This summer I took an excellent class through Hugo House called The Art of Romance Writing with Lish McBride and Olivia Waite. It was delightful! For six weeks, fifteen of us zoomed in for a conversation with Lish and Olivia about a different aspect of writing compelling romantic stories, from building enticing characters to writing action (i.e. kissing) scenes and more. Because I’m attempting a romantic plot in my latest writing project, this was a fantastic way to up my game.

We studied lots of texts (my TBR pile has grown exponentially) and not only the Fabio-on-the-cover type of romance, but paranormal, suspense, historical, sci-fi, horror, and more. All genders and combinations of lovers were represented in our discussions as well as in the chapters we shared with one another for critiques. I’m hopeful to keep in touch with my classmates not only because I enjoyed our discussions but to find out what happens in their books!

I’m still making my way through the more romantic books in my reading list–stay tuned for a roundup–but I thought it might be fun to review the most recent books by Lish and Olivia so you can check out their awesomeness for yourself. And if you ever have an opportunity to take a class with them, go for it.

Lish McBride and I graduated from the same MFA program at the same time, though in different genres (she was fiction, I was poetry). But we got to know each other’s work a little bit, and I’ve been a big fan of hers ever since (here’s my review of Firebug, and here’s one of A Little Too Familiar.) Her latest is a YA horror/mystery/slasher with a bit of romance and lots of heart, and if you’re reading this before 9/20/26, you can grab a copy on sale right now.

Rick and Martina are best friends, social outsiders, and notorious pranksters, so when yearbooks come out and almost everybody in the senior class gets a grisly prediction–Most Likely to Choke on Her Words, Homecoming’s Cutest Corpses–everyone blames them. Then, when the body of a guidance counselor is found in the lake (Most Likely to Sleep with the Fishes), the accusations become much more serious. Now they have to do their homework, deal with their tumultuous families, and figure out who’s picking off the senior class before they’re next.

Lish balances Rick and Martina’s personal lives and individual romances with page-turning suspense and funny-gross murders that those of us who love ’80s horror expect. Though she’s playing with slasher tropes, Lish avoids treating her killer’s victims as disposable by putting us in their head spaces when the killer comes for them. That technique ratchets up suspense while giving us a glimpse into each person’s life, making us care about them for a moment–even the obnoxious ones. As the body count rises, so does the number of suspects and motives until the big exciting final-girl-esque conclusion and reveal. I’ll warn you right now: set aside plenty of time to get through the last third of the book without interruptions because you won’t want to put it down (or in my case, go to bed) until you find out who makes it out alive.

I hadn’t met Olivia Waite before this class, but I’ve enjoyed her romance fiction column in the New York Times Book Review and both of her Dorothy Gentleman sci-fi mystery books. You don’t need to read Murder by Memory first in order to enjoy Nobody’s Baby, but if you like quirky, thoughtful cozy mysteries with a sci-fi twist, I recommend you do!

Aboard the HMS Fairweather, an interstellar planetary liner on a very long trip to repopulate a faraway planet, ship’s detective Dorothy Gentleman is called in to solve the mystery of a random baby who has appeared on her nephew’s doorstep. Babies are not supposed to be possible on the ship, which isn’t equipped to handle population growth, but someone has broken a whole bunch of rules to create, and then abandon, a newborn. While Dorothy’s nephew and his partner navigate diapers and bottles, Dorothy’s colleague wants to classify the baby as something a stowaway without rights to “refresh” its body with the onboard memory-bank and body clone. In a way, it would be doomed to die, unlike everyone else on the ship. So Dorothy is under pressure to figure out who did what with whom and why and argue why the child should be an exception to the ship’s rules.

Through a twisty series of interviews and deduction, Dorothy figures out the baby’s parentage, but the question remains whether her nephew and his partner will be allowed to keep the child they are learning to love. Dorothy also has a sapphic love interest who keeps her a little distracted, but not enough to prevent her from presenting her case to the Fairweather Board like in a crime procedural. The overall vibe is snappy and fun like a 1940s comedy-mystery like His Girl Friday but in space with queer characters and interesting questions about what it means to be a person if you can recreate yourself whenever you want. The pages turn fast, and its novella length ends all too soon, but I’m happy to see another volume of Dorothy’s adventures on the horizon. Can’t wait.