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What Do Romance Writers Think About? (Brace Yourself)

Hi, I’m Kay Freeman. Once upon a time, I was a tenured art professor—Kay A. Klotzbach, thank you very much—for twenty-five years. I earned actual money, won two Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation grants for my paintings, and was awarded a Princeton Mid-Career Fellowship for my teaching. I had a career. I wore real pants.

Then I became a romance novelist.

Now I write full-time. I left my publisher and went fully self-published. (That’s another story—don’t worry, I’ll tell you.) I don’t do TikTok. I deleted it. I hated it. What I do instead is write books, run this newsletter, and spend as little time on social media as I can get away with.

This is where you’ll follow me through the daily absurdity of writing romance: plotting disasters, characters who refuse to behave, editors who delight in finding my plot holes, and marketing plans I mostly invent as I go. There’s hair-pulling. There’s coffee. There’s wine. Sometimes I even get actual writing done.

You'll hear what it's really like to manage a mailing list, set up a reader magnet, wrangle a website, and plan a book tour without losing your grip on reality. And yes, there will be learning from my mistakes. Because I make a lot of them—and somehow, they keep turning into stories.

One of my short stories, Meeting, Matching, and Dating, was published by Meet-Cute Press, who called it “hilarious” and spot-on about the hellscape of modern dating. My debut romance novel was released by The Wild Rose Press. I was selected as a 2021 mentee for Romance Writers of America’s RAMP program. So yes, I’ve been around the block. Probably barefoot, dragging a laptop, muttering dialogue to myself.

I’ll also be bringing in guest romance authors to talk shop—how they write, why they write, what keeps them going, and what no one warns you about when you start publishing.

If you're a reader, writer, or just curious about what happens behind the scenes in the romance world, you're in the right place. It's messy. It's occasionally ridiculous. And yes, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

So subscribe. Follow the chaos. Laugh at my missteps. Learn what not to do. And above all, discover what romance writers really think about—besides coffee and deadlines.

To find out more about Kay, see LinkTree

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My interests are simple. Writing romance, Tequila, Blues music, alpha men, people who don't act their age (you know, mentally in our heads, we're age 17) and terrific stories, not boring ones. 

I will, of course, discuss books about writing that helped me, romance books and other fiction I love, and people and programs that have helped me along the way.

I'll be throwing a recipe up here occasionally because if I like to cook, my characters do, too. That's pretty much all I've got. I hope you'll join and be part of my community.

To learn more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.