When I was growing up, there was always a Reader’s Digest lying around the house. I devoured those things from front to back. The articles, the laughs, and especially the Quotable Quotes. But since we’ve had kids, a Reader’s Digest subscription is just one more of the casualties of a tight budget.
Recently on Facebook, I’ve noticed friends posting quotes now and then and I really enjoy them. In fact, sometimes I copy and paste them into my “Favorite Quotes” word document. Funny, I started that doc to save quotes years ago when I was looking for the perfect quote to use at the beginning of a Historical Romance I was writing at the time, never remembering the Readers Digest page until I sat down to write this blog.
So, without further ado, I’d like to share my top ten favorite quotes from my long list.
• I believe as I did as a child, that life has meaning, direction and value; that no suffering is lost; that each drop of blood and every tear counts; and that the secret of the world is to be found in St. John’s “Deus Caritas est” – “God is love.” –Francois Mauriac
• “It takes so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover…” — Morris L. West, Shoes of the Fisherman
• Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. — Mahatma Gandhi
• I will experience everything in life, so that on the final journey to my death, the nights will not be haunted by regret. – Lady Chatterley’s Lover
• It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.” – Rebecca West
• “Dreams dwell in the hidden places of the soul.”
• “We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence upon those who would do us harm.” —-George Orwell
• “Keep away from small people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great ones make you feel that you, too, can become great.” –Mark Twain
• “Revision is like wrestling with a demon, for almost anyone can write; but only writers know how to rewrite. It is this ability alone that turns the amateur into a professional.”– William Knott
• When we read good fiction it is to understand the human experience, to share or try to share, the feelings and intuitions of another. That other is a character, is an author, since, I’d argue the character is the author, at least a facet of the author, an alternative, a glimpse of, a parallel, a doppelganger, an inner being (maybe one of many), but no less human and no less revealing for being part of a part or a reflection of a dream or suppression. — Alex Keegan

When I was growing up, there was always a Reader’s Digest lying around the house. I devoured every issue from front to back. The inspiring true life stories, the celebrity interviews, the information and advice on everything from plumbing to family relationships, the jokes and comics, and especially the Quotable Quotes. As an adult I got my own subscription and kept every issue until I had to start a shelf in the garage. But once we started having kids, a Reader’s Digest subscription was just one of the casualties of a tight budget. I miss reading it, but e-mail and the internet have helped fill the void somewhat.
Recently on Facebook, I’ve noticed friends posting quotes now and then and I really enjoy them. In fact, sometimes I copy and paste them into my “Favorite Quotes” word document. Funny, I started saving quotes years ago when I was looking for the perfect quote to use at the beginning of a Historical Romance I was writing at the time, never remembering the Readers Digest page until I sat down to write this blog.
So, without further ado, I’d like to share my top ten favorite quotes from my long list.
• I believe as I did as a child, that life has meaning, direction and value; that no suffering is lost; that each drop of blood and every tear counts; and that the secret of the world is to be found in St. John’s “Deus Caritas est” – “God is love.” –Francois Mauriac
• “It takes so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover…” — Morris L. West, Shoes of the Fisherman
• Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. — Mahatma Gandhi
• I will experience everything in life, so that on the final journey to my death, the nights will not be haunted by regret. – Lady Chatterley’s Lover
• It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.” – Rebecca West
• Dreams dwell in the hidden places of the soul –
• “We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence upon those who would do us harm.” —-George Orwell
• “Keep away from small people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great ones make you feel that you, too, can become great.” –Mark Twain
• “Revision is like wrestling with a demon, for almost anyone can write; but only writers know how to rewrite. It is this ability alone that turns the amateur into a professional.”– William Knott
• When we read good fiction it is to understand the human experience, to share or try to share, the feelings and intuitions of another. That other is a character, is an author, since, I’d argue the character is the author, at least a facet of the author, an alternative, a glimpse of, a parallel, a doppelganger, an inner being (maybe one of many), but no less human and no less revealing for being part of a part or a reflection of a dream or suppression. — Alex Keegan

