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I loved The Princess Bride.
Another one of my all-time favorites is The Last of the Mohicans.

Others I've really enjoyed:

Sleepless in Seattle
Hitch
Silver Linings Playbook
Dirty Dancing (the original)
When Harry Met Sally
Once
Howl's Moving Castle
Several musicals, including West Side Story, Grease, The Sound of Music, Singing in the Rain
Wall-E (We can include robot romance, right?)

I belong to both the Premium group & some of the free groups. As far as I can tell, posting to free groups does not affect the points earned by my reviewers. If I use points to post my chapters (e.g., through the Premium group), then reviewers will earn points to review those same chapters. For example, the medieval fantasy group is "free", but the authors I've reviewed that belong to that group all have points attached to their chapters.

However, if we make this a 'free' group we may get members who post chapters with no points attached. I started reviewing a new author in the Romance group who had no points attached to her chapters. But she was very good at reciprocating, which is really what matters for me. So I reviewed her chapters & she's been reviewing mine. Now she's earned enough points to start posting within the point system, which she does. That entire transition happened while the Romance group remained "free". 

Of course, I may be wrong about how all this works. Quite a bit of confusion has been generated by having a point and a no-point system. Maybe this is a question that needs to go to the Premium forum for clarification. I think I'll head over there & check out their thread on the point system.

I felt this way back when I published Eolyn; I wanted original artwork for my original stories. That's still, to an extent, my preference but I've come to recognize it's not necessarily a good marketing strategy. The number one job of a book cover is to grab the reader's attention.  Original artwork, tailored to the story, isn't always the best way to do that.

It's also true that no matter who the artist is, the cover art will always be a product of someone else's imagination. The scene portrayed in the cover of Eolyn never happens in the novel. The Naether Demon on the cover of HIGH MAGA looks nothing like I imagined it when I wrote the book. This wasn't  an issue for me, because as I've said, the number one job of a cover is to capture the reader's attention. I do think it's important for a cover to communicate the essence of the book, but it's unrealistic to expect any artist to produce cover art that reflects my vision and my vision only.

Maybe not unrealistic, but unfair, in my mind, to clip the artist's creative wings any more than we would want them to clip ours. It was really fun for me, for example, to see how Tom developed the idea of the Naether Demon through his own artistic expression, even if his Naether Demon looked nothing like the one I would have painted if I had the ability.

In terms of the classic artists, I take a special delight in finding classic art that fits any major theme of my work. Imagination, for me, is a shared endeavor; timeless and free of personal boundaries in a lot of ways. From my perspective, the fact that Edmund Blair Leighton hit upon a theme over a 100 years ago that connects to the mood of my 21st century fantasy novel is pretty darn cool.

Again, I'm still hoping for original cover art for Daughter of Aithne, but I'd have no problem using classic art if it (1) succeeded in catching the reader's attention, and (2) communicated a major theme of my work.

There's some great information in this thread. 

My case is a little different because my publisher chose the artists, although I was allowed to work closely with them in determining the cover art. The artwork for 'Eolyn' was done by Jesse Smolover; 'High Maga' (front and back) was done by Thomas Vandenberg. I was especially pleased with Tom's work and hope to snag him again for 'Daughter of Aithne'.

The cover for my Kindle short story 'Creatures of Light' features a painting by 17th century artist Claudio Lorraine. I think it's useful to trowel through the classic artists when considering your cover art. They may not have dragons or elves in their paintings, but often the themes and settings are period-appropriate for fantasy. They lend a very professional look to your cover. AND many of those works are public domain, so you can use them for free.

When I started posting 'Daughter of Aithne' for critique on tNBW, I put together a quick-and-dirty cover using the artwork of Edmund Blair Leighton ('The Accolade', 1901). This is a public domain work too, so while I intend this cover only for internal use on tNBW, it could probably be adapted for an ebook as well.

But, like I said, I'm hoping to snag Tom again for some original cover art when the time comes.

I'm working on Daughter of Aithne, which is the 3rd and final installment of a romantic fantasy series. I'm working toward a late 2015 release, but we'll see.  I'd appreciate any feedback you all have to give. If you haven't read the first 2 books, no problem; I'd like to see if this one can stand on its own.

Thanks, Sol. That's good to know. I will keep my fingers off that button, then.

And in that case, I second Norm's request for a little check box somewhere. Thanks so much for following up on this.

I've run into this problem too. I get notices for new reviews before they're actually done, and then if I open up an unfinished review, it disappears. I hope I did not erase my reviewers work by doing this! Until the bug is fixed, it occurs to me that it might help to avoid opening up a new in-line review until the closing comment is displayed - indicating the review is finished.

Hello PByrd - Just to answer your question, yes most of the edits I found were in the first part of the chapter. The only comment I had on the last part was the general one about the final dialogue between Jarad and Ethan; that it took a little more work than I like to put in as a reader to recognize who was saying what. I think you can fix this with simple dialogue tags (shy away from the choreography of what they are doing and just use he said/he said), and maybe developing subtle cues in the language of each character that will help the reader tell them apart.

Wow! It's getting warm in here.

I don't particularly like explicit sex scenes, but I do like stories that incorporate sex as an integral part of the human experience, and especially as part of amorous relationships.

When writing a sex scene, I tend to gloss over the details and focus on the emotional experience of the characters. I figure the reader's imagination can go places I might not, so I'm comfortable letting them fill in the blanks.

I guess I should add that I can't really have Ghemena do this alone, as it would violate the culture of the magas and strain (perhaps even violate) the limits of their magical system. Magas are social creatures; they run and work in packs whenever possible.

Hi Sol!

I don't seem to be able to send messages to my contacts.  When I click "send a message" I get a blue message window, but there is no place to write the message. If I click "send message" the window closes & nothing seems to happen.

I LOVE the in-line review feature, by the way. That is working for me without a hitch & makes the review process go much faster. Overall the new site has been a lot of fun.