I get Nick Cave and Tom Waits confused.

Perhaps it’s the single syllable names. Perhaps it’s the fact they look like they could be the humanoid forms of a Southern Gothic vampire and werewolf, respectively.

The one thing they have in common is I don’t really listen to their music.

Anyway, this is all beside the point. You didn’t click on this article for observations on weird looking men with musical rizz. You came here for the romance.

I promise, though, this intro is…tangentially relevant.

Recently, I came across a clip of Nick Cave from the twilight episodes of Colbert1 in which he discusses his project, The Red Hand Files, which started as an “Ask Me Anything” style site for him to answer questions from fans but “has burst the boundaries of its original concept to become a strange exercise in communal vulnerability and transparency.”2

On Colbert, Cave read aloud an answer to question he received in 2022, one asking whether, given our unprecedented times, it is still worth believing in humanity and not give in to cynicism.3

The entirety of Cave’s response is resoundingly beautiful. In it, he refers to the “devastation” of his life (his son Arthur passed away in 2015 and, only a month after the writing of this letter in May of 2022, his son Jethro would pass) and how this devastation creates a dichotomy that makes you realize just how important hope is, giving way to the triumphant third paragraph of the letter.

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

Naturally, after watching this clip, my mind went to Romance.

Romance is defined by hope.

Romances end optimistically and are embodied by the Happily Ever After (a requirement, by the way)4

Just the other day in the summer cohort of The Romance Incubator, we were airing out our frustrations over why romance isn’t taken seriously because happy endings “aren’t realistic.”

I’ve reached the point of romance-actualization that this lack of seriousness pisses me off, not because I feel the need to defend romance but because it’s fundamentally wrong.

Happy endings are serious business. In fact, they’re revolutionary.

It is easy to be a cynic. I don’t mean this with a swoop of my arm toward the world. I mean this whole-heartedly as a metric of challenge. On the scale of complicated emotions, cynicism is an easy one.

Cynicism is an emotion of anticipation. If we can add up all the elements in our immediate context, we can anticipate the outcomes. And after being hopeful too many times, thanks to the ardent rush of childhood or whatever disappointments have marked our lives, cynicism is safe. Not only because hope hurts but because it can be abundantly embarrassing if we’re seen hoping only to fall short of what we want.

It is easy to be cynical.

Cynicism is a close relative of apathy. You know, that thing the powers that be count on us feeling so that we don’t fight or strive for more.

Hope, on the other hand, hope is an advanced emotion. One as a child that is easy to have but, the more you learn about the world, the harder it is to hold onto.

It is much more difficult to be hopeful than cynical. And yet Romance readers and writers are in the business of hope.

This four-letter word, far more complicated than its letter count would have you guess, is why I maintain that Romance is a very serious, very sincere genre. Readers and writers return to it again and again because in a world such as ours, constantly chaotic and unjust, speaks to something tender and beautiful at the core of Romance.

Despite all the horrors, the hope of finding your person(s) in a sea of billions, someone to weather the storm with, to fight the fight with, to make a life with, stands supreme.

We are stronger together.

This theme is at the crux of every romance.

And through the hope of romance, we live in, as Nick Cave says, “the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism”.

When we invest our time and attention in romance, we inevitably learn about the perhaps reckless belief in the happy endings that define romance. The more we see them, the more we remember that despite the horrors, we can persist. At the very least to find those we can love, see us for our whole selves, and create a world we love living in together.

Romance, in unison with hope, “says the world is worth believing in.”

And we need to believe more now than ever.

Let me be abundantly clear lest I be misunderstood (and boy does the internet love to misunderstand). I am not saying that being a romance writer or reader is a replacement for community action, deconstructing, voting, or any other number of things integral to combating fascism and creating a more equitable world.

To persevere through the dark times, we need to fight. We also need art. We need hope.

And Romance does just that.

✒️Post Script

You may have noticed this email wasn’t from the Romance Room, but from a different source all together: Sincerely, Romance with Marjorie Muller.

If you’ve been here a while, you might remember how my branding began as Marjorie's Love Letters. As I started making more education forward content, I felt that my branding didn’t reflect that so I shifted to The Romance Room. Which…I never quite clicked with.