Well, I finally did it. I joined Twitter. (you can find me under JILLIANBURNS) I am now a “twitterer”? I tweet? Yesterday I twitted? Whatever. I’m so proud of myself. I can barely operate my cell phone, and yet I managed to do this all by myself. I admit, I paid my 16 year old daughter to set up my MySpace page and my 14 year old son had to show me how to set up my Facebook page. Even my 72 year old mother can take her new Handy cam and download her videos onto a DVD all by herself. But this is a first for me. I’m somewhat intimidated by all these new-fangled electronic miracles.
Recently I was telling my youngest how when I was her age, (9) there was no such thing as a microwave, and there were only 4 stations on television and no way to “rewind” or “pause” a TV show. She seemed horrified at my Neanderthal-like childhood. She’ll never know what it’s like to place a needle on an album to play a song. The expression “a broken record” means nothing to her. Probably because I’m getting older, I tend to remember those days with a nostalgic twinge. They seemed slower-paced, simpler, more peaceful.
And though I try to make my kids have electronic-free experiences by taking them camping and making them leave their i-pods and cell phones at home, I admit I enjoy the luxuries all these new inventions have to offer. (I can remember my car breaking down on the side of the road in freezing weather and having to walk to a gas station with a pay phone…)
And I’ve enjoyed finding old friends from high school and keeping in touch with new friends I’ve met at RWA National through Facebook (find me as Juliet Burns). I’ve really enjoyed hearing from fans who’ve emailed me through my website www.julietburns.com and all my Yahoo-groups where I can connect with so many wonderful writers for information and support in my career. And of course, this blog, where I can read about what other authors are thinking and doing and I can ramble on about things that interest me… Oh dear, I’m rambling, aren’t I?
Anyway, I was so excited to brag to my oh-so-cool, er…hip? teens that I’m now on Twitter! Hah! Finally I did something before them AND without their help!
My daughter stared at me with look of sympathy for her poor, behind-the-times mother and said, “Twitter is so lame.”
I can’t win.

“It was one of those haphazard decisions that you make casually and affects the next 30, 40 years of your life.”
Garrison Keillor – The Man on the Radio with the Red Shoes.

My husband and I are huge public radio fans, Prairie Home Companion fans in particular. Recently, we were watching an American Masters program called The Man on the Radio with the Red Shoes about Garrison and his radio show, which has been on the air since he started it in 1974. He told of how he grew up in a small town in Minnesota but always dreamed of living in New York and writing for The New Yorker Magazine. But a glancing thought while at the Grand Old Opry in Nashville about how he could do a radio show like the old Opry show changed the course of his life.
At the National RWA conference in DC last week, a young lady who’d just joined RWA sat beside me—or rather I sat beside her—at a workshop and we got to talking before the author began speaking. I recalled my first national conference and how awestruck I’d been. I told her how less than a decade ago I would never have dreamed I’d get to someday meet the wonderful authors I’d been reading for years, much less BE a published author.
Me? Be a writer? If someone had told me that in high school, I’d have given them a polite yet worried look and thought they were one beer short of a six-pack. The worst grade I ever received in my straight-A-student life was a C in Honor’s English class my senior year, because no matter how I poured my heart into a 12-page dissection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby the teacher thought my writing stunk.
And it probably did. I wasn’t a writer in my youth. I didn’t yearn to scribble stories from the moment I could hold a crayon. I never kept a diary or a journal. And I absolutely hated writing papers for school.
But I was a reader. I started out with Nancy Drew in 3rd grade and never looked back. The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Jane Eyre. All the Georgette Heyers and yes, all of Barbara Cartland’s novels I could get from our small suburban library. When I was 14 I borrowed my mom’s copy of Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower. I read Phyllis Whitney,
Catherine Cookson and Mary Stewart. Every summer my mom would have to force me to get my nose out of a book, get off the couch and go outside. As I grew older my reading tastes turned to Romantic Suspense. Barbara Michaels and Elizabeth Peters, Elizabeth George and Anne Perry. Then one day in 1997, with 2 toddlers in tow, and having exhausted the library of all my favorite authors, I turned to the paperback rack out of sheer desperation. And I read Amanda Quick’s Ravished. It was my first adult experience reading hot sexual tension and a strong heroine making passionate love. I was hooked on the modern Romance novel.
So, how did I end up being a writer?
It just started with a story in my head. It stayed there for about a year and a half. Finally we got a computer with a WORD program and I thought it might be fun to see if I could actually write the story. After joining RWA and learning some of the craft of writing, and after finding wonderful critique partners who stuck with me through 3 years of revisions, it sold! Part luck, part timing, true, but…I’d sold a book. Something *I* wrote! Maybe I wouldn’t have to work at Wal-Mart after all. Of course, I say that same thing every time I get a new contract. (Took me another 3 years to get my second contract) But I can’t help but look back and think–how did I ever imagine that I could be a writer? Never in my wildest dreams…
Hopefully that haphazard decision I made so casually will affect the next 30-40 years of my life.
You just never know.

