Nope. Category romance doesn't just mean the publisher has guidelines, it means that the book is primarily marketed by publisher and line (hence category) and stays on the shelves for only a month.

If you look at Avon Romance's page, you'll see that the emphasis in the cover design is on the individual authors' names and titles.

[link]

Contrast the cover designs on these Harlequin Temptations:

[link]

The focus is on the publishing line, much more than on the author.

And if you want to buy an Avon Romance that was first published in 1998 and is still popular, you can. There is no way to buy a new copy of a Harlequin that was first published in 2002, let alone 2003. That page I linked to is the May books. They'll be gone by July.

Scary....

Yup. When you combine that with Harlequin having a mandatory moral rights clause nowadays, I'd never write for them. (It used to be common that you did an apprenticeship in category before writing a full-length manuscript.)

The moral rights clause says that the author has no moral rights in the content: you can sell them a book and they can change the heroine's name to Petunia and make her give speeches supporting slavery and there's not a damned thing you can say about it.

Used bookstores specializing in romance novels would be the place to look for the Harlequin titles. There's one here in town, I think 80% of their stock is romance novels of all type. It's not a huge shop by any means but the owners are very nice and knowledgable and they know can also tell you if your search for a title is futile.

I was reading a semi series (not in the Harlequin line) but some author and I couldn't find one book that had the story of two characters that were constantly referenced in the others. They told me the book was so popular they never got it in and I was just wasting my time trying to find it.

I use [link] and [link] to track down old categories. That's how I found Jennifer Crusie's backlist. It won't waste your time, but you can spend $20.00 and up for hard-to-find categories.

You may ask, why the @#$@#$@ don't the category publishers reprint these? They're starting to -- Harlequin's Mira line, for instance -- but not all of them are willing.

I'm eager enough for publication that I'd probably go with Harlequin if I'd exhausted all other opportunities, but they're definitely at the bottom of my list for all the reasons Betsy cites.

Susan, you're not the only one who writes out of order. Everything I've done more than 5,000 words long has been written that way. I get the idea, I bonk out a few scenes in the middle, I write the ending, and then I go back and fill it in. Sometimes the ending gets rewritten along the way, but I always have to know where I'm going.

For me, it's too easy to get bored if I just go beginning-middle-end. Instead I write the interesting stuff first, the stuff that grabs me first, and then go find interesting things to say about the other sections. Yes, I'm weird. It's one reason why I'll never post a fic WIP.

I have such a problem with description. I have to go back in with a weedwhacker and machete to find the story. Of course there's a member of my writing group who insists everything's in her novel--and we keep saying, no, it may be in your head, but it's not on the page.

I'm just the opposite of Susan when it comes to writing scenes vs. making myself not write out of the timeline. I'd always written whatever came, like single scenes, or conversations, or description of an "establishing shot" or a drive, or the background of a scene. My writer's mind works cinematically, and I do tend to detail "camera" moves. Because some scenes were mere skeletons and some were lush detailed things, and also because I may have written the same scene from slightly different perspectives, maybe more than twice or three times, putting the jigsaw together was a nightmare. Plus, the bridgework between the fun-to-write scenes? Boring as shit, thus often not done, or done indifferently. The style tended to vary widely, too, from scene to scene. All failings of the novice, in my case.

For this last attempt, I forced myself to write chronologically. Which actually paid off, because being linear, I discovered things as I went along, things that sent the narrative off in unexpected directions, and changed the details, or the circumstances, or the inhabitants, of those scenes I'd planned for later.

I've always been very weak on plot, tended to get to know my characters as well as possible and then just turn them loose. I had a story line anchored by things that had to happen at certain points. How I got from one point to another was open for tangent, deviation, exploration and surprise.

It was the fourth attempt. I actually finished this one. Would you like to see the contents of my files? I could reanimate several trees with the cellulose therein.

My Lewis Carroll advice-taking (start at the beginning and go on until you reach the end) I expect may well be because I start with people, not with what they're doing. So here's a collection of people in my head, and then there's the big bright light - what if they..... - and then I put them at the little green line and push 'em out there.

That's true even on the rare occasions when I start with a concept. I have a scifi morality tale I want to go back to, that I started a few years back. That one began with a concept, a what-if, but immediately I began seeing the characters and wrapping the story around them. And since the what-if in this particular story is a very angry uprooted dryad? Also character.

You know, I really think I'm character rather than concept oriented, too. I get these people in my head, and start picturing how they'd interact, but not always in any chronological order.

And strictly speaking, it's not that I don't know what happens in my unwritten Chapter Two. Three major characters get in a carriage and journey across the country. I just so far haven't imagined anything interesting or important enough to constitute a scene. And if I don't think of anything soon, I'll just pick up on their arrival in Gloucestershire with a throwaway line or two about the journey being uneventful.