Even nonromance readers could probably define the term “alpha male.” The much-debated, much-loved character archetype is precisely what it sounds like it is—a man among men, in control and in charge. But in the charming new romance Puppy Love, author Lucy Gilmore deconstructs the archetype almost immediately, starting when her intimidating, taciturn firefighter Harrison Parks is given his new diabetic service dog: a tiny, adorable Pomeranian named Bubbles. Gilmore explains how she found the gooey center of her supposedly tough-guy hero.

In romance novels, the alpha male is king. Literally.

Granted, there aren’t too many novels out there that deal directly with the royal succession, but alpha heroes have always been and always will be the leaders of their particular fields. They’re top lawyers and powerful CEOs. They run motorcycle gangs and head up mafias. They’re the warriors who win the most battles and the shapeshifters who lead the pack.

There’s a lot to be said in favor of this type of hero. A man who takes command—in his profession, in his personal life and, yes, in the bedroom—appeals to the modern reader on many levels. Others have delved into the study of this far better and more thoroughly than I can, but suffice it to say that there’s a reason why we turn, time and time again, to the Lothaires and lotharios of the world.

In Puppy Love, Harrison Parks fits almost all the characteristics of the alpha male hero. He’s excellent at his job as a wildland firefighter, where he leads teams of people and puts himself at extreme risk to save lives. He’s uncompromising when it comes to his personal life, particularly regarding who he allows to be a part of it. And in the opening scene, he’s standing in the middle of a dog kennel, determined to go home with the biggest, baddest Great Dane puppy he can find.

That’s where all resemblances to the traditional alpha male end. One of my favorite things as an author is to take a beloved romance stereotype and give it a twist. It would have been very easy for Harrison to do all those things that the setup warrants: to demonstrate his intelligence and bravery in the field, to participate in a social life where he’s in control and to adopt a 150-pound canine companion. However, none of this happens in the book. In fact, he’s faced with the exact opposite. He’s forced to take a sabbatical from work until he gets a diabetic service dog. He’s overwhelmingly out of his depth when it comes to both romantic and familial relationships. And instead of the Great Dane of his dreams, he’s given a tiny, skittish Pomeranian puppy named Bubbles. (Who, by the way, he’s terrified of accidentally squishing.)

This is the kind of book I love to write. I took a traditional alpha hero and stripped him of all the things that make him top dog. The result is a soft, gooey mess of a man who has no idea what he’s doing—but whose innate drive and strength of character make him determined to figure it out.

To be fair, Harrison didn’t start out like this. The writing process for this series has very much been a collaborative one with my editors at Sourcebooks. (In fact, they chose the puppy for this book long before I started writing it.) I’ve been really fortunate in working with a team who understands what I’m trying to do with this series.

In the case of Puppy Love, the goal was simple: to create a hero who looks like an alpha and talks like an alpha—but who, deep down, is just a tiny and skittish puppy in need of a good home.

The two authors behind the pen name Liza Kendall have been friends for years. But writing a book together is a wholly different endeavor. In this piece, the two women behind Liza Kendall share how they teamed up to write their first romance together, Walk Me Home.

How did two veteran authors used to controlling their own fictional worlds end up writing together?

We had been friends for years and used to go on dog-sitting and writing retreats together, especially since we discovered that we actually wrote—instead of talking, watching movies, shopping or getting up to no good.

Kendall had taken a break from the crazy business of publishing, but was working on a few ideas of her own when she happened to be on a trip to San Francisco, where Liza used to live. Comically, we almost managed to meet in the airport as Kendall was leaving and Liza was returning. The result was a phone call.

Liza had come up with the idea for Silverlake Ranch and the five Braddock siblings. Kendall loved the idea, so we started brainstorming the plots of the first couple of books and developing the characters. We both got excited, and decided to form a partnership so that we could produce the stories more quickly and have fun while doing so.

Then came the first hurdle.

Liza yelled, “Let’s start writing!”

Kendall said, “Not without ten plot points in a three-act structure.”

Liza said, “But you’re supposed to be the wacky creative who studied art. Not an anal-retentive structure nut!”

Kendall said, “Yeah, but I have to rein in my free spirit or it runs around with its hair on fire, doing whatever it wants.”

Liza said, “Okaaay. But why 10 plot points?”

Kendall said, “Dunno. I guess we could have either nine or 12.”

Liza: “But not 11?”

Kendall: “No. Definitely not 11.”

Then came the second hurdle.

For efficiency’s sake, we write in Google Docs, so that we can each see the ongoing draft of the book. At first it was very intimidating to expose our raw work processes to each other. It’s sort of like running around in your underwear with your hair uncombed and only one sock on. But eventually it became amusing to see each other’s cursors on the same page.

Kendall: “Hey, Liza! Had a lot of coffee this morning, huh?”

