Trigger warnings and stuff I don’t want to read in a romance

Authors, academics and almost anyone who puts pen to paper have been thinking about trigger warnings for a while now. University courses carry trigger warnings. Television, streaming services, movies and books carry trigger warnings. I recently entered a writing competition and was asked to list trigger warnings.

People see trigger warnings as important content warnings to assist readers to choose or reject your novel based on topics they do or don’t want to read about, in particular, because a topic or experience might trigger traumatic memories.

Opinions are divided on whether or not they’re helpful.

In December 2022, The Conversation, published Proceed with caution: the trouble with trigger warnings, written by Jessica Gildersleeve, India Bryce and Kate Cantrell. They reviewed 20 peer-reviewed studies, published between 2010 and 2020. They found trigger warnings can be harmful to students, however their overall finding is that “when embedded as part of such a broader approach, trigger warnings can be a valuable tool for assisting with the management and reduction of trauma exposure.” The broader approach includes “a holistic, trauma-informed framework, across all disciplines, that promotes resilience and recovery through a skills-based approach to coping and capacity building”. So this is not a simple question, and there is no single or simple answer.

Trigger warnings in romance novels are also a hot topic.

Romance Rehab discussed trigger warnings and disclaimers in 2020, concluding that if a topic was included in a romance it should include a warning, for example: rape, domestic abuse, child abuse (all forms), self-harm, suicide, extreme drug abuse/overdose, animal abuse. The article added the no-brainer that “if the hero or heroine dies at the end of a book and there’s no HEA, I don’t need a disclaimer or trigger warning. I’ll need the author to reclassify the book because IT’S NOT A ROMANCE.”

Romances are by definition about emotions. Mine are about adults, with lived experiences, people we come to believe are real. As such, they have real experiences, so it’s impossible for them not to have experienced, viewed or heard about traumatic experiences. 

I don’t write on the page trauma, but I do refer to past incidents that have shaped my lead characters. I use those experiences to show why people might be hesitant to trust, or to open themselves up to further hurt. I look for hope and a happily-ever-after, so my writing goals are about healing and moving forward.

Recently, a few books have made me think about my personal triggers, although these are not necessarily books that trigger traumatic memories. They are books I don’t want to read, or don’t particularly enjoy, not because of the quality of the writing, but because I instantly reject characters exhibiting certain behaviours as romantic leads. These same characteristics and characters clearly resonate with other readers, who write glowing reviews. Have I said before that romance readers are a broad church? Well, they are.

So—stuff I don’t particularly want to read‑includes:

  1. Love triangles—walk away is my mantra. You either choose me or you don’t. I don’t care about the gender of the protagonist, but if one person is playing two people off each other it’s a turnoff for me. It’s a common trope in rom coms, and I’ve read some excellent examples, including by Australian authors. Scottish born author Mhairi McFarlane’s If I Never Met You has a twist where the female protagonist was dumped by her long-term partner. Devastated, she meets someone new, then her old partner decides he made a mistake and reappears. It’s a quirky take on the trope and almost won me over.
  2. Characters who will do anything for their love interest, including break the law, often violently—Nah! Vigilante justice has never worked for me, although it’s huge in popular culture. The entire notion that I, or my lover, can look at a situation and be the best combined cop, judge and jury is something I find increasingly insidious and disturbing. Having it peddled to me through romance freaks me out. I’m a bit of the view that a seriously bad boy will remain a bad boy, but hey, it’s not my role to diss with someone else’s fantasy.
  3. A lover who lies—this is my absolute biggie. Lying, especially when it’s critical to your lover’s sense of self is a turn off for me. Taking someone to bed with a big lie between you is not, to my mind, heroic.  Having said that, lots of great books play with secrets, lies and white lies, and I’ve used the seesaw of secrets and lies in some of my work. It’s a fine line.

Do you have strong views on trigger warnings or any tropes, themes or book characters that are always last on your to-be-read (TBR) list?