In an effort to create “a brand”, I’ve felt like I was lost in the process.

Sincerely, Romance with Marjorie Muller is a shift back to my roots while still holding romance at the center, capturing exactly what I wanted to do with this space in the first place: uplift the genre that changed my life without losing myself in the process.

More to come…

— Marjorie

I’m rereading the first draft of my rockstar romance. Taking notes of edits I want to make. And as I go, as I alternate between chapters in the FMC and MMC’s perspectives, I’m getting a sinking feeling.

Now, it’s only a second draft, of course there’s work to be done. Plot points and characters to be added or struck, themes to uplift, darlings to kill.

But it’s a different sort of feeling. Not the promise of work. The suggestion of the kind of work I have to do.

I made a crucial error in the first draft of my romance.

My MMC is fully realized. My FMC is not.

**cue feminine rage**

Conceiving a Romance

I’m pretty confident I know why this is the case.

Most romances I have conceived of begin with a premise or…with a man.

I know! Ew! Why would a man be here?!

But listen, listennnnn, it’s my process. You can take the girl out of fanfiction, but you can’t take the fanfiction out of the girl (and to be honest, the girl never really left fanfiction anyway).

I was the type to write Character/OC fanfiction. For those outside the FF word, OC stands for original character. Contrary to popular belief, OCs are not always self-inserts. I was writing on Fanfiction.Net, thank you very much. Quite old school in a world of Archive of Our Own and Wattpad.

I was 14 and I loved Hugh Laurie in House, MD. Sue me.

Throughout my teens and early 20s, I hopped from British man to Irish man to British man: Hugh Laurie, Benedict Cumberbatch, Liam Neeson, Tom Hiddleston.

I used to think it was maladaptive daydreaming, delusions of grandeur, these intense crushes I’d get on celebrities.

As I got older, though, I realized they were more like muses. Trying to lead me to my true calling of romance. And eventually they did.

The Fanfiction to Romance Pipeline

Just What I Needed began with a question.

“What happens when you meet the subject of your maladapative daydreaming?”

It spiraled from there. What is it like to meet your heroes? What if they disappoint you? What if they’re just like you? What if they need you? What if they want you?

What if you’re too scared to tell them the truth for fear of obliterating any normalcy, and consequently, potential?

And then Cain came along, a washed up rockstar with an alcohol problem and a desperate need to get better.

I fell in love with Cain. Shaped him and his backstory with clay, lusciously, thoughtfully. I thought about what could make him worse and then better and worse before he got better all the way up to that happy ever after.

But a romance isn’t a dance between an author and a character study.

Enter the Enigmatic Pamela

I knew the foil to Cain needed to be equally as vibrant and complex, especially with the plot conceit of a famous person and a secret fan.

She couldn’t just be a fan. You can’t have him be so special she doesn’t shine on her own two feet.

A good deal of discovering Pamela came through the act of writing. There was some discovery through tarot, revelations about her backstory and profession, delicate navigations of her own relationship with alcoholism.

I thought I had enough of a sketch of her, so I marched on through the first draft, knowing I’d make discoveries along the way, hoping it would all be clear by the end.

But the stakes could be higher. Her character psychology clearer.

Decisions needed to be made about Pamela I was not ready to make and that’s why Pamela was the root of why I avoided Just What I Needed all this time.

Because at the heart of Pamela is me. I’ll talk about that another time, a later time, a time when I’m ready, a time when it’s germane.

Balancing POVs

To my credit, the art of the dual POV romance is a tricky one. It’s not unusual for one draft to be led by one character, the next the other. Part of the art of dual is achieving that ideal balance.

Having to face the disparity between Cain and Pamela’s development, however, nags at my feminism.

Or…it nags at me. That her story completely formed in response to the main male character’s and never quite got to the heights it needed to.

This isn’t a fanfiction that can focus on some sort of source material. I am the source material.

The pieces of Pamela that are most undiscovered are the traits she shares most closely with me. Her desire for control manifesting as codependence and care, her ambition tainted with guilt, the constant threat of self-lack.

Since deciding to pick up this book again, I’ve been allowing myself to go there. What does Pamela’s arc look like when it responds less to Cain and more to her own, high stakes circumstances?