Liza: “Yeah . . . why?”

Kendall: “Your pink cursor is skipping around like a kid at a birthday party.”

Liza: “Yours is sitting in front of the word ‘the’ as if it’s in jail.”

Kendall: “Yeah. I’m searching my neural networks for a noun.”

Liza: “Good luck with that.”

Then came the third hurdle.

Liza (the one with the business background) paradoxically writes like a free spirit, hopping around in the book, depending on which scene she feels like working on. Kendall (the one with the art background) writes like a buttoned-down business person: chronologically, line editing as she goes. Both were taken aback at the other’s work process. Interesting conversations ensued.

Liza: “Dude, why do you bother line editing before the final draft?”

Kendall: “Because I’m a professor’s kid. The grammar goblins will get me if I don’t. The typo trolls will eat me alive. The comma kamikazes will blow me up.”

Liza: “You realize how demented you sound, right?”

Kendall: “Yes. That doesn’t bother me.”

It can be a little dicey at times as we dance through each other’s scenes to edit and improve them, but we sit on our egos and it usually works out well. Fortunately, any issues that ensue are usually resolved by an official Author Therapy Phone Call. During an ATPC, both Liza and Kendall talk through any writing, plot or characterization problems, air any friendly grievances and sometimes simply agree to disagree and let our editor make a call.

We made a serious pact before starting to write together: The friendship is more important than the business arrangement. We still feel that way . . . and after writing three books so far, we are still fast friends.

We’ve each learned quite a bit from the other. Liza approaches a book with more of a director’s eye and a wide-angle lens. She enjoys building strong emotional arcs and delving into emotional nuance for both individual books and the series as a whole. She also loves writing family and ensemble scenes. Her process is to put the “bones” of a scene on the page and then keep building it.

Kendall has more of an interest in deep psychology and characterization. She’s a more formal writer and approaches a novel intending to explore what exactly makes each character “tick,” what his/her wounds are and how to heal them. Often, she focuses more on the romance than the family. Her process is to dive deep into a scene and produce it more or less completely all at once.

Both of us love humor, banter and dialogue. We’ve enjoyed creating our small town of Silverlake, its unique businesses and the friends who make it home. We can’t wait to introduce readers to the Braddock siblings and their complicated, colorful worlds. Welcome to Silverlake Ranch!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Walk Me Home.

Sonali Dev’s Recipe for Persuasion updates Jane Austen’s beloved final novel, Persuasion, to the present day, setting the classic second-chance romance amid the high-pressure world San Francisco food scene. Fans of Persuasion almost universally agree that a certain letter by main character Captain Wentworth is among the high points of the novel (if not of Jane Austen’s entire body of work). In this essay, Dev explores how the famous letter gave her hope as a young girl, helping her believe in the power of second chances.

You know that moment when you read something and you know your life is never going to be the same again? Well, imagine a 13-year-old girl reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion and encountering Captain Wentworth’s letter. I’m not sure if I grasped then the full impact it would have on me, but I remember losing sleep, I remember feeling restless, I remember being altered. The way sci-fi films show creatures mutating from one being to another with all the requisite agony. In retrospect, I was obviously experiencing my first book crush, but it was more than that. It was my adolescent self being given permission to believe that making mistakes was not absolute, that letting something you cherish slip from your hands didn’t mean that it was gone forever. The resulting relief and freedom were transformative.

It was my adolescent self being given permission to believe that making mistakes was not absolute, that letting something you cherish slip from your hands didn’t mean that it was gone forever. 

As a young girl growing up in India, I often had this sense that how I felt about things didn’t match the messages the world was giving me. So much of what I was being told came from a place of fear. Risk-aversion, it seemed, was the overriding principle of childrearing. Everything was a zero-sum game. If you didn’t do well at school, didn’t get into the right professional college at 18, then you’d never have another chance at a “valid” career. If you got yourself mixed up with “the wrong kind of boy,” your reputation would be unsalvageable and your marriageability permanently compromised. Essentially, you got one chance at a career and at marriage, and those were the two wheels upon which your life’s cart rolled. It wasn’t entirely unwise, and it was incredibly socially convenient. It was also stunningly restrictive and just plain untrue.

If I didn’t have Captain Wentworth’s letter, I might have found other ways to believe that hope doesn’t end no matter how big your mistakes. I might have found other sources that reinforced my natural faith in the fact that there’s always another shot if you have the courage to take it. Fortunately, I did have the letter, and it taught me that we humans are essentially a bumbling lot who need to make often arduous, misstep-ridden journeys to self-awareness, and that without self-awareness we may never be ready for happiness. It also spurred my lifelong obsession with stories that explore hope and second chances. I might have set out to write Recipe for Persuasion as an homage to Anne Elliot and Fredrick Wentworth’s second chance, but really, it ended up being my homage to that letter. The one Captain Wentworth writes to Anne at the very end, after they’ve both come face-to-face with the strength of their feelings but before they know how to cross the chasm their past has put between them. That letter is what gives them their second chance.