A Romantic Rendezvous—March 2025—Christmas giveaway

The Australian Romance Readers Association (ARRA) will again host A Romantic Rendezvous in Brisbane (22 March) Sydney (23 March) Melbourne (29 March) and Perth (30 March). Special guests will be Nalini Singh & Julie Ann Walker There will be panels, an author luncheon and a signing in each city. You can nominate the sessions you’d like to attend.

This Christmas, one lucky ARR2025 attendee will win a special treat—a $30 book voucher that they can spend at the signing.

To enter, readers need to take a selfie with one of their favourite books (ebooks count!) from one of the attending authors, then post it in the ARR2025 Attendees group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/arr2025attendees). Be sure to include the following in your post:

I’m looking forward to ARR2025 in <insert name of city> in March, and meeting <insert name of author/s>. Maybe I’ll see you there! #arr2025comp

(For an extra entry, tag a friend in the comments of your post.)

The winner will be drawn randomly on Christmas day from all entries.

Finally I’d like to wish everyone a happy and peaceful festive season with lots of good books to read. Links to mine are on the Books pages.

Find me on:

You can also meet me in Sydney – 23 March 2025 at A Romantic Rendezvous, contact me directly via the contact page on my website if you have any other questions.

Comparisons, reviews and well damn!

I’ve come to this topic via a roundabout route. I find it difficult to compare my writing and stories to other contemporary romance writers—to say, hey I’m the next Emily Henry, but shorter, or the next Ali Hazelwood without the STEM characters. I could say, my lead characters respect and like each other—Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood do that too, and it’s something I look for in a romance. I want sizzle, but I also want my heat with heart, so to echo Olive’s words in The Love Hypothesis “I really like you, and I really trust you …”

However, there’s an expectation, largely for marketing purposes, that you will compare yourself to current top performers, to give readers an idea of your style. Sounds a bit like a recipe for disaster to me. What happens if you deviate or disappoint them?

Another Australian author I was chatting to offered an alternative approach. Banter like author A, heart-warming characters like author B, scene setting like author X, and sizzle like author Y. This seems a better approach to me because no two writers are the same, unless one of them is AI generated and feeding off a real author’s creativity. I haven’t found my list of comparable authors yet. If I remind you of a fabulous romance author in some way, please feel free to let me know.

To be honest, I’d like readers to see me as sufficiently unique to want to read my next release because it’s me. Samples are available on all the e-book selling sites.

If anyone here has checked out my socials, you’ll know I’ve had some great reviews, some good reviews, and some ho-hum reviews. I’ve never had the kind of review that says “those are a few precious hours I’ll never get back” unless you count this one for Quinn, by design—Choosing Family Book 2 that said:

“This book is not suitable for people who are not familiar with carpentry work and antiques. The author has tried their best to explain the details of this kind of art, but it did not hold my interest much.”

That’s telling me. And can I raise my hand and say I’m not especially familiar with carpentry or antiques either? Although I like to look at beauty in nature and crafted by humans. I like wood and glass and clay and stone, and I could continue …

I’ve also had reviews that puzzle me. I like to think there’s some humour in my books and characters. Not laugh out loud and not all the time, but most people—and therefore most characters—show humour as well as seriousness, and balancing those two sides of a personality can get you deeper inside a character’s head and heart. So, the reviews for Masquerade—Choosing Family Book 1 that described it as a rom-com were completely unexpected.

“Kate and Liam are a hoot …”

“a charming rom-com full of emotion …”

“steamy, goodhearted and a great romcom ….”

“a comedic vibe …”

I’ll take the reviews, say thank you, and see if I can replicate that humour in other books, because sharing humour is a way of establishing connections. When I raised this with a fellow author, she suggested a lot of first-time readers of romance come via Booktok—Tiktok for books, and that they’re new to the various categories within the romance genre. For example, she suggested they might use the term rom-com to refer to what emerging authors, authors, editors or industry specialists call contemporary romance. Booktok can be a disruptor, especially as not all authors use it.

