Blog

Before anything else: June 19 is Juneteenth, a federal holiday and a moment of American history worth pausing for. Take a moment. It matters.

Now. Father’s Day is Sunday, June 21, and I want to talk about the single dad in romance, because he is, without question, one of the most effective character setups in the entire genre. (I said what I said, and I’ll say it again in a court of law if necessary.)

Here’s what makes him work: he already knows how to love something more than himself. He did...

National Best Friends Day is June 8, and I want to be honest with you: the best friend in a romance novel has one of the hardest jobs in fiction.

She has to be funny enough to steal every scene she’s in without upstaging the heroine. She has to dispense wisdom that sounds like she’s making it up off the top of her head (because she is). She has to drag the protagonist toward her own happiness with varying degrees of subtlety and success. And she has to do all of this while also having her own...

National Donut Day is June 5, and I want to tell you about the most important hole in the history of pastry.

In 1847, a sixteen-year-old sailor named Hanson Gregory got frustrated that the center of his fried dough cakes never cooked through. So he punched out the middle with the top of a tin pepper shaker. The hole he created, the part nobody eats, turned out to be the thing that made the donut iconic. Its most recognizable feature is an absence. (I’ve spent considerable time deciding whether...

Memorial Day arrives on May 25, which is also, somehow, National Wine Day. The universe has gifted us a long weekend and a wine holiday in the same 72 hours. I consider this a personal message. (Who am I to argue with the universe?)

Before I get to the wine, I want to pause on Memorial Day itself. It’s a solemn holiday at its heart, a day of remembering people who gave something we’ll never be able to give back. That matters. If you know a Gold Star family, call them. If you know a veteran,...

Memorial Day weekend is almost here, which means summer reading season is officially about to kick off. (May is also Get Caught Reading Month, by the way, so consider yourselves warned. I’m watching you in public, waiting to catch you in the act.) If you’re anything like me, you’ve already started triaging your TBR for beach season.

Here’s the thing about a true beach read. You can spot one from forty feet away. The cover is usually pastel, or cerulean, or that specific shade of coral that...

National Chocolate Chip Day is May 15, which might be the most important holiday of the entire month, depending on your priorities. (Mine are: book, blanket, snack. Everything else is negotiable.)

Here’s something I learned that delighted me. The chocolate chip cookie was an accident. In 1938, Ruth Wakefield ran the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. She was making a batch of chocolate cookies and didn’t have time to melt the baker’s chocolate, so she chopped up a Nestle bar and tossed...

It’s Mother’s Day week (Sunday, May 10), which means flowers, brunch reservations, and a guilt-induced rush on greeting cards. But here’s a story I bet you didn’t know. The woman who fought to make Mother’s Day a national holiday spent the rest of her life trying to destroy it.

Her name was Anna Jarvis. In 1908 she organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration to honor her own mom. By 1914 it was a federal holiday. By the 1920s, Hallmark had entered the chat, florists were marking up...

April is almost over, but before we move into May, let’s talk about something that happens on April 30 and matters far more than most people realize: National Honesty Day. And yes, there’s a whole day dedicated to this. (Presumably so we can all feel guilty about the little lies we tell ourselves.)

Here’s the thing about honesty, especially in romance: it’s terrifying. It’s the moment a character stops hiding. It’s the instant they admit the thing they’ve been denying for pages, chapters,...

This week is a straight-up love letter to books and the places we find them. World Book Day lands on April 23, Earth Day reminds us to care for our world on April 22, and Independent Bookstore Day hits on April 25. So basically: peak bookish season.

Here’s the thing about independent bookstores that chains will never understand. It’s not the books. It’s the smell. It’s that specific mustiness and paper and hope that hits you the second you walk through the door. It’s the careful hand-lettered...

Tax Day is coming (April 15, in case you’ve been living under a rock), and I’m sure many of you are having the annual panic of gathering receipts and trying to remember which deductions are legal. But I’ve got a different kind of audit on my mind: the one where we all confess how much we actually spent on books this year.

Go ahead, do it. Open your Goodreads, your Amazon history, your bookstore app. Add up those purchases. Now add up the number of books you’ve actually read from that pile. Sit...

April 10 is National Siblings Day, and if you’re anything like me, it’s probably an excuse to send your brother a text that says “happy siblings day” and then not hear from him until Christmas. (The one I have is perfect, thank you very much.)

But here’s what got me thinking: readers absolutely eat up a good band-of-brothers romance. There’s something irresistible about the protective older brother, the black sheep who finally gets redeemed, the found-family dynamic where loyalty runs deeper...

It's April, and that means April Fool's Day is right around the corner. Did you know that the origins of April Fool's Day are kind of chaotic? Some say it started in the 16th century when France switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and anyone still following the old calendar became the butt of jokes. Others claim it's even older. Either way, people have been pranking each other for centuries (which is somehow comforting in a weird way).

But here's the thing that gets me as a...