In Recipe for Persuasion, I wasn’t interested in replicating Anne and Wentworth’s journey by way of scenes and plot—Austen did a spectacular job of that already. What I was interested in was taking the raw regret and hope in that letter and exploring it in a contemporary story. I wanted to place Ashna and Rico at that point of youthful weakness where they made mistakes that cost them their happiness, because who hasn’t made mistakes that did that? More importantly, though, I wanted them to make the journey from there to a place of strength where those mistakes could no longer hold them back.

“I am half agony, half hope,” is generally acknowledged as the highlight of the letter, and those words are beautiful. Even more beautiful to me is the part where Wentworth finds the courage to yet again give in to the feelings that once took so much from him, and to own his mistake in running from them. “I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.” Without this self-awareness, there is no way to let go of the past. And letting go of the past and forgiving yourself for it is the only path to a second chance.

Growing up, when everything was telling me to be perfect from the get-go or lose, these were words that told me that courage, love and constancy won out over bad judgment and that there would always be another chance. Exploring that truth through Ashna and Rico’s story was something I had to do for the 13-year old girl who had felt such hope from reading that letter.

In Farrah Rochon’s new contemporary romance, The Boyfriend Project, three women find out via social media that they’ve all been dating the same man. And while Rochon’s book primarily follows one of them, Samiah, as her pact with the other women to not date for six months is challenged by her incredibly appealing co-worker, Daniel, it also celebrates the friendship between the three women as it blossoms into a powerful and positive bond. In this essay, Rochon explores fictional friendships between women and asks why they don’t play a more central role in romance novels today.

The Joy Luck Club. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The Outsiders.

Our collective bookshelves are filled with enduring stories that explore the beauty, refuge and even the heartbreak found in deep, meaningful friendships. These treasured tales remind us that sometimes our strongest ties go beyond blood relatives, and that these bonds can be for life. I can remember as a preteen envying the friendship between Kristy, Claudia, Stacey and the rest of the gang in The Babysitters Club. However, when my reading tastes eventually graduated to more mature books, it became harder to find stories that celebrated close friendships.

I didn’t realize just how much I craved such relationships in my fiction until I read Terry McMillan’s groundbreaking novel Waiting to Exhale. The breadth and richness of the close sisterhood in that book spoke to me on so many levels. Four black women sharing their successes, failures and everything in between was such a beautiful representation of the female relationships I’d witnessed in my own life and the lives of the women in my family. After nearly 30 years, McMillan’s remarkable story of black female friendships continues to reign as the ultimate “girlfriend” book, but thankfully, newcomer Sharina Harris is bringing that flavor to a new generation. Harris’ (Im)Perfectly Happy tells the story of four college friends navigating the joys and pitfalls of relationships, careers and family 10 years after their graduation.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Boyfriend Project.

The one genre where that bond between girlfriends seems to be lacking is the one that is closest to my heart: romance. Maybe because the genre relies so heavily on the romance between the lead protagonists, authors feel there isn’t enough space on the page to highlight anything more than the spunky best friend who lends sage advice. Don’t get me wrong, there are a number of romances that portray close female friendships. Ledi and Portia in Alyssa Cole’s Reluctant Royals series and Kristen and Sloan from Abby Jimenez’s connected stories The Friend Zone and The Happy Ever After Playlist showcase the type of friendships many of us seek in real life. Interestingly, when it comes to the romance genre, it seems more common to find stories based on male-centered friendships. Suzanne Brockmann’s trailblazing Navy SEALs, Kwana Jackson’s upcoming Men Who Knit series, and Lyssa Kay Adams’ Bromance Book Club series, which features an all-male romance reading book club, all rely on male friendships as their foundation.

When I first came up with the idea for The Boyfriend Project, I knew that I very much wanted it to remain a romance, but the instant friendship that develops between the three women readers meet in the novel’s opening scene was just as central to the story and, in my opinion, deserved equal time. Samiah, Taylor and London each find something that none of them realized they needed: strong friends they could lean on.

Basically, I took a page from my own life.

Back when the internet was still shiny and new, I happened upon a message board for fans of the legendary Judith McNaught. Brought together by a shared love of our favorite author, the friendships born in that little corner of the web have lasted 20 years. Those women changed the course of my life. I would not be a romance writer today without them championing my early writing attempts.

That’s what friendships can do—they can be life-changing. Those who have been blessed with lasting friendships understand the valuable role our they play in our lives. Our friends are the sounding boards, the cheerleaders, the shoulders we cry on. Friendships enrich our world. They deserve a place in our fiction, especially in the romances we read.

Author photo by Tamara Roybiskie.