I already have a couple huge swings I’m taking in this second draft that are going to upheave the first. For Pamela’s sake.

Because this isn’t his story. It’s theirs.

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We have an epidemic in the romance genre.

Romances where writers are putting everything into the plot and overlooked the characters. Their psychology, their arc, who they are separate from the romance.

Consequently, you have all these romances on the shelves that haven’t done the real work of getting a reader to care about what happens to the characters.

Other than the HEA, of course.

Let me be clear. I want to like your characters. I want to root for them and relate to them. And the more specific your characters are, the more rootable and relatable they are.

To put it bluntly, too many romances have characters that feel like they know they’re in a romance.

Think of your favorite romance. At the beginning of the story, the characters didn’t know that love was hurtling there way. They were living their lives in a way that was shaped by their experience, not the knowledge that they’re going to get to an HEA at the end.

This knowing usually happens because your character’s psychology and life isn’t built strong enough separate from the romance.

You might have heard your character needs to want something. You might have heard that they need to fear something.

But I want writers, especially of romance, to take it to the next level with The Big Four.

The Big Four

Similar to the Big Three of astrology (sun, moon, rising sign) the Big Four are elements of character psychology. These four elements will flesh out your characters in a way that will separate them from the romance and allow a reader to see their specificity and exactly why they should care.

Those four elements are as follows.

1. A Desire

2. A Fear

3. A Misbelief

4. A History

No, that’s not right. These elements aren’t nearly strong enough.

Let’s modify them to make them stronger.

The Bigger BETTER Four

1. An OVERWHELMING Desire

Your character doesn’t just want something. They want something so bad it’s eating them alive.

And no, “wanting love” is rarely a strong enough desire.

Usually the easiest stop along the way. We can almost always tell what our characters want on some level. While their needs to be a want related to desire, connection, and partnership on some level for a romance to enter their life, this is not what the desire is meant to represent.

This desire is what they want when you open the book, the very first thing. The greatest desire. Not just something small. What do they want on a big life level. in some respect it might be scary for them to pursue. Which leads us to the 2nd requirement.

2. A CRUSHING Fear

What does your character fear most? How does that fear keep them from acting on or realizing their true desires?

If you aren’t sure, think about what’s keeping them from their greatest desire because this fear most certainly should get in the way or be counter to their greatest desire.

Their greatest fear should be deep-seated and huge, something they would have to work to get over. This work is prevented by...

3. A PARALYZING Misbelief

We all have beliefs and misbeliefs about ourselves.

Misbeliefs are often characterized by something about ourselves we have had to believe in order to survive or keep ourselves safe. Even if it’s devastating or cruel to ourselves.

This misbelief is never true and keeps a character from overcoming their fear. The thing they believe is a fundamental, unchangeable flaw about themselves or their circumstances.

If this didn’t exist, they might be able to work through the fear to get the want. But the misbelief holds them back, so much so they must go through a significant personal journey to get over. This misbelief was usually born from...

4. A CONSEQUENTIAL History

Sometimes called background damage or trauma, your character’s history informs so many things about a character.

While we don’t need to psychoanalyze them or learn everything about the past, all of these psychological aspects were born from their experiences. From the history, you can determine much about a character’s mental makeup. Why they fear what they fear, why they have a deep-seated misbelief not necessarily founded in truth but in experience.

In about 75% of the manuscripts I edit, I have to confront the reality that a character is missing pieces of their character psychology. They are tethered to the romance because their true inner life hasn’t been explored.

And that doesn’t make for a compelling, cathartic romance.

So then how do you discover all these things? Through a flow chart of course.

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And that was valuable.

But what surprised me most was how much growth came from the community of writers that I had assembled.

Again and again in my post-incubator one-on-ones with writers, I have heard the same refrain: I learned so much from everyone else.

Over the course of the cohort, participants became sharper readers of romance itself, not just their own manuscripts. One comment in week two received some thoughtful nods. By week five, the same comment spurred on a whole new conversation.

Community is an invaluable piece of the puzzle for growing as a writer and a huge part of what shaped the Summer 2026 cohort.

