I’m here to help. The Heat Index: Using Romance Terms To Determine How Much Sex Is In A Romance Novel Arranged in order of little-to-no heat to all the heat… Zero Sex On The Page, Or Implied Only (Maybe Kissing) 🔥 Romances with no sex at all are often called “clean” or “sweet,” and I hate both of these terms. If a sexless romance novel is clean, does that mean sex is dirty?...

I started filling an old binder with the photocopied printouts of stories we read in class. Writer friends recommended stories, which I’d track down in the library, copy, and add to the binder. Of course I’d read short fiction before, both in and out of school. But during those years in my early twenties I was hungry for short stories in a new way. I couldn’t get enough. I loved their quickness, how they could sharpen a character or an emotion down to its essential truth and lay it bare on the page....

It has only been a few months since I finished college and I have since had a bit of time to reflect on some of the more crazy experiences I had—most of them taking place during my time working at the school paper. I was about two years into college when I realized I needed actual experience writing for a publication if I wanted to have a portfolio to backup my eventual journalism degree....

I learned to read when I learned I loved stories. I learned to read helping Encyclopedia Brown and Joe and Frank solve mysteries. I learned to read when choosing my adventure was as much fun as choosing my next book. I learned to read on long, warm summer afternoons when I wasn’t “supposed” to be reading. I learned to read Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Harper Lee between pep rallies, tennis matches, and awkward dances....

My husband insisted I take the bed and he spent the night on the couch. We decided the dog should stay with me, since we just didn’t trust her wandering around the house at night. But my dog was super attached to my husband and was not pleased to be left away from him. At the time, I was also at least six months pregnant with my daughter. Towards the beginning of the book, we were getting ready for bed and the bed frame collapsed on one side, thanks to a faulty bed support....

However, if you don’t prepare correctly, the calming ambiance you were expecting will be shattered by another group of hikers partying it up at the lake. Or maybe you’ll have a million little distractions in the form of a hoard of mosquitoes buzzing around your head. Or maybe you make the mistake that comes back home with you: getting more than a healthy dose of sunshine (i.e. terrible sunburn)....

Although I mostly see the same faces week to week, I try to do a rundown of storytime expectations and tips for caregivers so they know how to get the most out of storytime for their little ones (DC Public Library has a solid set of expectations at the bottom of their storytime page if you’re a storytime leader looking for some guidance). Now, I offer it to you. This list is by no means exhaustive and individual children will have, as they do, individual needs and best practices for their learning and development....

But I want to talk to someone about the books I’m reading and I’m sure my co-workers are sick of hearing about them, especially since it’s mostly horror novels I’m talking about at 8:15 in the morning. Lucky for me (and my coworkers), TikTok book clubs are a thing now. This is how to join a TikTok book club! Other times, they host a live event at a pre-determined time so everyone who read the book can join in and discuss it in the chat....

If you’re a SFF reader, you should really consider buying a Worldcon membership and voting. Let’s talk about why and how! Why You Should Vote In The Hugo Awards N.K. Jemisin’s third Hugo win for The Stone Sky last year made her the first person to win three consecutive Hugos. But that almost didn’t happen. Anyone who’s read The Broken Earth Trilogy knows these books are some of the best SFF written....

Furushiki, the Japanese Art of Cloth Wrapping Furushiki is the next big holiday thing. Instead of ripping a bunch of paper up and making ugly trash, this beautiful process of folding a precious gift in soft, reusable fabric makes the entire gift-giving process meaningful. If you’re into saving the planet, then this is a great way to both wrap your gifts and have a planet-happy holiday. The fabric can even be part of the gift if you’re giving to like-minded or crafty people....

But for a long time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was about YA books that made my brain go a little squirmy. I’ve read and loved my fair share of YA books, don’t get me wrong. But something about them always made me feel uncomfortable. Even as a teen, I preferred reading adult books. I categorized it for a long time as feeling like I wasn’t the intended audience, which was eventually true once I aged into adulthood....

