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Jonathan King Is the Blueprint: My Thoughts on Rina Kent’s Kingdom Duet
I didn’t know I had a daddy kink until Jonathan King walked onto the page and ruined my goddamn life. There. We’ve established the important part. After reading the Royal Elite books, moving on to Jonathan and Aurora felt inevitable. I already knew Jonathan as Aiden’s terrifying father, the man who could walk into a…
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I Read the Rest of Royal Elite, and the Girls Might Be My Favorite Part
After finishing Aiden and Elsa’s trilogy, there was no chance I was stopping there. I had already committed myself to Rina Kent’s world of emotionally damaged rich teenagers making terrible decisions, and I wanted to know what was going on with everyone else at Royal Elite. The remaining main books follow Levi and Astrid in…
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I Wrote 170,000 Words for a Book I’m Not Going to Use (No, I’m NOT OKAY)
I wrote more than 170,000 words for a book that is no longer going to be the first book in my series. So, that’s fun. Let me explain. The first book I actually wrote for this series was Always On. It follows Tessa and Chase after they’re already married. They’re on their honeymoon, driving through the…
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Aiden King Is Probably a Sociopath: My Thoughts on Rina Kent’s Royal Elite Trilogy
Before Deviant King, I was pretty sure bully romance wasn’t for me. The whole concept sounded like something that would piss me off more than entertain me. I pictured myself spending four hundred pages yelling at the heroine to develop some self-respect while wondering why anybody found the man tormenting her attractive. Then I met…
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I Read All Five Aston Archers Hockey Books by Cali Melle. Here’s My Ranking.
There are romance series you read one book at a time, calmly and responsibly, like a person with hobbies and a reasonable bedtime. And then there are romance series where you finish one book, immediately download the next, and suddenly you have opinions about five fictional hockey players and their reproductive decisions. The Aston Archers…
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Stop Treating Romance Writing Advice Like Law
Romance writers are drowning in rules. Some of them are useful. Some of them are fine in theory and disastrous in practice. And some of them sound smart enough that people repeat them without ever stopping to ask whether they’re actually helping the story on the page. I’ve learned—mostly the hard way—that writing gets worse…
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I Accidentally Wrote Book FOUR First… and Here’s What That Taught Me About Writing Romance
When I started drafting what I thought was my first romance novel, I truly believed I had everything under control. I had a strong outline, a clear plan, and a story I was excited to tell. I followed that outline scene by scene, and for a while, everything seemed perfectly aligned with the vision in…
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6 Books That Shaped How I Write Love Stories
Every writer has a few books that quietly carve their fingerprints into your creative DNA. You don’t always realize it at the time, you just finish a book, exhale, and think that did something to me. And then years later, you’re writing your own stories and see the echo of that line, that dynamic, that…
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Romance Tropes I Will Defend With My Whole Chest
Some people pretend they’re too sophisticated for certain romance tropes.I am not one of those people. I am proudly unhinged about the tropes I love, and today we’re talking about the ones I refuse to apologize for, even when they’re dramatic, chaotic, or blatantly unrealistic. (Especially when they’re unrealistic. Let me have my fun.) I’m…
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How I Wrote 50,000 Words With Zero Chill (Novel November Chaos Recap)
Or: Why my caffeine tolerance is now spiritually concerning. This month, I discovered something important about myself: I am not—absolutely not—a chill writer. Not even on my best day. I joined Novel November with the goal of writing 50,000 words, and instead of writing 50,000 words, I’ve actually written 85,243. Yes, really. No, I don’t…
Jessica Martin | Author
Writing Stories with a Happily Ever After