The new cohort now includes:

• more structured craft lessons (and optional assignments)

• responsive sessions tailored to the group

• expanded discussion around romance storytelling mechanics

• and a stronger framework for critique and revision

Applications for the Summer cohort close Wednesday night (tomorrow!).

If you’ve been considering applying, now is your chance to have a romance centered summer! I can’t wait to read your work.

Apply now

I’m sitting outside, sun warming my skin despite the chill in the air.

A bright green inchworm crawls up my water bottle.

I’ve just finished the first draft of my novel.

An electric feeling, especially after handwriting though two legal pads. Literally, muscles pulsate. Metaphorically, I soar…

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Welcome back to The Romance Room — the place for all conversations romance, from craft to culture and everything in between.

Today, we’re talking the talk: dialogue.

Dialogue is a fundamental piece of writing. It’s important to developing the connection and relationship of the love interest while also revealing of character, while also serving as an important driving force for the narrative.

In romance, dialogue carries an enormous amount of the emotional weight of the story you’re trying to tell. Attraction, conflict, vulnerability, and intimacy often unfold in conversation.

And I’m not talking about banter. Spoiler alert: I’m over banter.

But we’re not quite there yet.

Put your dialogue to work!

There are three functions of dialogue.

1. A way to move the story forward, aka the plot function

2. A way to show characterization and personality, aka the character function

3. A way to develop and portray relationships, aka the relationship function

Let’s break it down a little further:

1. The Plot Function

Think story, instruction, revelation.

This kind of dialogue moves the story forward. It creates beats for the rising action and keeps the momentum of how the story is progressing.

Plot comes up in the form of characters discussing their future actions, relaying past actions, planning, discussing history, etc.

2. The Character Function

Think personality, tone, rhythm.

This kind of dialogue shows us who the character is rather than telling us about them. This can be shown through what they say, how they say, when they say it (all those who/what/when/where/why words). Rather than telling us traits about a character through prose, we are shown the traits and allowed to understand the character through their actions.

3. The Relationship Function

Think emotional connection, personal dynamics, banter.

This kind of dialogue develops the relationship through connection. This function is imperative in romance writing.

Relationships change through dialogue. Characters learn about one another through dialogue: how they behave, problem solve, what they value, who they are.

Dialogue is invaluable to character connection. Which is why it can’t all be banter.

Why does dialogue need a job?

It’s important to be able to identify what type of dialogue you are using at any given point in time. If it does not fall into one of these three categories, chances are you might be spinning your wheels or leading the reader astray.

You do not have time to be wasting with your dialogue.

I don’t care which publishing route you take. If you go trad, they’re going to have a range for you. If you go indie, please do not waste a reader’s patience with your characters’ loquaciousness.

It might seem like I don’t like dialogue which couldn’t be further from the truth. I love dialogue. I think it’s the emotional backbone of a story.

Like anything, however, sometimes less is more. I don’t advocate for more prose than dialogue just as I don’t advocate for more dialogue than prose.

Balance is everything when it comes to dialogue. It’s an opportunity to craft the story, move the plot, build characters, and create relationships. If your dialogue isn’t doing a job, you’ve missed an opportunity.

But…what about banter?

Banter is killing your dialogue.

I need to talk about banter.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a snappy, quippy scene ala His Girl Friday. There’s a reason banter as a concept is popular: it’s fun, it’s easy to read, and it can be a a great way to develop character and relationship through dialogue. And of course, when you hear readers gushing about the banter in a book, you want to get in on that.

Ah, the TikTokification…

I implore you to ignore the temptation, the Pandora’s Box of centralizing relationship development around banter.

The emphasis on banter has caused some writers to use it as shorthand for character connection. Sure, it’s a piece of the connection we see between characters on page but true transformation of a relationship in a romance cannot be held by only banter. There are other pieces to dialogue that need to drive the relationship like emotional connection and understanding.

Banter isn’t everything. In fact, it’s a crutch.

Psst…want more romance craft conversations and hot takes?

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Now…let’s see how good dialogue functions.

I’ve chosen a few passages from romances I love that have creme de la creme dialogue.

I have taken the liberty of removing most of the prose and inter-dialogue lines in order to let the dialogue stand on its own. This is not a comment on those words being unnecessary, rather it’s a testament to the writers and their talent for dialogue.

