I’m a guy and I write love stories. As it turns out, not all that many other guys do this. Some romance writers with female names are actually men (I’m sure Jerry Springer has found a tawdry way to spin this at some point). Some men include great love stories in novels about other things (thank you, Pat Conroy). But remarkably few men make the love story the central element in their fiction. This seems terribly wrong to me, as though guys have made some universal agreement to
In one way or another, I’d been planning to be a writer from the time I was a teenager. When I graduated college, though, I needed a job that paid a salary rather than one that had some vague potential for remuneration somewhere down the line. I interviewed with a number of publishing houses and hooked on with Bantam Books as a schlepper (I think the actual job title was “administrative assistant,” but I was decidedly a schlepper). A few years later, though, I got my first me
