Elle Hill

As I’ve mentioned before , I suck at promoting myself. I have the marketing skills of an emu, and trust me, emus are notorious in the wild for their lack of self-promotion. Nonetheless, I’ve recently floundered about in the dark, bumping into things and knocking objects over in my attempt to find promotional deals and reviews and such. (Interestingly, I’ve noticed a lot about promoting oneself involves spending money; I must have given out 10 copies of Hunted Dreams over the past month.) In spite of my clumsiness, I’ve managed to score a few wins. One of these wins was my personal favorite review from Bitten by Paranormal Romance . Although the reviewer gave my beloved Hunted Dreams only 4 out of 5 howls, the reviewer really captured the tone I tried to convey in the book. No one else has really mentioned it, which made me wonder if I’d been successful. Not to creep out the reviewer or anything, but I’d like to engage with her rather lovely review. Katana is one of the...

I’m going to share a little secret with you. Shhh – don’t tell anyone. See, I’ve always wanted to be a visual artist. Not instead of being a verbal artist. Oh, no. I want to be an artist with many hats, a modern-day da Vinci , if you will. (Well, minus the science and anatomy stuff. And the scruffy beard, of course.) Thing is, I don’t have a lot of visual-artistry talent. My latest theory is that my mother only had so many artistic genes. She gave half of the writing ones to my oldest sister , half to me, and she tossed all the visual ones at my younger sister.* So, no drawing, painting, sculpting, or other fun visual artistry in my future. However, I’ve often wondered if, buried deep within my psyche, lurks a talent for pointing, shooting, and Photoshopping. I have no evidence to back me up, but in this realm, and much like Nicolas Cage and acting, I refuse to let lack of talent hold me back. Given my secret desire to be the next Annie Leibovitz , you can understand my e...

Rereading my latest blog posts, it occurs to me I’ve never explained my word choice for the protagonists populating my literary worlds. I write hetero romance (for now, at least), which means there’s a girl main character and a boy main character. In most of my stories, the girl protagonist is pretty clearly the main-er character, but in some of them, like Hunted Dreams , my scenes are divided pretty equally between the sexes. When speaking about these two character staples, most folks I know use the terms “main characters” or, if they’re, like me, a fan of melodrama, heroes and heroines. I won’t use the term “heroine,” and not just because it sounds like a narcotic substance . (Creepy, right?) Words ending with “ ine ,” “ ina ,” “ita,” “ ette ,” and “ ess ” annoy the heck outta me. See, these words have one thing in common: added at the end of a word, they all represent it in a feminine and/or diminutive form. “Señorita” means “little señora,” “waitress” means “female waiter,” ...

"You *think* I'm feeling passion, bub, but I'm really just trying to catch my breath in this corset." Tall or short, brunette or blonde , mousy or (more likely) modestly and understatedly beautiful: Romance sheroes tend to come in a variety of packages. The two things that stay the same? Their youth and their thinness. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick to my gills of the endless parade of young, thin sheroes. When it comes to portraying younger peeps as if they have a right to all the wisdom I’ve collected as a spicy-smart 38-year-old, I admit I’m as guilty as anyone; my main characters all clock in at under 35. But this is my blog, and I can darn well ignore my faults for now. In this blog post, we’re talking the problem of size diversity – or lack of, therefore -- in the romance genre. Enter Katana, my plus-size protagonist. I’ve mentioned this in prior posts, but in case it escaped your attention, the shero in Hunted Dreams is fat . I never ...

Normally, I’m a pretty ascetic media consumer. I don’t own a TV, almost never go to the movie theater, am pretty selective with my book choices, and get most of my news through Facebook and word-of-mouth. During my recent stay with the Southwestern chapter of my family, I wallowed in a positively pornographic amount of media: movies, mainstream novels, and tons of television. I’m not ashamed to admit it shocked my monastic  media sensibilities. I’ve whined before about the dearth of positive representations of fat persons in media , and I stand by those gripes. I’m also cranky about the lack of roles for persons of color and with disabilities, although during my recent media glut, I found a few more than I expected. The complete lack, the screaming absence, of older persons is something I will perhaps discuss another time. For now, I’m interested in discussing the Bechdel Test , and how unfortunately rarely media pass it. For those who don’t know, this test appeared...