Hi. My name is Jillian and I’m a movieholic.
I confess. I love going to the movies. I love the dark theater. The smell of popcorn, the stadium seating and surround sound, and mostly the experience of losing myself in someone else’s world for 1.5 – 2 hours. I especially love a big sweeping Historical drama like MASTER AND COMMANDER or AUSTRALIA. But I also love a good romantic comedy.
This weekend I saw THE PROPOSAL with Sandra Bullock and that cute guy from Scrubs, Ryan Reynolds. It’s your basic Fake Engagement/Marriage of Convenience story. And I loved it.
Over the years I’ve read countless Marriage of Convenience romances. I even helped plot one with my critique partner in her first novel for Harlequin American–on shelves in July called LAST RESORT: MARRIAGE (shameless plug) And yet they’re all different, all great stories, wonderful romances. So, what makes the same basic plot work over and over again?
In The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, by Christopher Booker, the author proposes that there are only 7 basic plots in the world. They are:
Overcoming the Monster – Usually a lone hero but sometimes a group who set out to save a community or the world from an evil villain, whether it be evil man, animal, or alien.
Rags to Riches – Usually a demoralized character who fights to find his or her place in the world
The Quest – features a hero, normally joined by sidekicks, who must overcome many difficult adversities to secure a priceless treasure
Voyage and Return – The hero must leave his ordinary world to embark on an epic journey that usually involves danger. The hero ultimately learns a life lesson in order to return home.
Comedy – Can be slapstick or wit that drives the story.
Tragedy – When human flaws drive a hero to terrible consequences.
Rebirth — centers on characters who undergo life-changing transformation. In his book, Booker states that the 1975 movie JAWS is the same basic tale that was told over a thousand years earlier in BEOWULF; Overcoming the Monster. Both stories feature a town terrorized by a monster who rips his victims to pieces. And both have a hero who defeats the monster in a gory final battle, restoring peace to the town. Many modern movies and novels follow this plot, even if the “monster” is an evil genius bent on destroying the world, as in every James Bond story.
What about the Rags to Riches plot? DAVID COPPERFIELD, and OLIVER TWIST come to mind. And there’s CINDERELLA, of course, and all the many versions of that story like… PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, or MAID IN MANHATTAN.
The Quest? Well, there’s the obvious; DON QUIXOTE, and Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS. There’s also THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, THE SURE THING, UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN
Voyage and Return? Homer’s epic tale, THE ODYSSEY, ROBINSON CRUSOE, and of course THE WIZARD OF OZ. In more modern times, perhaps KATE AND LEOPOLD or 13 GOING ON 30
Comedy: A MISUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, EMMA, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, THE WEDDING PLANNER, MUST LOVE DOGS
Tragedy: ROMEO AND JULIET and WUTHERING HEIGHTS, NIGHTS IN RODANTHE, ATONEMENT
Rebirth: SNOW WHITE, SLEEPING BEAUTY, PERSUASION,
P.S. I LOVE YOU, JUST LIKE HEAVEN

These 7 basic plots represent the fundamental human desires: love, death, adventure, family, justice, and adversity. And these desires were as relevant to people thousands of years ago as they are today. We identify with these basic human desires in all their many forms of story. But we must also identify with the characters. They’re as individual as every human being. Compelling fiction will contain conflicts and complications that prevent the protagonist from achieving love, or fortune, or peace. And if we identify with the character, we want him or her to come through the storm and win the treasure or the love or the peace they’ve been fighting for.
I’ve been listing classic novels and contemporary movies, but what about the contemporary romance novel? Specifically, Blaze. Julie Leto talked in her blog on the 22nd about Harlequin Blaze having everything: Historical, Paranormal, Suspense and Comedy. This got me to thinking—always a dangerous thing—could we find a Blaze for each of these 7 Basic plots? In Jo Leigh’s IN TOO DEEP series, we find the protagonists Overcoming the Monster–Corrupt Government–and restoring peace to the world.
What Blazes sit on your keeper shelf? And what basic plots can you identify in them?