Minnie Darke’s The Lost Love Song is a winsome and heartwarming love story that follows the brokenhearted Arie after his blazingly talented fiancée, Diana, passes away. A classical pianist, Diana composed a beautiful love song that, after her death, begins to make its way around the world and just might bring hope and light back to Arie’s life. We thought it only fitting to ask Darke which five songs she thinks are the most romantic she’s ever heard.

Can music make you fall in love? Capture the spirit of your own love story? Can it help you stay in love? These songs did the trick for me.

1. In my teens—"Raspberry Beret” by Prince
For me, this boppy tune from the purple pop star is permanently emblematic of my first love affair with a boy who had a car. I only have to hear the opening riff and all of a sudden it’s high summer. The windows are down, there are smudgy toe prints on the windscreen and sand on the red leather of the bench seats. Probably, I’m eating a rainbow Paddle Pop on the way home from the beach. I confess that at this time in my life, I even had a raspberry beret. And if it was warm, I wouldn’t wear much more.

2. In my 20s—"The Ship Song” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Oh, the sweet angst of being in one’s 20s, and in the turbid depths of a love affair with a tragic, emo art boy with big green eyes. The one I always knew wasn’t quite right for me but couldn’t resist even so. I sailed my ships around him, I burned my bridges down, and Nick Cave sang the soundtrack to the great and terrible pain of an on-again, off-again relationship.

3. In my 30s—"First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes
This song makes a cameo appearance in The Lost Love Song as the wedding song at Arie’s little sister’s nuptials. It wasn’t released at the time of my own wedding, which happened under a waterfall in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. But, if it had been, I’d definitely have chosen it as my own wedding song because it’s as simple, straightforward and beautiful as the moment in life when you commit yourself utterly to one person. I’m so glad I didn’t die before I met him.

4. In my 40s—"If I Ever Lose My Faith in You” by Sting
I came close to picking Shania Twain’s “You're Still the One” for my 40s, because—I confess—I do sing along to it super loud in the car when it comes on the radio. But the song that really pierces me to the core in this phase of my life is Sting’s “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You.” It’s a song about how true love holds steady, even when every other belief is crumbling, and despite the challenges of our complicated world (politicians who look like game show hosts, miracles of science that turn from blessings to curses). It’s a song that might sound disillusioned if you couldn’t hear the idealistic belief in love beating at its core.

5. In my future—"I Know You by Heart” by Eva Cassidy
Maybe nobody else is masochistic enough to work out in advance what song they would want to listen to if they lost the person they love. But I think I already know that if I’m ever in that situation, I’ll turn to this exquisite autumnal song by Eva Cassidy. I’ll walk with Eva’s soaring vocals down roads of orange and gold, remembering everything that I’ve come to know by heart.

In Anne of Manhattan, Brina Starler transforms the beloved children’s classic Anne of Green Gables into a modern, New York City-set rom-com. In this essay, Starler explores why Anne’s story means so much to so many people and why it’s just as fresh and inspiring today.

I think I was 12 the first time I read L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read it since. Like Anne, I’m an only child and spent many hours in my own head, ignoring the reality around me and spinning stories in my mind. I’d sit at the edge of the woods behind our backyard and build fairy houses out of twigs and moss, or use reams of paper to draw stories of magical elves having adventures and falling in love. Or I’d find a solitary place and hide there with a book for hours, instead of what I was supposed to be doing.

When I was introduced to the world of Green Gables, I felt like I’d found a “kindred spirit” in Anne, as she would say. Her propensity for building entire worlds out of pure imagination, her love for books, her inclination toward drama and her affection for interesting words felt very relatable. I immediately fell in love with her hilarious, unfiltered stream of consciousness and kind heart.

The first book in the original series may have been written in 1908, but the characters are still relevant today. Because of that, it was easy in many ways to transition them to modern-day New York City, even as I made changes to diversify the cast to fit a more realistic portrayal of what Anne’s social circle and family might look like now. Anne is still Anne (with an E, if you please), with her thirst for knowledge, fiery temper and competitive edge. Gilbert “Gil” Blythe is still pining after Anne while working hard to keep her on her toes. And Marilla will always be Marilla, trying, and failing, to hide her deep love and pride for Anne behind a gruff exterior. These are the characters who have endeared themselves to millions of readers across multiple generations. Anne of Green Gables has inspired hundreds of thousands of young people to read, write stories and chase their dreams, including myself.

Montgomery’s Anne Shirley taught me that I didn’t have to tuck away my imagination or make myself small in order to accomplish my goals. I wouldn’t be the writer, or person, I am today without her. I’m incredibly honored to have been given the opportunity to create a new adventure for Anne, and I hope you enjoy reading Anne of Manhattan as much as I loved writing it.

“Oh, it’s delightful to have ambitions. I’m so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them–that’s the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting.” —Anne of Green Gables