more real-world life-saving experience than the average cop. So he careened his truck to a stop and jumped out to help. He showed the cops his credentials—he happens to live down the street from one of them, so he wasn’t a complete stranger–and they deferred to him. He quickly realized that the heavyset man slumped in the car wasn’t breathing, but he had a heartbeat. They pulled him out—at times like that, spinal injuries are a secondary concern to basic life support—but no one had a mouth protector for CPR. The guy was going to die on the street if they couldn’t keep air flowing to his brain. My brother saw just one way to save the man’s life and protect himself in the process.

He tugged off his t-shirt, stretched it over the unconscious man’s mouth, and gave him CPR until the ambulance arrived. When the EMTs got there, they intubated an airway and took the man to a hospital. Had my brother not stopped to help, the driver of the car wouldn’t have survived to see Christmas Day.

Oh, his son was there, too. That’s right. My four-year-old nephew got to watch his daddy save a stranger’s life. His wife got to watch him do it shirtless. How’s that for a memory?

How fictional does all that sound? Totally fictional, but it’s 100% real.

I’m shocked to say it, but my big brother is a true Alpha Hero.

Do you, too, know a real-life alpha male? What’s his extraordinary alpha ability? What do you love about him—or what does he do that drives you crazy?

WRONG. Wrong, wrong, stupid and wrong. It’s been awful, and though I’m much better than I was in, say, mid-July, I’m still worse than I was before the surgery (yeah, you read that right). My bicep burns as I sit here typing. I can’t go back to zookeeping. I can’t play volleyball. I can’t even lift my 3-year-old nephew into a swing.

It sucks, and it’s bothering more than I think it should.

See, I’ve always been a physically strong person, able to hold or lift more weight than could other women I knew. I was no bodybuilder, but I was naturally strong, whether I worked at it or or not. I thought it was part of who I was as a human, part of my intrinsic self. I probably took it for granted, and ironically, that was my downfall, for the doctors tell me that if I’d made an effort to keep my shoulder muscles strong, I might not have injured it in the first place. (Did someone just whisper “hubris”?)

Now, I can’t even do the normal things that everyone else can do. I see it at the zoo: I can’t hold a twenty-five-pound giant rabbit in one arm. I can’t carry two penguins at once. I can’t help load the Indian python into the van. I can’t scrub the floor. And at home: I can’t carry an armful of sticks into the backyard. I can’t move furniture by myself. I can’t run a power drill. I can’t do a simple push-up, to say nothing of a tricep dip or bicep curls.

I am a pale, flabby, unremarkable imitation of my former self, and I hardly know who I am anymore.

People who didn’t know me two years ago don’t know that I used to be strong, and I get this weird, childish urge to tell them how things used to be. But I don’t—or at least I try really hard not to—and this effort to shut up has made me wonder why it matters so much to me that people understand that I’m only temporarily weak. I mean, I know humans aren’t strong forever. I know that old age would have taken my strength away eventually. I know I should never have allowed myself to place so much stock in something so fleeting. But it’s clear now that however unwise it was for me to let it happen, my self-image was based on my physical strength. Now that it’s gone, I feel bereft, undefined, like I’m not entirely myself.

So I’ve been wondering, what remains after the thing you believe is the foundation of your self turns out to be nothing more than a construct of youth and arrogance?

What’s left? Well, after much thought, I’ve decided that I’m still here, and maybe I’m stronger than I was before that last volleyball swing. Maybe I’m a better person now that I’m not relying upon external character traits to tell me what I’m worth. For as much as I enjoyed and was comforted by my physical strength, it wasn’t the best of me. It didn’t help me to take in foster cats. It didn’t help me make friends when I moved to a new town. And it surely wasn’t the thing that kept my butt in the chair and my brain connected to my stories as I pecked out my first two novels.

My physical self isn’t my internal self, as connected and difficult to disengage as they may seem.

And that, my fellow romance writing friends, is where this little confessional begins to apply to our craft. This self-reflection has me thinking about myself abstractly, like I’m some disillusioned character in one of my books. (I think it’s a little easier to take the analysis when I remove myself from my self for a bit.) As writers, we create heroes and heroines with well-rounded sets of characteristics, both tangible and intangible. We know their hair color, their height, their eye color. Shoe size, too. But that merely describes them; it doesn’t define who they are.