Authors seek reviews because we’re told they’ll attract more readers and hopefully more buyers of our books. But some nights I lie awake wondering if the algorithms are toying with me, and if I’m being punished for not succumbing to the lure of those constant messages that say if you spend just a bit more you’ll get thousands more hits. Has marketing trumped quality writing as the most important strategy for an upcoming author? You tell me.

There are, of course, other ways to draw attention to your books, interviews, public appearances, celebrity endorsements—do you know any celebrities?—word of mouth, begging every member of your extended family to buy at least six copies and leave them at bus stops and in street libraries. But balancing marketing time with writing time is tricky, especially when I know what I’d rather be doing. And now, I’ll return to my work in progress (WIP). I’m on a roll.

A Romantic Rendezvous—March 2025—Christmas giveaway

The Australian Romance Readers Association (ARRA) will again host A Romantic Rendezvous in Brisbane (22 March) Sydney (23 March) Melbourne (29 March) and Perth (30 March). Special guests will be Nalini Singh & Julie Ann Walker There will be panels, an author luncheon and a signing in each city. You can nominate the sessions you’d like to attend.

This Christmas, one lucky ARR2025 attendee will win a special treat—a $30 book voucher that they can spend at the signing.

To enter, readers need to take a selfie with one of their favourite books (ebooks count!) from one of the attending authors, then post it in the ARR2025 Attendees group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/arr2025attendees). Be sure to include the following in your post:

I’m looking forward to ARR2025 in <insert name of city> in March, and meeting <insert name of author/s>. Maybe I’ll see you there! #arr2025comp

(For an extra entry, tag a friend in the comments of your post.)

The winner will be drawn randomly on Christmas day from all entries.

Find me on

You can also meet me in Sydney – 23 March 2025 at A Romantic Rendezvous, contact me directly via the contact page on my website if you have any other questions.

Dear diary

Today I dug out an old manuscript from my bottom drawer. You know the drawer? The drawer of discarded dreams.

I was thrilled with it when I set it aside. I’d had some nibbles from editors of the bigger publishing houses—well-written, very evocative of Finland, and I should know because a family member is married to someone from Finland, but it’s the wrong length for our current series.

I reread it, and as you can imagine, was devastated to discover it wasn’t the masterpiece I remembered, or hoped it was. For a start, point of view (POV) was all over the place. My excuse for that is that I was experimenting. The result? Characterisation suffered. It was also a bit of a mishmash of tropes, and as an expert on romance recently said, readers have certain expectations of certain tropes and an author who doesn’t deliver them is likely to be punished in the socials. Oh dear!

Given the passage of time, there are also historical inaccuracies. I used the very public 1986 unsolved murder of Olof Palme, then Prime Minister of Sweden, as a starting point. The Swedish Government recently closed the case, saying they’d identified the assassin. Not everyone’s satisfied with this decision.

So where does this leave me? Helsinki is a long way from Australia, so is instantly exotic to us. A murder mystery—case closed, but with enough hanging threads to be intriguing. My female lead is guarded, but her caution can strike people as grumpiness. My male lead’s a natural optimist and has enough positives in his life to project a sunshine persona, but hey, there’s more here than meets the eye. A completely accidental meeting. She distrusts coincidences, especially when they involve journalists or writers interested in her famous dead father. He’s wow! Serendipity. This is my lucky day.

So, I’m feeling a tickle of excitement about tackling this manuscript, but it’s forced me to ask—why do I write? Why particularly do I write on those days when the muse has better things to do than hang on my every word? Something compels me to. I set my writing aside and say, No, I’ve had enough. It’s not working. But I go back every time, because I want to get this right. I want to tell the story of these people well, so you, the reader, are on their side. Finding Cleo (working title) is a standalone contemporary romance.

In the meantime, I’ve signed contracts with Inkspell Publishing for two more books in the Choosing Family Series.

  • A Just Man—Choosing Family Book 4 (release March 2025)
  • An Accidental Flatmate—Choosing Family Book 5 (release July 2025)

A Romantic Rendezvous March 2025

Meet me in Sydney – 23 March 2025.

