I didn’t know when I wrote the first love spell that it would actually make things happen. Like, actually make people fall in love with each other... How could I have known something like that? I mean, magic isn’t real, right? But here’s the thing—the spell does work and so does the next one and the next one...and suddenly I’m getting a whole lot of attention from everyone at my high school. Me, Blend-into-the-Walls, Please-Let-Me-Introvert-in-Peace Rowan Marshall. And not only that, but I’ve also caught the attention of Luca Russo, a godlike, football-playing hottie who claims he likes me just the way I am. Ummm... But as I’m about to learn, playing around with things you don’t understand means when things go wrong—like really, very awfully wrong—you don’t know how to fix them.

What if you were fated to NEVER fall in love?

A comprehensive guide that defines the literature and the outlines the best-selling genre of all time: romance fiction. More than 2,000 romances are published annually, making it difficult for fans and the librarians who advise them to keep pace with new titles, emerging authors, and constant evolution of this dynamic genre. Fortunately, romance expert and librarian Kristin Ramsdell provides a definitive guide to this fiction genre that serves as an indispensible resource for those interested in it—including fans searching for reading material—as well as for library staff, scholars, and romance writers themselves. This title updates the last edition of Romance Fiction: A Guide to the Genre, published in 1999.While the emphasis is on newer titles, many of the important older classics are retained, keeping the focus of the book on the entire genre, instead of only those titles published during the last decade. Specific changes include new chapters on linked and continuing romances, a new section on "Chick Lit" in the Contemporary Romance chapter, an expansion of coverage on the alternative reality subset. This is THE romance genre guide to have.

Disaster Number One: Men Hard knocks and hunger taught Faith Duffy not to believe in love. Still, when she married her very wealthy—and very old—husband, she became the perfect wife. And then he went to that big bank in the sky, leaving Faith with lonely nights, a pile of money, and a total mess of a pro hockey team. Heck, Faith doesn't even watch hockey! Disaster Number Two: Passion But most of America and half of Canada is watching Ty Savage. His lethal sex appeal and deadly right hook make him the favorite of fans. For most of Ty's life, he's dreamed of winning the Stanley Cup. The last thing he needs is a bimbo messing up his plans. Disaster Number Three: Love Faith loathes Ty on sight, but she can't stop thinking about him all day . . . and night. Then a moment of temptation ends with Faith in Ty's bed, and she begins to see there's more to him than sex appeal. Ty discovers there's far more to Faith than beauty and billions. But a relationship with Faith is impossible, and falling in love—that would be a disaster.

Follow Gin Blanco, a kick-butt female assassin who moonlights at a BBQ joint in Tennessee, as she searches for the person who double-crossed her in this heart-pounding and fresh paranormal romance series. After Gin’s family was murdered by a Fire elemental when she was thirteen, she lived on the streets and eventually became an assassin to survive. Now, Gin is assigned to rub out an Ashland businessman, but it turns out to be a trap. After Gin’s handler is brutally murdered, she teams up with the sexy detective investigating the case to figure out who double-crossed her and why. Only one thing is for sure—Gin has no qualms about killing her way to the top of the conspiracy.

Following up the first book in her new "Elemental Assassin" series, Jennifer Estep's Web of Lies once again brings readers into sexy assassin Gin Blanco's world, which is populated with giants, goth dwarves, elementals, and some kick-butt BBQ. Curiosity is definitely going to get me dead one of these days. Probably real soon. I’m Gin Blanco. You might know me as the Spider, the most feared assassin in the South. I’m retired now, but trouble still has a way of finding me. Like the other day when two punks tried to rob my popular barbecue joint, the Pork Pit. Then there was the barrage of gunfire on the restaurant. Only, for once, those kill shots weren’t aimed at me. They were meant for Violet Fox. Ever since I agreed to help Violet and her grandfather protect their property from an evil coal-mining tycoon, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m really retired. So is Detective Donovan Caine. The only honest cop in Ashland is having a real hard time reconciling his attraction to me with his Boy Scout mentality. And I can barely keep my hands off his sexy body. What can I say? I’m a Stone elemental with a little Ice magic thrown in, but my heart isn’t made of solid rock. Luckily, Gin Blanco always gets her man...dead or alive.

NYT and USAT bestselling author and screenwriter, Cindy Dees, brings her formidable skills as a master storyteller and master writing teacher to this encyclopedic series analyzing the major tropes used in modern commercial fiction. In this volume, Cindy explores 33 iconic internal romance tropes, the stories of personal affliction, wounds, fears, and personality traits that form obstacles to love inside the hearts and minds of your characters. Written by a working writer for working writers, this is a comprehensive reference guide and brainstorming tool to help you quickly generate ideas, create characters and plot, revise and edit, brand and market your story. You’ll write faster, cleaner, and deliver your audience a story they’ll recognize and love. If you’re writing a novel, script, play, comic, graphic novel, video game script, or any other story format, this book is for you. If you’re writing a love story specifically, or you’re writing any genre of fiction in which you’d like to include a romantic relationship, this book is for you. Each trope entry includes: · a detailed definition and analysis · descriptions of all obligatory scenes necessary to structure this trope correctly · lists of additional key scenes important to this trope · an extensive list of questions to think about when writing this trope · an extensive list of traps to avoid when writing this trope · reasons why audiences love this trope · a list of similar tropes · a list of examples of each trope in action taken from television, film, and novels …every kind of writer in every genre of fiction is going to want these guides in their go-to reference books… …a tour de force how-to on creating stories audiences adore… …the books every writer has been waiting for—a comprehensive walk-through by an industry pro of everything to think about when building a story of pretty much any kind…

America loves Luann. Through Luann's teenage adventures and misadventures, this delightful strip illustrates the task of being a modern teen. The agony of the summer job, the thrill of crushes on cute lifeguards, the excitement of the shopping mall, the terror of parents watching their children navigate life-it's all there in Dates and Other Disasters, another compilation of Greg Evans's insightful humor. Nominated four times as Cartoonist of the Year by the National Cartoonists Society, Greg Evans has been pleasing audiences of all ages with Luann since she first appeared in the late 1980s. She was a popular part of Teen magazine in the 1990s and has served as the spokestoon for Girls Inc. and Tambrands. This ""everygirl"" teen representative is also the star of a series of health and fitness brochures distributed to clinics, schools, and hospitals worldwide by Journeyworks Publishing. Everyone can relate to Luann's trials, missteps, and frustrations-preteens, teens, post-teens, adult readers who exclaim, ""Phew! I'm glad that's over!"" plus parents who relive the adventures with their own kids. Dates and Other Disasters expresses a universal message that declares no matter how times change, the trials of being a teenager are always the same!

The apocalypse can take many forms. Possibly our end will come by way of an addictive cell phone game that manipulates its users into a crowd-sourced mass murder. Or perhaps our downfall involves aliens drugging us into bliss and then taking it away. Maybe it'll be technological redundancy that leaves loved ones without a purpose, or corporations replacing the natural world with creatures more amenable to market pressure. All these apocalypses and many more can be found in Erica L. Satifka's debut collection, which gathers together twenty-three short stories from the past decade.