Hate to throw a wrench in this, but I think her descriptions might be a bit outdated already.
I say to you as a romance writer that I won't go anywhere too awful. I promise to throw a little blurring gauze over anything that's disturbing. I won't kill anyone on screen, especially not someone you care about. If you cry, it's going to be because everything works out exactly right, because I'm taking you from the darkness of human experience into the redemption of love and trust after a terrible storm. I promise, as a romance writer, that the characters are going to largely be people of good character. If they've made mistakes, they're largely noble, or a really long time in the past and they've paid heavily.
Particularly where I've bolded. Sherry Thomas & Victoria Dahl have both made me cry lately - and not at the end, 'cause everything's so happy shiny. In the middle, 'cause bad things happen to good people, and it just wrecked me. That whole not-killing on camera? I think it's shot, though honestly I can't think of any examples right now.
In women's fiction, I make no such promises. Because I am the writer I am, I'm still going for the happy ending in some way or another. Because my own idea of a great guy to fall in love with is somebody big and strong and sexy, my heroes aren't going to be a lot different-though their issues might be. Instead of giving up drink five years before the novel opens, he might still be drinking and making his way through those reasons in the present.
This one leapt out at me in particular - Eloisa James featured an alcoholic Duke in her second series. (Or I think it was the second - his name was Rafe.) The heroine in my CP's December release starts out the book as an opium addict, and I'm damn proud of my CP and her writing.
The second paragraph of each description feels more accurate to me. But on the other hand, I think this is one of those things where broader strokes are better.
Just....don't take the article as a hard and fast rule, yeah? The "definition" of women's fic seems to vary with each person you speak with. So if I had a WF piece I were shopping, I'd dig very carefully to figure out what my goal person (be it agent or editor) said as *their* definition.
To be honest, I kinda screwed this pooch on my first agent hunt - found a definition of WF that included romance and queried a WHOLE bunch of agents that I shouldn't have.
