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.

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

Can I interest you in a trope?

Tropes are a feature of romance novels, whether the novels be sweet, spicy or dark.

Sophie Pembroke suggests a trope is a plot, theme, device or character used so often that it has become a convention within the genre.

I’ve heard category romance editors argue that you have hooks and tropes, with the hooks relating to characters and settings and the tropes as plot devices.

By this definition, character hooks include the perennial favourites of military, royalty and billionaire. Once upon a time it was millionaires, but hey! Apparently, millionaires don’t rate anymore. Some characters seem to be perennially popular, like single or widowed parent, cowboys and medicos. In more recent years firefighters and sports stars have been added to the list—something to do with muscled bodies perhaps? There’s also chatter about numerous bad boys, outlaws, mafia, and motorcycle club president. Breaking the rules is seemingly also hot.

Setting hooks include rural or small-town romances, Texas specific romances, hospitals, or exotic locations where you might find the stray sheikh or prince. For some readers, it’s the setting that emotionally resonates or appeals.

Tropes, then, are plot devices, such as working together, accidental pregnancy, marriage of convenience, fake relationship, forced proximity, snowed in, second chance, emotional scars to name a few. Just as some people have favourites, others hate particular tropes to the extent they won’t read any, for example, enemies to lovers, or accidental pregnancies—what’s with that in this day and age is their question? I have to admit I have a secret baby, actually toddler, in Taylor’s Law, but the now dead mother chose to keep the father’s name a secret which was only revealed at her death.

Often romance writers just use the term tropes. We talk about tropes, we use tropes as shorthand to market and promote books, and create new tropes to appeal to new or different audiences, think age gap, cinnamon roll hero, only one bed or golden retriever.

A trope isn’t a formula, whatever the naysayers of romantic fiction might think. It’s a lure to tickle your reading tastebuds. Good authors upend tropes or give them a twist.

I recently heard Michelle Pennington deliver an online lecture, Trope Up Your Scenes. Michelle talked about character and plot tropes and the common scene tropes that serve as the building blocks of plot or character. For example, if your trope is fish out of water, there’s a good chance you have a scene that involves an elaborate dinner party with the full cutlery setting. She used various movies as illustrations of different scene tropes. So, tropes are serious business.

N. N. Light’s Book Heaven commented that my novel Masquerade “is a mash-up of a few tropes but has a comedic vibe throughout”. My shorthand description is “a masquerade, a road trip, a steamy attraction and Kate and Liam discover the steps they took to protect their hearts might break them”.

A road trip is a good way to put people together. In this case, Kate and Liam are also working together, but they’re each an identical twin, and Liam was the only one of the four not aware of a billboard campaign featuring Kate and his brother. So, essentially Masquerade includes some forced proximity, workplace romance, with a dash of enemies to lovers, topped off by the decision to just have a fling.

Grace Under Fire is a combination best friend’s brother, boy next door and prodigal returns. Planting Hope blends tragic pasts with one character who must stay and another who needs to go, working together, a hint of second chances and passion galore.

Romance Writers of Australia’s 2024 annual conference is called Trope Actually. It’s in Adelaide Wednesday 12-Sunday 18 August. Unfortunately, I’m unable to attend, but if you’re lucky enough to be present, you’ll be able to ask any question you’ve ever had about tropes. N.B. An excerpt of Masquerade—Choosing Family Book 1 is included in the Conference Anthology, which is added to every participant’s goodies bag.

Note: Getting my ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) together:

ARC readers get advance copies of new releases with the request to post an honest review on one of the major sites, for example, Goodreads, Bookbub, Apple, Amazon, Kobo or Barnes & Noble.

If you’d like to be an ARC reader for  my upcoming books you can sign up to Booksprout, where you’ll have a choice of my books or the books of other authors.

Alternatively, you can contact me directly via the contact link on my website. Let me know a little about yourself. I always post the blurb for my next book on the My Books page of my website, so have a read of that and see if my books interest you.

