I Cheated and Blended 2 into 1

by Dave Dentel

The first rule of writing is to know your audience, which in fiction means conforming to the tropes readers have come to expect in the genres they favor.

For romantic suspense authors, plotting a novel to please today’s consumer entails building on the legacy of gothics—especially the titles cranked out by publishers in the 1960s to 1980s.

Considering that at the time these potboilers outsold every other type of fiction on the market, I thought it would be worthwhile to research the elements that typified a good gothic romance. After all, I am working on a sequel to my own romantic suspense novel released earlier this year—Suffer A Sea Change.