Tickets on sale from 15 September 2024. Follow on FaceBook

The Australian Romance Readers Association will again host A Romantic Rendezvous in Brisbane (22 March) Sydney (23 March) Melbourne (29 March) and Perth (30 March). Special guests will be Nalini Singh & Julie Ann Walker There will be panels, an author luncheon and a signing in each city. You can nominate the sessions you’d like to attend.

Find me on

You can also contact me directly via the contact page on my website if you have any other questions.

Betrayal—Choosing Family Book 3

Apologies if you’re receiving this a second time. Gremlins invaded my machine and an unedited version went out.

Betrayal is Anna Turner’s story. You may have met her in Masquerade (Bk 1) or Quinn, by design (Bk 2). She’s an identical twin and fiercely loyal to her sister Kate, the Quinn brothers and select friends. She doesn’t like entitled men, men who see her as a collection of appealing body parts, or men who lie, and she’s encountered too many who do. Anna believes in women having choices in life.

So, it was tough crafting her individual back story and then finding a male lead who’d match her.

Anna’s a fighter, but not an activist. She makes a difference where she can. As a senior staffer in a Marketing/Advertising company, she adds her voice to calls for a staff childcare centre. It was easy to pick this as a goal, both because of Anna’s history and because the price and availability of affordable childcare is a hot topic in Australia. We even have areas that we call childcare deserts because the shortage of childcare places is so great. Couples, where both partners work can struggle to find a suitable placement. The situation gets tougher when you add layers, a single mum struggling to balance childcare and work, or who has no family to help out, or whose childcare is in one suburb, their job in another, and they’re dependent on public transport to cover the distance.

Liaising over premises for a childcare centre is how Anna met her male lead.

I know that editors and publishers discourage you from using the names of well-known people in your novels.

I also know Hunter S. Thompson is a famous, dead American journalist and author, who wrote hundreds of articles and many books. The S. stands for Stockton. His style was known as ‘gonzo journalism’, which puts the writer in the middle of events. Hell’s Angels, his first published book details a year of living with a Hell’s Angels chapter.

But I can’t help myself, so when the name Hunter popped into my head, I went with the whole shebang. There’s a story behind my character being called Hunter S. Thompson. And his middle name is Samuel, not Stockton, so I haven’t exactly stolen the name.

Betrayal is the thread that weaves this story together. I love words and teasing out words, so with betrayal comes disloyalty, treachery, duplicity, double-dealing, deception and bad faith—all powerful words to create conflict in a romance. But a definition doesn’t fully capture the emotional devastation of betrayal. Betrayal is the deep emotional wound my characters strive to move past.

“Kim” Philby (Harold Adrian Russell) the famous British intelligence officer and spy for the Soviet Union, who shared British secrets with the Soviets during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War, was exposed in 1963. In 1967 in a Sunday Times article he was quoted as saying To betray, you must first belong.

Where does a person’s wariness start? When do they grow antennae and start waiting for attack? Some people spend a lifetime and can’t escape the crippling influence of betrayal. Where is our first place of belonging? Family betrayal can scar long before we consider taking a lover. But belonging is a human need, so it’s worth fighting for.

I hope you read Betrayal—Choosing Family Book 3, and I’d love to hear what you think of it.

A Romantic Rendezvous March 2025

Meet me in Sydney.

Tickets go on sale 15 September 2024. Follow on Facebook

The Australian Romance Readers Association will again host A Romantic Rendezvous in Brisbane (22 March) Sydney (23 March) Melbourne (29 March) and Perth (30 March). Special guests will be Nalini Singh & Julie Ann Walker There will be panels, an author luncheon and a signing in each city. You can nominate the sessions you’d like to attend.

Find me on

You can also contact me directly via the contact page on my website if you have any other questions.