By agreeing to be part of my ARC team, you are in no way obligated to leave a review on any site, although I’d appreciate it. I welcome all reviews, good or bad, as long as they are honest.

Find me on

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

What’s so special about a table? (aka Quinn, by design)

Absolutely everything.

In Quinn, by design—Choosing Family Book 2, one of Niall Quinn’s major creations is a table made from a single bark to bark piece of Huon pine (pictured on my website jenniferrainesauthor.com).

The Huon pine or Macquarie pine, Lagarostrobos franklinii, is a species of conifer native to the wet southwestern corner of Tasmania, Australia. While known as a pine, it’s actually a podocarp (Podocarpaceae), not a true pine (Pinaceae). It’s the sole species in the genus Lagarostrobos. Huon pines are among the oldest living and rarest species of trees in the world and are now critically endangered. Individual trees have been identified as over 2,000 years old. The Huon pine has an incredibly slow growth rate of about 0.3 — 2mm per year, taking approximately 1,000 years to reach a height of 30m and a diameter of 1 metre.

Niall’s rich, creamy, yellow wood table has a width of approximately 72 cm, meaning you’re looking at a piece of wood hundreds of years old. I’ll add a caveat here: this piece of wood was harvested in the 19thcentury and held within the woodworker’s family for several generations until it was turned into a table.

Niall’s table is a simple design involving three pieces of Huon pine and an ironbark beam. It’s stunning because of the simplicity of the design and the quality of the timber, and is a privilege for anyone to own.

So, that’s what’s special about Niall’s table.

The table also revealed Niall’s passion to me, which is the crafting of beautiful, yet practical objects using old and recycled timber.

Niall Quinn—struggling woodworker, man of integrity, sexy beast seemed to invite the trope opposites attract. That’s how I met Liùsaidh (Lucy) McTavish, also interested in the arts, but in her case she values and preserves antiques. Lucy chooses the old vs the new. Niall’s creations force her to reassess her perception of timelessness.

Lucy took me in other directions as well. She’s able to tell the difference between Royal Doulton Art Deco and Minton Pink Cockatrice tableware. She recalls that in eighteenth-century France, frames for paintings stood as works of art in their own right, partly furniture and partly sculpture, and sometimes worth more than the painting. She has no trouble at all recognising a Maud Bowden art deco vase circa 1912 using brush lining rather than tube-lining and beadwork for decoration. Don’t you just love a woman who knows her subject!

Do you have a favourite object passed through generations in your family? A lot of people don’t. Treasures can be lost to poverty, war, theft, simply moving house or one generation deciding something is worthless. Value and sentiment are personal to each individual.

Ultimately, Quinn, by design is a romance, so the story focuses on the two main leads, Niall Quinn and Liùsaidh (Lucy) McTavish, who are attracted, but have so much happening right now, love might have to wait. The research for this book took me down fascinating rabbit holes. I hope you enjoy what I found.

June 2024 Giveaway: Masquerade—Choosing Family Book 1

And the winner is Kirsten H.

Kirsten already has a paperback copy of Masquerade—Choosing Family Book 1, so has chosen a paperback copy of Quinn, by design—Choosing Family Book 2. Congratulations, Kirsten.

Australian Romance Readers Association (ARR2025)

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be signing at A Romantic Rendezvous in Sydney in March 2025. I can’t wait to see you all again.

Tickets will go on sale in September. In the meantime you could win a Golden Ticket to the city of your choice. You can enter the giveaway here: https://bit.ly/ARR2025GT Then join us in the Attendees group  for all author announcements: https://www.facebook.com/groups/arr2025attendees

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

Familiar or unfamiliar settings?

Do you like to read novels set in a familiar or a foreign—by which I mean unfamiliar in time and space to you—location?

A long time ago, I overhead someone say they loved Peter Corris’s crime novels because they were set in the city where the reader lived. That reader knew the streets, the spaces and could imagine themselves in the action. It was another layer to their enjoyment of the book, but one that hadn’t registered with me at that time.

