Starting October 19th, I will be teaching my romantic suspense class.

Here’s the description:

Fall Suspense Thing Writing Workshop is now accepting students!!!

National bestselling, Emma-award winning author for Romance Suspense Deirdre Savoy will be facilitating this month-long workshop set to begin the week of October 19. This workshop is for authors wanting to learn the basic craft of writing romantic suspense or those seeking to add a bit of dramatic spice to any novel.

Course syllabus:

October 19: What is suspense–how do you achieve it and how do you use it:

October 25: Dark suspense vs. light suspense–how to create the effect you want

November 3: The devil in the details–making suspense believable.

November 10: Love on the run–how to use suspense to heighten the romance and vice versa.

Each week, a lecture and assignment will be posted. Completion and posting of assigned work for peer review is not mandatory but advised if students want to get the most from the class.

Who should take this course:

–first time R/S authors looking to learn the basics

–R/S authors looking to hone their craft

–any author interested in taking their writing to new levels

How to register:

Apply for group membership here. You will receive an e-mail telling you how to make payment. Once tuition is received, you will be added to the group.

Tuition: $25. (First 5 students to complete registration will receive a free synopsis critique.

Most readers are not too fond of the TSTL heroine unless she manages to redeem herself (or she’s Stephanie Plum–sorry, I couldn’t help myself), but since they’re only fictional folk, there’s not too much damage done, except to the psyches of the young girls who admire them.

But I was tooling around the blogosphere today and I happened on an article at the Women in Crime site talking about gullible real-life women who risk much to be with men who mistreat or kill them. Case in point: Sandra Boss and her daughter who was duped by a supposed Rockefeller, a man with no social security card, no job or history of having one, no real family. How the hell did this guy fool a supposedly smart woman duped into sharing their lives and their fortunes with reprobate men.

A big part of the equation is that these men don’t want you to know. They go to great lengths to preserve their con. This is their whole life and when it starts to unravel, they usually do one of two things–kill to cover their tracks or disappear. Luckily for little Reigh Rockefeller (now Boss) her dad chose the latter route even if he took her with him.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that there is something lacking in these women that these men pick up on and exploit. I would agree with that. When you consider that many of these type of love stories begin with the same formula: a whirlwind courtship followed by a quick marriage. Then the woman finds herself separated either emotionally or physically from her family and friends. It’s the same way many abusers and other predators behave: separate the weak one from the herd.

Another part of the equation is the pervasive sentiment that we women are still not complete without a man. We spout crazy statistics like we are more likely to get hit by lightning than to find that man after a certain age. Like a demented game of muscial chairs women are afraid to be the one left without a place to call their own. So, many close their eyes to signals anyone else would see. They don’t want to admit, until perhaps too late, that their (possibly) one shot at love isn’t who or what they claim to be.

But I think it’s also true that some folks take the fantasy of the romance novel and the movie theatre too literally. Some guy sweeps into their life and rather than being suspicious about why some man with millions wants ordinary ol’ you, you swoon. It’s not like Cinderella stories never happen, but more than likely the heroine ends up in divorce court trying to salvage some bit of her life, in a shallow grave–or, perhaps, my next novel. We’ll have to wait and see.

Although Deaver won an award for the creation of this creating this character and presenting a great role model for handicapped folks, proving they can be productive members of society. I’d guess, though, that there is a more pressing need in society for black men to be seen as cerebral, competent, active and sensual–without cutting the legs out from under them in either a literal or figurative way.

By contrast, Alex Cross is an active man who gets the girl he wants (who just happens to be black), a school teacher (or is it principal–either way she’s an educator, so I’m biased), has a family he takes care of, and is in general an honorable man. Aside from the near-tragic casting of Morgan Freeman as his movie persona, he’s pretty terrific. Or he was. I haven’t kept up with Cross as much as I would have liked to.

Truthfully, I’m all for breaking down barriers, for portraying us humans in all our infinite variety. Just sometimes there seems to be a certain awareness of what these images might imply. This isn’t limited to the way black men are portrayed, though that issue is on my mind at the moment. Don’t get me started with the pairings of old, half-dead geezers with sweet young things everywhere, as if women drop off the face of the earth once they hit thirty-five.

In my own work, I’ve written about men and women, blacks and whites, whoever–and I know what it’s like to be careful not to make the villains or the heroes too stereotypical.  Frankly I applaud folks for creating characters, especially heroes, out of people unlike themselves.  How about, give it a bit of thought before you create a character outside your comfort zone. That’s all I ask.  And a damn good story, of course.

Let’s start with Crimesistahs, where Angela blogs about the latest survey from Sisters in Crime . It’s amazing what information you can find on the market if you just look around. I hadn’t realized the mystery was genre non grata until I read this post. From now on I write thrillers, dammit.

Next stop is Sarah Weinman’s blog. She steals a bit from an essay on suspense written by Thomas Perry for LA Weekly.

Suspense isn’t a pleasant sensation. We go to great lengths to manage our lives in ways that will keep us from having to go through periods of uncertainty — particularly when it’s prolonged, and when the stakes are high. But in reading fiction, especially a novel, we crave this sensation of increasing tension, and the higher the stakes, the better. We love the experience of sitting somewhere in perfect safety with a book while some character serves as our surrogate in facing a world full of danger. What we’re enjoying is growing excitement, followed by a tantalizingly delayed cathartic ending. It’s a quality of all good fiction, and it’s why the reader keeps turning the pages.

My response is exactly! I know that’s why I read and the experience I hope to engender in my work.

Weinman also posits that Perry is correct when he speculates that the literati aren’t enamored with suspense is “perhaps because [suspense] seems to stimulate emotion rather than intellect: It makes readers care rather than think.”

Isn’t that the mission of all genre fiction? To bring the reader into the world of the protagonists and make them feel what the characters feel? And perhaps that’s why romance is the most denegrated genre of all, since the character’s feelings play such a prominent role in the development of the story.

And finally, Patricia Woodside blogs about finding your literary voice.

Hope you enjoyed this mini-roundup. Now that the heat wave here in New York has broken, I’m actually going outside.