There’s a Country song by Tim McGraw with the lyrics, “I’ll show you how a real bad boy can be a real good man.” I love that song. And I love Bad Boys. Maybe not so much in real life (although there are exceptions) but most women definitely love a Bad Boy hero in a Romance novel.
In a Historical Romance he’s The Rake, The Scoundrel or the Gunslinger. In a contemporary, he’s usually the Biker or the Player-the Serial Dater. But he can also be the CEO, the Sheik, the Cowboy, or the Navy Seal. Any man can be a Bad Boy. I’m a fan of the archetypes book, HEROES AND HEROINES by Tami Cowden, Caro LaFever, and Sue Viders. In their book they list a Bad Boy’s traits as: “Charismatic, Street Smart, and Intuitive.” They say he can be “The boy from the wrong side of the tracks.” or “The Rebel.” Tami Cowden, et al lists such examples as Johnny Castle from DIRTY DANCING and Jack Mayo from AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN.
Johnny and Jack are perfect examples, and if you have the chance I recommend this book for more insight into The Bad Boy.
My Critique partners and I were discussing Bad Boys from our own works in progress at our annual retreat one year and came up with a list of traits we would add:

1. He has a temper
2. He’s cynical, an outsider, doesn’t like rules
3. He’s not a big talker.
4. He’s aloof, acts as if he couldn’t care less
5. He never explains himself
6. He’s unpredictable, exudes an air of danger
7. He’s a passionate lover
8. He never admits he’s wrong
9. He’ll take the blame whether it’s his fault or not
10. He never runs from a fight and doesn’t mind picking a fight if he’s in a temper
11. His word is his bond
12. He never lets anyone see the goodness inside him, or his fears, or any feelings for that matter
13. He doesn’t believe in love
14. He’s possessive, won’t share his woman
15. He’s capable of pouring all his passion and love into a lifetime devotion to the woman who can love him and make him want to be a better man.

And that last trait is the fantasy. The end game. The reason we read Romance. We might all have a Bad Boy in our past somewhere. Maybe it worked out, maybe it didn’t. But in a Romance, the heroine always gets her man.

They say a reformed rake makes the best husband. And in a Romance the Bad Boy can be a real good man to love. So, any Bad Boy heroes you can’t forget? Any Bad Boy tales you care to share? Any true life stories of reforming a Rake?

My very first Blaze is being released next week and I’m so thrilled, I could pop the cork off a champagne bottle with sheer excited energy. Though you can’t really tell from my cover (not a complaint—I LOVE my cover!) my hero is a US Air Force fighter pilot. Or at least, he used to be. He was shot down and permanently grounded from an injury. I dedicated this book to the men and women of our military who risk their lives so we can live free. And especially to those who’ve given their lives or been injured in the service of their country. And I’d like to dedicate this blog to them also.
I did a LOT of research for this book. I have a friend whose husband is a colonel in the Air Force, and I also spoke with two wonderful female Air Force personnel—one of whom was one of the first female fighter pilots back in the 70’s. Is this F-22 not the coolest?
Here’s an interesting fact about the Air Force. Did you know they don’t have just one official motto? Like “The Few, the Proud…” or “An Army of One”. For a while they tried “AIM HIGH”, and now the PTB have declared “USAF: NO ONE COMES CLOSE” is their slogan. But where the Marines have “Semper Fi”, the Air Force doesn’t really have anything. The closest I found was, US Air Force Core Values: “Integrity First, Service Before Self, and Excellence in All We Do”.
But no matter the slogan or motto, men and women in the military put their lives on the line every day for others. If that’s not a hero I don’t know what is. Perhaps that’s why we love to read romances with heroes and heroines serving in the military. Can there be anything more romantic than someone who’s willing to give his or her all? And not just for their country, but for you.
I heard about a study conducted and the results read on Oprah that said what a woman wants most from a man is to be desired. I have to agree. There’s nothing sexier than a man who desires you and no other. Put a uniform on that man and you’ve got the perfect combo: A tough, honorable soldier who desires you and only you. Or in my case, my heroine. Of course, Blaze heroines like to take that uniform right back off again. Or perhaps take off their own uniform…

So, other than serving in the military, what makes a hero sexy to you?