Oh no, said another reader, I love to be an armchair traveller when I’m reading, to find new places that I can dream of visiting or to revisit places I’ve been and remember the excitement, the awe, the sparkle of discovery.

Then we hit historical fiction—the quote that pops into my head is from L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go Between “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” That sentence resonates on multiple levels. Yet 1953, and even the beginning of the 20th century where the story starts are at most 120 years ago, baby steps when you’re talking historical fiction.

In historical fiction, you may recognise places, the facades of buildings and streets might look unchanged, but just think of the plumbing and wiring! That’s before you consider furniture, clothes, design, music, art and attitudes. It’s why I’ve always thought writing historical fiction is challenging. You need extensive research and attention to detail for accuracy in setting the scene and understanding the cultural conventions.

A fan of J.D. Robb’s futuristic crime novels, when describing them to me a few years ago, told me J. D. had covered all bases, in the sense of making rules and building a world that can’t be challenged by the reader because the books are set in 2040. Well, look out, 2040 is getting increasingly close. AI tools are already stealing the settings, characters and words authors sweat to produce.

The world of video game design is a setting and world that is completely unfamiliar to me. But for Gabrielle Zevin, who wrote Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, it’s been part of her everyday all her life. I had to pay attention to this setting because it’s so integral to the story, but the characters are immensely powerful as well.

Take paranormal or fantasy novels where the world building and setting are the attraction for many readers.

Despite finding some settings fascinating, I’ve never chosen novels specifically for their setting. It’s always been the characters for me. The characters who capture my imagination and keep me up late at night to make sure they’re happy, or safe. Although happy and safe operate in so many dimensions in our current world. You can be physically safe, but emotionally or mentally at risk.

That’s not to say I don’t seriously consider where my books are set, and how the setting suits the characters. Lela’s Choice is set in Malta and I can’t imagine it would work anywhere else. Planting Hope is set in a large garden on the edge of a regional town. It may sound like a small setting, but it was right at that moment for those characters. I’ve set books in Sydney, my home town, and I’m currently contemplating one set in Finland, because why not?

For me, characters drive the story. I’d love to know what you think.

June 2024 Giveaway: Masquerade—Choosing Family Book 1

Quinn, by design—Choosing Family Book 2 releases on 18 June, so I’ve decided to do a giveaway of Masquerade—Choosing Family Book 1, just to give you a taste of Liam’s twin, Niall.

All subscribers to my blog on 10 June 2024 will automatically be entered in a draw to win a copy of Masquerade—Choosing Family Book 1.

International: e-book copy

Australia: e-book or paperback (winner’s choice)

Note: Getting my ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) together:

ARC readers get advance copies of new releases with the request to post an honest review on one of the major sites, for example, Goodreads, Bookbub, Apple, Amazon, Kobo or Barnes & Noble.

If you’d like to be an ARC reader for  my upcoming books you can sign up to Booksprout, where you’ll have a choice of my books or the books of other authors.

Alternatively, you can contact me directly via the contact link on my website. Let me know a little about yourself. I always post the blurb for my next book on the My Books page of my website, so have a read of that and see if Quinn, by design is a story you’ll enjoy.

By agreeing to be part of my ARC team, you are in no way obligated to leave a review on any site, although I’d appreciate it. I welcome all reviews, good or bad, as long as they are honest.

Find me on

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

Writing the little black dress

Do a web search for “little black dress” and you’ll discover that fashion historians credit Coco Chanel for this 1920s design. It’s a clothing item that’s so well known it’s often referred to as “LBD”. The LBD is intended to be long-lasting, versatile, affordable, and widely accessible symbolising class, business, elegance, and sexiness. I’ll have what she’s wearing!

“The original LBD also became a blank slate for reinvention that evolved to accommodate the fashionable silhouettes of every decade, from Cristóbal Balenciaga’s abstract sculptural volumes and Christian Dior’s cinched waists and full A-line skirts to Rei Kawakubo’s body-engulfing Comme des Garçons designs and Vivienne Westwood’s draped corset dresses.”