As you will note, I footnoted where I had explanations for why this piece of dialogue suits the defined function.

The Plot Function as seen in Ruby Dixon’s Barbarian Alien:

“But,” Vektal continues in a strong voice. “Tribe law has been broken. You were forbidden to take the woman, Leezh. You did so and knew the cost.”1

“Exile?” I parrot. “For what, borrowing me for a while?”

“For accosting you and endangering your life. For that, he is cast out of the tribe.”2

Raahosh’s expression is shuttered. “That is not right. She resonated to me.”

“And I warned you,” Vektal counters. “And you deliberately disobeyed my orders.”3

This piece from the third act of the book is clearly is meant to further the plot along and is not mincing words at showing how actions have consequences. Simultaneously, it’s revealing new information to the reader through the POV character, Liz.

The Character Function as seen in Julia Whelan’s Thank You For Listening:

“You’re special. That ‘it’ thing. You twinkle. All mischievous and shit.”4

“Mischevious,” Sewanne said in that well-trained voice of hers. 5

“Dat’s what I said. “

“No, you said, miss-Chee-vee-us. It’s MISS-chi-viss.”

“So?”

“Mis-chi-viss is a word. Miss-chee-vee-us is not.”6

This passage is a delicious representation of the FMC’s characterization. Not only does she have a love of words, but she has the zeal to correct someone on it.

While there are assumptions we can make about Sewanee this early on in the book based on her profession and background, this shows us something important: she takes words, and consequently her work, seriously.

The Relationship Function as seen in Kennedy Ryan’s Long Shot:

“Your hair is getting so long.”7

He turns his head to peer up at me. “You said you like it longer, right?”8

“I said that?”

“Yeah. That week in Baltimore.”9

“Are you saying...you’re growing your hair out because I said I liked it longer? For me?”10

In a beautiful book such as Long Shot, it’s not surprising how elegant and simply the dialogue can hint at the relationship development. This revelation for the FMC is that the MMC considers her in a deep way despite contextual disconnection.

Though subtle, it hints at a closing in of connection, a deepening. Given it’s placement at the beginning of the final third of the book, it’s effectively ushering in a new era for the characters.

You may have read these pieces of dialogue and perceived them as having different functions than the one I defined for them.

Guess what?

Dialogue Function isn’t a science.

Dialogue can have multiple functions at any given time. In fact, the more the better (usually).

When I did this exercise with an audience at a conference, they illuminated some key pieces of these passages I hadn’t even considered before. That’s what’s so brilliant about dialogue.

For instance, in the piece of IPB, someone pointed out that we learn of Liz’s character through the fact she’s choosing to speak up against the tribe leader, Vektal. A brilliant observation!

How many functions can you find in the other examples? I’d love to hear your ideas down in the comments.

Leave a comment

The thing about good dialogue is this: when it’s working for you, it’s often multitasking.

You are only ever a few precise and measured changes away from crafting dialogue that propels your story forward, whether it be for the plot, the characters, or the relationships.

On a final note…

Dialogue is fun. Really fun. But it also has a job and that job is making an impact on the story, not just giving the writer and reader some fluff (*cough, cough* banter) and inflating your word count.

When evaluating your own dialogue, remember to ask yourself: what is the function of this piece of dialogue? If it doesn’t have one, put it work!

That’s it for now, but don’t worry. Your seat is always saved in The Romance Room!

And one of the best places to find that is in the romance genre.

I’m not just saying this because it’s International Women’s Day.

(Happy international women’s day to everyone who celebrates. It should be all of you. Okay?)

On Monday, I saw a reading of Katherine Gwyn’s All I Want To Do Is Be Pretty Like You.

ABOUT THE PLAY
A group of twenty something actors are trying to perform as a group of abducted teenage girls who are trying to perform as a group of pageant contestants so that one of them can be awarded the crown by their Director--and be set free.

A play about performing womanhood, goodness, and trauma for the male gaze, and the blurred lines between desire and abduction, fantasy and reality, and violence and beauty itself.

The script is fucking phenomenal and deeply thought-provoking.

At one point in the play, one of the actors says something to the effect of, “When it comes to media about women, they don’t want to see us be happy. All they wanna do is see us scream.”1

I immediately wrote that line down. Because it was raw and real and true.