Let me start by saying I’m sorry. Maybe you’ve noticed that I tend to take out a lot of my existential anxieties out on you, especially in the last five years. It’s a lot of pressure to have to meet my impossibly high standards of perfection and entertainment, especially when I’m anxious. It’s a lot of pressure to have to contain the answers to everything that seems to be going wrong in my life at that moment, especially when they are answers that only I have the power to find....

Beth March has been serially underestimated and misunderstood for years. I get it: in a world where women are told to be meek, eternal helpers to everybody else, it’s easy to feel that Beth is little more than a portrait of the exhausting, selfless womanhood we’re told to aspire to. But all it takes a closer look to see that she is more than that. She is Not Weak One of the misconceptions that irk me the most is the notion that Beth is weak because she is shy and nervous around people....

If putting one’s thoughts and life experiences down on paper and expecting strangers to be interested in reading them is narcissistic or self-indulgent, then all writing is self-indulgent. A writer of fiction is narcissistic in assuming that the world and the characters that exist only in their mind deserve a place in the minds of readers. Philosophers, writers of some literary fiction, and their admirers are narcissistic in assuming that their view of the “human condition” is one worth serious contemplation....

His new Holmes brothers novel, Mycroft and Sherlock, drops October 9th and Abdul-Jabbar was kind enough to answer some questions about his new book, his Holmes obsession, and his TBR pile. Book Riot: Sherlock was a sort of remote presence in your first novel and appeared only briefly in the comic. What made you feel like the time was right for a Holmes brothers team-up novel? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Though I have always read ACD (Arthur Conan Doyle) for the mysteries, my co-writer and I spent considerable time on Mycroft Holmes to establish Mycroft and Sherlock in a way that would reflect a believable relationship between the two....

Do we use different terms for book recommendations or reviews than we did ten years ago? Do we ask for different types of books, or just ask differently? I decided to find out. Before BookTok Before we can see any new trends in how we talk about and recommend books, first we’ve got to go back. To get a sense of how readers chatted about books before TikTok arrived, I went back to some BookTube channels you’ll probably recognize if you were in the community in its early years: PeruseProject and polandbananasBOOKS....

Something I love about YA survival stories is the versatility within the genre. Some of these stories are traditional dropped-in-the-wilderness tales. Others follow escapes from war, oppressive political regimes, and other very real factors that make people flee their homes. These stories can help build empathy for people in these dangerous situations while still providing the heart-pounding thrills of a survival story. I take real inspiration from these books. As someone with some kind of inability to reliably identify poison ivy (don’t worry, I get plenty of flak for this from people I know in real life), I’d be a sitting duck in an actual survival situation....

Bestselling authors Natalie D. Richards and Darcy Coates bring us stories that chill us to the bone and keep us up all night reading—haunting reads perfect for Halloween! A hitched ride home in a snowstorm turns sinister when one of the passengers is plotting for the ride to end in disaster in New York Times bestseller Five Total Strangers. From USA Today bestselling gothic horror author Darcy Coates comes The Haunting of Leigh Harker, a chilling story of a quiet house on a forgotten suburban lane that hides a deadly secret… Because I love fake scary stuff!...

Let’s get something out of the way immediately: vampires — the blood-sucking, immortal, turning-into-bats, sparkling-in-the-sunlight, “I-vant-to-saaaahck-your-blooood” vampires, are not real. At least, not on our plane of reality. That I know of. And to be honest, I’d rather not know if they’re really real. But if you happen to come across one, please ask him (it’s always a “him”) why his kind seem drawn to young, impressionable women who haven’t yet formed their sense of autonomous self....

Action Book Club has 1,400 registered clubs and 65,000 members of all ages in 45 countries, and they’ve announced that their theme for 2022 will be In Our Nature, “honoring the environment, our planet, and how we connect with the world around us.” They include a list of possible book choices, including options for kids, teens, and adult readers. They are also hosting a giveaway: “Sign up your Action Book Club by February 28, and you’ll be entered to win a special selection of Action Book Club titles or the grand-prize: an eco-friendly Little Free Library book-sharing box made of recycled milk jugs!...