Hollywood’s influence on fashion helped its popularity. Think Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Fast-forward to the Barbie world premiere in July 2023, when Margot Robbie posed for pictures on a pink carpet, in front of a pink Corvette convertible, wearing a black custom Schiaparelli Haute Couture bustier dress that was fully embroidered with sequins and finished with layers of tulle. Admittedly, she did carry a pink mousseline scarf. The modern Barbie wears black.

Trends in fashion come and go, but we’ve held on the LBD—in all its variations—for more than a century now.

Now think of the timelessness of the romance novel—it has multiple genres—historical, paranormal, speculative, romantic suspense, contemporary, romantic comedy, young adult, fantasy, science fiction, LGBTIQ—and the list continues to grow. Within these there are sub-genres and varying levels of heat or spiciness. Erotica is often described as standing to one side of romance because the intent is not to deliver a Happily-Ever-After (HEA) or Happy-For-Now (HFN) outcome.

Like every other area of human endeavour, there are trends and fads in romance fiction. Some authors choose to follow trends, sometimes to stretch their creative muscles, but if you love writing and want to make a living out of it, you have to be hard headed. For other authors, it’s a genre they love.

A current trend is dark romance—themes of love, passion and (often) obsession set against a backdrop of darkness, danger or taboo. The Fifty Shades of Grey series fits this category. Novels can explore BDSM (light or heavy), role playing, abduction, rape fantasies, and kidnapping and captivity. Mafia romance has a growing fan base. Dubious or no consent features, as well as dominant males. Arguably love still leads to redemption, although not all character behaviours change. Some dark romance is getting darker, and the term used in bully romance, which is a pretty descriptive statement. The stakes are higher in these romances, the tension greater and, so the argument goes, reader satisfaction is greater (potentially) when love triumphs.

Social media, including TikTok has popularised a lot of books, including dark romance, but social media has also helped promote terms like “golden retriever” or “cinnamon roll” hero as an antidote to toxic masculinity, although this sub-genre isn’t gaining the same traction.

A cinnamon roll hero is a sweet, supportive and kind hero—the anti Christian Grey. Golden retriever heroes are variously described as calm, easy-going, dependable, good listeners and observers. One source adds that Golden retrievers understand the true meaning of being a partner. Another suggests they’re naïve, which isn’t necessarily a good rep to have if you’re a hero! A good cinnamon roll hero is a multilayered, sexy character.

At their heart, romance novels are about fantasy and escapism. Not everyone shares the same fantasies, and a reader’s fantasies can change over time. At this point in history, between statistics about partner abuse, attacks on gender equality, assumptions that women in high places got there on quotas rather than merit, and even the clustering and muttering of groups on social media e.g.- involuntarily celibate (INCELs) men who blame women because they don’t have a partner, and pundits claiming women should behave like women, I’m beginning to wonder if cinnamon rolls, who value equality in their relationships with women, and who trumpet women’s success, are the real fantasy.

To fit modern parlance, you could say I write cinnamon rolls with backbones of steel. It may be fanciful to suggest it, but really, I write the “little black dress” of romance—contemporary romance with heat and heart, where the lovers are so well-matched you’re convinced the relationship will grow and last. Like the LBD, my heroes are keepers. I hope readers agree.

Note: Getting my ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) together:

ARC readers get advance copies of new releases with the request to post an honest review on one of the major sites, for example, Goodreads, Bookbub, Apple, Amazon, Kobo or Barnes & Noble.

If you’d like to be an ARC reader for my upcoming books—next in line, Quinn, by design—you can sign up to Booksprout, where you’ll have a choice of my book or the books of other authors.

Alternatively, you can contact me directly via the contact link on my website. Let me know a little about yourself. I always post the blurb for my next book on the My Books page of my website, so have a read of that and see if Quinn, by design is a story you’ll enjoy.

By agreeing to be part of my ARC team, you are in no way obligated to leave a review on any site, although I’d appreciate it. I welcome all reviews, good or bad, as long as they are honest.

Find me on

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