Certainly, a character may think of herself in physical terms (as I clearly have). Perhaps it’s important to your heroine that she has curly red hair. Perhaps she acts in accordance with how people with curly red hair are reputed to act. But would she be a different person without that hair? If she lost it through chemotherapy, perhaps, or merely by the natural thinning and graying of age, would her nature change? Would she see herself in the mirror as a different woman? Would some subtler self emerge, or would she remain as she always was, as the redhead within? Does it turn out that the hair give her confidence to be bold, or was it really nothing more than hair to her? Would she have been the same women if she’d been born a brunette?

I really don’t know, because I don’t know your heroine. But you must. You must understand how your character’s physical appearance impacts her emotional world, whether sensible or not. After all, people aren’t very sensible, and while I know that fiction isn’t reality, I think that this often unspoken balance between internal and external selves is a mine worth exploring in our novels.

Try this exercise: pick your character’s most defining physical trait, whether positive or negative—hair, height, weight, whatever. Let them have it for a while, let them grow accustomed to it, and then rip it from them. See what happens. See if they change. I’d wager that you’ll learn something about the guts of your characters if you do.

And a question for your comments….do you have a physical trait that you think defines you? How would you feel if you lost it?

Now, everyone knows that each year’s class of Golden Heart finalists represents the top-scoring 10% of manuscripts entered in the contest. Right?

Wrong, at least it was in 2009. Last year’s sixty-seven finalists represented, on average, 8.2% of their categories. Those sixty-seven manuscripts comprised just 7.4% of the total entries received. Only one category (Inspirational Romance) graduated exactly 10% of its entries to the final round.

Why?

Golden Heart rules are funny. Here are two that tend to skew the number of finalists above or below 10% of the total:

1. FINALIST CAPS: Contest policy states that there can be no more than eight finalists in any category, nine in the case of a tie.
2. NO PARTIAL FINALISTS: Because the number of entries in a category is rarely evenly divisible by ten, RWA must round to ensure that the number of finalists is a whole number (we can’t have 6.2 finalists, can we?).

Here’s how the numbers broke down in 2009:

While this data doesn’t imply anything about reader trends or the quality of manuscripts in any category, it does show us the relative popularity of each genre within the romance writing community. Clearly, more of us are writing, finishing, and submitting Novels with Strong Romantic Elements to the Golden Heart than any other genre. Thus, that category was more mathematically competitive than any other genre last year.

I’d love to do this analysis on previous years, but I haven’t been able to find total entry data from previous years. (If you have it, please email me!) I do know how many finalists there were in 2007 and 2008, and from that we can draw limited conclusions. It’s likely that if a category had less than eight finalists, then those finalists represent around 10% of the total entries. Viewed through this lens, relative popularity trends have remained stable over the past three years.

No category has varied by more than one finalist over the past three years. Even figures from the categories that have been merged or deleted suggest consistent interest in each genre.

What does this mean for 2010 Golden Heart entrants?

Nothing. Or everything. If you enter a category that happens to receive more than eighty entries, your chances of finaling are automatically worse than they’d be if you entered a smaller category. That isn’t to say that you can or should avoid entering perennially popular categories–or that any category will be as popular in 2010 as it was in 2009, 2008, and 2007–but if you’ve written a fence-sitting novel and are desperate for a reason to enter one category or another, consider adding mathematical competitiveness trends to your mental gymnastics.

Why does it matter how many finalists are in any category?

If you final, you’re more likely to win if you have fewer competitors. As the winner of the smallest group last year, I know that my odds of winning (one in three) were better than they would have been in, say, Historical Romance (one in nine, ouch!). Odds like these apply to all competitors, and tell us nothing about the quality of one manuscript over another. And no, I don’t think judges roll dice to select scores or winners, but I can’t help but keep an eye on historical data as I think about what category I’ll enter my baby into this year.

Will you take any of this into consideration when you select your category for the Golden Heart? Do you wish your category were more or less popular? Have you written a novel in a less-popular genre with the hope that you’ll have a better chance of standing out? Or do you think it’s unwise to write in what may be a fading fashion?

One lucky commenter will receive his or her choice of a first chapter critique (up to 25 pages) or a cool, Ruby-Slippered Sisterhood mug.

Disclaimer: For official Golden Heart rules and regulations, consult http://www.rwanational.org and the most current Policies and Procedures manual in the governance documents section of RWA’s website (http://www.rwanational.org/cs/rwa_governance/governance_documents).