That line made me realize part of the reason the patriarchy (misogynists, enablers of misogynists, those with internalized misogyny) want to degrade romance as “unserious” is because we have become terribly numb to stories centering women to be full of suffering.

It’s why I don’t watch shows like Yellowjackets or The Handmaid’s Tale. I don’t need fiction to indulge in women’s suffering. I get that every damn day all around me.

Romance is important to show that media surrounding women can be happy and that it is valuable to tell stories where women don’t suffer.

Romance is denigrated as unserious so many times and I believe in great part to this notion that the way we consume media about women emphasizes the pain, the horror, the injustice.

The scream.

At the end of the day, media where women don’t scream, where they are not being brutalized and hurt, is clearly not valuable to a lot of people.

But I wanted to offer this thought on International Women’s Day.

Because after seeing a beautiful play, I was reminded about my crusade for the seriousness of romance.

Romance upholds the notion that stories about women finding joy, safety, or love are also very important, and that we will not just be party to media that is us screaming

And that deserves to be taken seriously.

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I’ve gotten to the point where drowning out existential dread means having three screens on at once, voices competing for attention to the point of numbing.

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I had switched it from its original vase to one that used to sit on the piano in my grandparents’ house.

As I set it down and adjusted the flowers so they’d look their best for a photo, I was struck with an intense wistfulness.

The flowers in the vase reminded me o…

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Noooooo. Or, when we do, it’s the point out writers who don’t know the meaning of CNC.

Consent, the enthusiastic and revocable kind, has been a bigger and bigger part of the romance conversation since the a…

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I’ve spoken with graduate students who want to give up on their degrees because the other writers in their cohort don’t know how to critique romance other than bullying them.

I’ve heard from writers in writing groups where the men become more emboldened by the day to talk do…

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Well, I’ve got a few new beginnings I need to let you know about.

First and foremost: The Romance Incubator.

The Incubator is an 8-week program focused on strengthening romance writers’ critical response skills through giving and receiving thoughtful feedback in a small, curated group.

I am so ex…

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Of course, a week into the new year, I fell ill with Flu A and let me tell you, you don’t want that shit. You do not want that shit! I was feverish for 3 days and started living off a diet of chicken soup and Pedialyte popsicles.

So, here I am, 3 weeks almost into the new year, finally getting around to one of the projects I promised to reignite. My Substack.

You may have noticed I’ve renamed the Substack. I can’t get the URL because it’s already claimed, but I’m moving away from Marjorie’s Love Letters to something simpler: The Romance Room.

You might recognize the name from the podcast I piloted last fall. Don’t worry, that’s coming back too ;) I want this space to reflect better how my life reflects my art and vice versa. The reality is, there’s only so many hours in a day and while I sometimes act like superwoman, I know just how not super I am (aka mortal and prone to burnout).

The Romance Room will serve as a better catchall for romance reflections, pod related things, marketing ish, and the moments in between.

This year, I want to craft better systems, make the projects I want to start more sustainable and rely less on motivation and inspiration and more on discipline.

Doesn’t that all sound…so nice?

Until then, here are my hopes for this space.

1. Restart my Substack on a biweekly basis.

2. Restart the pod on a biweekly basis.

3. Stop saying “I need” to do things and replace “I need” with “I want” (thanks Dorothy on TikTok for that one).

Along with all of this, I want to move my primary form of emailing to Substack entirely, at least for now, eliminating my MailChimp subscriptions which I’ve used for more “marketing” emails. We’ll see how this works out!

In the meantime, you can expect a follow-up email in the coming days updating you with my 2026 offerings. I’m very excited to show you what I’ve been cooking up behind the scenes!

I hope your 2026 is off to a beautiful start. Stay warm, stay cool, stay safe.

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I saw Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair the other night.

It was great. I loved it. I’d never seen a Tarantino movie, in fact avoided them like the plague. Quentin Tarantino’s firm status in the holy trinity for film bros scared me off.

But Kill Bill is on the list of my best friend’s favorite movies so I joined him on the 4+ hour extravaganza of both movies, one after the other with a slim intermission.