Living vicariously from my writing cave

August is romance writers conference time in Australia and New Zealand. This year New Zealand went first, with its conference in Christchurch over the weekend of 9-11 August. This weekend is Australia’s turn with Trope Actually being held in Adelaide, South Australia. Adelaide deserves it. They’ve often had to trudge to Sydney or Melbourne to be able to attend a conference in person. The tyranny of distance in this big wide land.

I’ve been following the socials and, in both cities, the excitement is palpable. Catching up, meeting new people, listening to inspiring speakers, getting the nitty gritty details about how this business of romance writing works. I’ve spoken to people who are attending and they were counting down the days. Although, it can also be daunting to those who are new or shy and aren’t quite sure how to introduce themselves to strangers who all seem to know each other.

People save up their dollars and cents and their holidays, take a day or two off work, then discover they have new ideas, sometimes in a genre they haven’t written before, for example, teen romance or short reads, around 15,000 words or so. Writers need a starting point.

I’ve made vows after conferences or workshops or when I listen to podcasts to do those things more often, because when you’re surrounded by other like-minded people ideas seem to automatically percolate. Something as simple as a question from a presenter can start a whole new line of thought. I wasn’t able to attend conference this year. However, I’ve signed up to some zoom workshops and recently attended my first physical romance writers group in a long time. It was fabulous, and I solved a problem that had been bugging me for a while.

So, here in my cave this weekend, I’m going to remind myself of some of the Ah ha moments from past conferences and workshops.

Michelle Pennington’s (LERAworkshop24) Scene Tropes zoom session. Her strategy for brainstorming your next book? Write different tropes on raffle tickets and then pull 2 or 3 out of a hat and develop a plot based on that. I haven’t tried this yet.

Pamela Cook (rwaconf22) Climb Inside Your Character’s Skin (2022)—challenged us to watch two skiing videos—one backed by mood music, the other containing the raw sounds the downhill skier could hear—to get inside the head of the character and see, hear, feel, think and experience the world as they were. For someone who doesn’t use visual images as triggers, this was an eye opener. For me, video 1 was mellow, relaxed almost playful whereas video 2 was gritty, adrenalin-charged with high stakes. An exercise worth repeating.

Cassie Hamer (rwaconf23) Taming the Voices. If you start your book with one character’s point of view (POV), a  lot of readers perceive that character  as the main character. Is that what you want? Do you want to upend convention?

Shannon Curtis (#rwaconf23) Mining the Back Story for Gems noted that writers are looking at—and I’m paraphrasing Shannon—the emotional shrapnel embedded in our fictional character—the wound; their bedrock belief, which is in fact a misbelief built on flawed, yet convincing logic. And their fear—whether real and well-founded or perceived. This fear changes the character’s behaviour to avoid threats, and thus prevents them finding love.

Social media and dating apps have changed cute meets, that is, the actual first meeting of our protagonists. With a dating app, the first meeting is often to check the person is real and in some way resembles their photo, the second is to see if you have anything in common, then you can take it from there. I gather this is also where some people produce their list of pre-prepared questions, can you support yourself? Can we have a baby straight away? That might work as an opening line for a rom-com?

Kristine Charles (rwaconf22) Let’s Talk About Sex noted that tension is the key in sex scenes, that is, bringing the couple(s) one step closer or further apart. Choosing whose POV the scene will be in. Physical and mental attraction are both important. What is at stake? Why is this the wrong time, the wrong person, the wrong situation? If they do this, what happens next? How does intimacy prompt them to make new and difficult choices?

Amanda Ashby (rwaconf23) Be Your Own Developmental Editor mentioned the Chekhov principle—if there’s a gun in the first act, someone needs to pick it up by the third.

Scrolling back through old notes, recalling conversations has reinvigorated me. And some of these tips are pertinent for a just finished manuscript.

Hope you’re doing what gives you joy this weekend.

My e-books are available through all major booksellers, paperbacks from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

PS. Thanks to the social posts that I used to create my webpage image for this blog, in particular, Jo Speirs’s photo of her goodies bag.

Find me on

You can also contact me directly via the contact page on my website if you have any other questions.