I loved it. I really did. The over the top blood and gore, the storytelling, the music (dear god, the music). I ate it up with a spoon.

And yet.

I couldn’t shake the feeling. You know, the one you get when you’re feminism is raising its hand and you’re trying not to acknowledge it because you know they have something valuable to say but it’s going to spoil the party.

My feminism raised its hand and asked, “Why are the most violent deaths saved for the women?”

Goddammit, feminism. You’re so right. Why do we see Lucy Liu’s brain and why does Daryl Hannah get her eye plucked out when Bill Carradine gets to take a nice little walk to death all on his own and Mike Madsen gets a couple snake bites?

Why is it that even if violence and death, the women’s body is exploited?

It’s a shock I had not seen Kill Bill prior to writing my play, The Sporting Life. There are so many parallels I hadn’t realized. So much of the over the top blood and gore, even lines that maybe I heard parroted in the zeitgeist I subconsciously drew inspiration from.

The Sporting Life is a “coming of rage” story about periods, feminine power, and growing up girl.

Here’s a little about the play:

16-year-old Dot still hasn’t gotten her period. Lucky for her, there’s a Witch in the woods who can get it started. However, in exchange, Dot must offer her the life of a man who has wronged her. And who better to offer than a math teacher? When Dot gets her elusive first period and becomes witness to the Witch’s murder, they become bonded in literal blood, sending Dot down a path of self-understanding, bitterness, and perhaps a little bit of violence too (as a treat). The Sporting Life is a ‘this girl is a woman now’ story brutally snapped open to expose the, sometimes literal, entrails of growing up girl.

You can see why I’d see my story in the Kill Bill. There is a kinship between my play and Kill Bill. Both revenge fantasies, both angry and fueled by over the top blood and guts.

What’s the major difference, then? Why is Kill Bill a cinematic masterpiece but The Sporting Life a mixed reviewed Chicago storefront theater production?

I have a lot of theories on this. And look, it’s not good etiquette for the writer of a piece to get into the weeds of reviewers and reviewing. yes, I read them and I probably shouldn’t have, and yes, I wished the play was received better. I felt the play’s messaging was fundamentally misunderstood by so many of its viewers.

I’m sure some people will read this and see this as the self-important ramblings of an artist who thinks her art is better than it is. And there may be truth in that. But, eh, fuck that.

After seeing Kill Bill, I think a major problem people have with The Sporting Life is that they can’t stand women committing heinous acts of violence against men. They can get on with a revenge story, they can conceptualize the men deserve it, but they can’t stand to see a 16-year-old girl go all Beatrix Kiddo on them.

There’s a notion that women are built to rise above. They go low, we go high.

Fuck that shit.

I wrote a play where women disembowel shitty cops and decapitate perverts.

Quentin Tarantino wrote a movie where a woman hunts down a group of assassins. The women receive heinous blows and tragic endings.

The men get to go to sleep.

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“Do romances really require a happy ever after?”

To which my answer is always…yes.

“But what if it’s a dark romance?”

Well, yes.

“But what if my character really wants to die?”

Then it’s no longer a romance.

And then the buts start. Not the fun butts. No, the but buts.

“But what …

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When you enroll, you’ll get:

• Over 4 hours of self-paced video lessons

• Worksheets to supplement your learning

• Templates you can use on the job!

ALSO, you’ll get lifetime access to The Haunt, a private course chat which you can use con…

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One thing plagued me though.

Despite being super successful and having a personality and job of someone beyond her years, the FMC was in…

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Oh! I’m glad you asked!

The Romance Room is a romance craft and culture podcast hosted by yours truly, Marjorie Muller.

In each episode, we’ll explore not just the craft of creating unforgettable love stories but also the cultural and societal contexts that shape them. From the mechanics of weaving passion into prose to the broade…

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I’m thrilled to invite you to the launch of my new podcast, The Romance Room, premiering on September 15th!

I’ve been meditating on the idea of a podcast for over a year now. I’ve always put it off, thinking I need a whole plan, a niche, and total brand strategy.

But recently, I decided all I needed was my mic, my opinions, and the wo…

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Then I stumbled across romance ghostwriting. Immediately, I knew I would be a perfect candidate for a job like that.

But there were a few problems.

I had never written a whole book.

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