Insomnia leads to rumination, so as I lay on the couch, my pondering of the thrill of instant gratification yielded to memories of other kinds of gratification. I believe it was Remembrance, by Jude Devereaux, that was my first hardcover purchase. (Can this be right?) It was 1994; I was fourteen years old and I had a bit of a cash flow problem, as fourteen year olds generally do, and I babysat with the specific intention of saving up for the momentous event of this book’s release. It seems to me, in my dim recollection, that this was the first book Devereaux had published in (what seemed to my fourteen year old self, at any rate) a very long time. I had planned ahead for it, carefully lining up income opportunities, and informing my parents, very seriously, that they would need to deliver me to the bookstore at 11AM (opening time) The Day Of. And because my parents are awesome, they did exactly that.

I walked out with that hardcover feeling so high, so triumphant, that I can still recall the walk with perfect clarity.

I had many such experiences in years following. Once I discovered AAR, their “Upcoming Releases” page became my first stop on the internet on those occasions when I mustered to the computer lab in my dorm to experiment with this thing called “The World Wide Web.” I had a little notebook in which I kept a list of books, sorted by date, that I needed to save for and buy. And oh, the anxiety of going into the bookstore, not knowing if the book would be there, if it had sold out already, if I was going to have to hop the subway (for I was in NYC by this time) to make the forty-five minute trek downtown when I had class in two and a half hours but who cares because I really *needed* this book, ASAP.

And then, the library visits! Seriously, I collected library memberships by the bushel. Oakland, Berkeley, West Contra Costa, Alameda and San Francisco: none of you were safe, in the summers. At my boarding school, I was the only student I knew with a membership to the town’s public library. At college, joining NYPL was my last stop of move-in day. In my head, I was an elite hunter, a sophisticated and merciless tracker of books; I entered these libraries like an assassin, intent on leaving no good book spared. I felt…ridiculously glamorous and self-important as I corralled the books that other library-goers had somehow, in their carelessness, missed or forgotten to check out. Again, my triumph, in exiting with a new release I’d had the unbelievable good luck to find on the shelf (no doubt two seconds after its return, or so I imagined) gave me the sort of giddy elation other people look for in shady drugs manufactured in basements.

For the most part, complaints about e-readers puzzle me. Don’t get me wrong: I understand the peculiar, sensual appeal of paper. I like to dog-ear and underline. Being brutal to my books was how I showed them love. As a kid I was so jealous of friends who loved their stuffed animals enough to wear away eyes and noses; I could never invest the time; feeling bad for my animals’ clear signs of neglect, I’d rub them over the gritty surface of the sidewalk to manufacture signs of wear and tear. But my books? Those required no extra treatment. Row upon row, shelf upon shelf, their spines were cracked, their pages bent, their covers creased, and I was proud of that. My friends whose books looked untouched roused my silent suspicion when they claimed to love to read.

In other words, I get the longing for paper. I understand intimately the pleasures of a physical interaction that registers one’s involvement with words.

But that alone is not enough to diminish my love of the miracle that is e-readers. Last summer, marooned at 12,000 feet above sea level, much nearer to the equator than my sunblock was apparently designed to handle, and much farther from English-language bookstores than I could like, I nevertheless read a book every thirty-six hours, thanks to the Sony Pocket Reader I’d stuffed to the gills before leaving home. To risk a really vulgar and possibly offensive analogy, for which I hope you’ll pardon me: my e-reader felt to me much as I imagine a stocked liquor cabinet feels to someone who’s developing a drinking problem: I felt safer, more comfortable, somehow *settled* in myself, knowing that I had a good supply of books to see me through my Peruvian summer. But I also felt anxious, uneasy, to know I had so many, many books available at the touch of a button. And in the course of the summer I came to understand this curious anxiety a little bit better, because I found that for me, e-reading is a very different game than reading in paper—and here is where my ambivalence about e-reading truly lies.

For a book addict, once the thrill of the hunt is removed, once the chase is no longer required, the experience of reading changes, somehow.

I find myself skipping from book to book like a madwoman.

I find myself ripping through the electronic pages at a pace that leaves me feeling at once glutted and vaguely nauseated.

I find my greed expanding exponentially, with no obstacles to regulate it.

And, of course, I find that I miss the signs and tokens—the bent pages, the cracked spine—that visually register the interior journey I took through a story.

My e-reader is my personal Xanax for travel: if I know I never will be without a book, I have no doubts about my journey. For the same reason, it also comforts me on sleepless nights. But I confess: I miss the chase. I miss the thrill of victory when books seemed objects that required careful planning, strategizing, and even a bit of luck to obtain. And I miss, above all, what I might call…the *friction* of paper books.

I mistrust myself with my e-reader. In its thrall, I’m becoming a different sort of reader. Sometimes, now, when I have a paper version in my hands, I forget to dog-ear.

This is useless romanticism. I’ll never give up my e-reader, and clinging to it does not mean that I must stop reading paper or that paper is dying. But such are the thoughts born of a sleepless night.

I’m happy to report that Book 1 & 2 of the new trilogy have both been delivered to my new editor at Berkley.  On time.  The books are not bad, by the standards of my first drafts.  But still, I’m already thinking of improvements, connections, and deeper layerings to add to them, when they come back from my editor.  Now onto the updates.

1) Three-Chapter Critique from Yours Truly

On the 13th of June my Crit for Water critique goes up for auction here.  If you need three chapters looked at, by all means bid.  It’s an excellent cause and I am a terrific critiquer.  (You didn’t expect me to say anything else on the eve of the auction, did you? )

And Mary Baader Kaley at Not an Editor was kind enough to interview me about my approach to critiquing.  But basically, I’m a good fit for you if you really need your work looked at by a pair of fresh eyes and you actually want to know what’s not working.  I will tell you what’s working for me too, but I assume that you, like me, are more interested in what can be improved than what cannot be.

2) Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Face

I participated in a multi-author fun vid a while ago.  And here’s the result of it.

Each author does her own recording.  I recorded myself with the Photo Booth app on my MacBook–and immediately realized what TV/movie folks are constantly talking about lighting and makeup.  My first go around I looked a combination of malnourished and zombielike.  So I threw on everything in my make-up bag–very liberally, since we are not dealing with high-def cameras here–and then pushed a really strong lamp right into my face.  You see me sitting on a couch, what you don’t see–and which made Sr. Kidlet lose his @#$% laughing–was all the chairs and stools and everything that held my laptop and my lighting at the correct height and angles!

So this time I looked alive and well-fed, but because I almost never, ever see myself in motion, I realized, for the first time in my life, after watching the footage, that I have a come-hither face.  What to do?

I recorded for a third time, this time with my dress on backward.  Yep, that’s what you see in the video, that very prim neckline, that’s actually the back of my house dress.  The front is not exactly plunging, but I figured, if I already have a come-hither face, then I’d best keep everything else covered.  :-)

3) Now For Something Slightly More Intellectual

I had the great pleasure to be interviewed by Ms. Courtney Verronneau, a sociology student at the University of Oregon, for her final thesis on gender relations in romance novels.  She asked some wonderfully thought-provoking questions, which required me to actually organize my thoughts.  I post the interview here with her permission.

1. Together with her profession, her more collected and self-assured personality, and her quiet confidence, Bryony is quite different from other heroines in romance novels.  Why did you decide to create her character and how would you compare her to other heroines in yours and other authors books?

The origin of NOT QUITE A HUSBAND lies in the 2006 film adaptation of THE PAINTED VEIL.  I’d never read the original book, so I went into the movie not knowing the story.  When I came out, I felt I’d been hit by a truck.  <BEGINNING SPOILER>  I couldn’t believe the hero died!  </END SPOILER>  It was gut-wrenching.

Almost immediately I know I’d have to write a similar story of reconciliation, but give the leads the happy ending they deserve, rather than only a fleeting happy moment.  But I never want to just rewrite another story; it has to be different enough.  And one of the easiest things to do in terms of finding new angles to approach a story is to flip the genders.

In THE PAINTED VEIL, the hero is a bacteriologist, serious and bookish.  So in my book, Bryony is a physician, serious and if not bookish, rather unapproachable.

I’ve heard a saying that in movies, if you want to have a memorable female lead, write the part for a man then find a woman to play it.  And ALIEN, with Sigourney Weaver, is often given as an example, a part originally written for a man.  By this, I interpret the meaning not as men are more memorable than women, but that Hollywood is such a male-driven, male-dominated industry that roles for women are often relegated to those of girlfriends and mothers etc., and that a full-fledged female character, who is not a supporting character in someone else’s story, but a hero of her own, is awfully hard to come by.  (We are excluding rom coms here, of course.)

So if Bryony is different from other characters, both my own and many other romance heroines, that maybe part of it.  That she had her origin in a male character and does not possess any desire to please–one of the most prominent feminine characteristics in fiction and possibly in life.  That she will thoroughly cut someone out of her life if s/he has disappointed her.  That she finds it so difficult, if not impossible, to forgive any transgressions.

2.  A common theme I have run into in romance novels is the heroine loving the hero since childhood and the hero finally returning her love in adulthood.  But “Not Quite A husband” reversed these roles, having the heroine be the focus of the hero’s admiration since he was a small boy.  Furthermore, Leo is not portrayed as stereotypical or hyper-masculine: in the story we read of his physical distress, gauntness, and exhaustion after traveling and malaria, and find him dependent on Bryony during his sickness and the uprising in Chakdarra. What about Leo to you makes him stand out from other romantic heros and how, if at all, does he contribute to a new definition of masculinity?

I have always felt hyper-masculinity to be strange.  I wonder if its recent resurgence–or perhaps it never went anywhere, since we did have a whole lot of it in the Old Skool romances–is a subconscious reaction to the man-children we see so often in popular culture.  I mean, look at the comedies of the past decade, they are all about immature men who are forty-year-old adolescents.  But hyper-masculinity, if you to mean mad-alphaness, my-way-or-the-highway-ness, is as cartoonish and repellent as 40yo adolescents.  And if your definition of hyper-masculinity is physical, like the Black Dagger Brotherhood heroes who are of a jaw-dropping size and have shoes bigger than my garbage can, ur, I guess they are just unrealistic in a historical era.  Plus, all men get sick, at some point, don’t they?  :-)

As for Leo, he has that one thing I feel that separates real men both from adolescents and from cave men alphas: he is secure in himself.  And because he is, he does not need to force his will on anyone else.  And because he is, he learns from his mistakes–once he sees those mistakes.  He does not get defensive or angry when it is pointed out that he’d done something wrong; instead, he repents and makes amends.

So it is a character issue, masculinity, and not so much physicality or mannerism.

(BTW, I hold my heroines to the exact same standard.  They have to eat crow if they did something wrong and show changes in behavior before I deem them to be again trustworthy.  Some readers have felt that Camden in my book PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS is an unforgiving bastard.  But the issue for me has always been, has Gigi realized yet she did something fundamentally wrong, or is she still only sorry that she got caught and lost him?)

3. On page 118 of the book, when Leo is reflecting on their failed marriage he thinks to himself that he believed he could break through “The Castle” by making love to Bryony, but that “instead she banished him altogether. They grew further and further apart. And their marriage dissolved like a pearl in vinegar.”  At face value it seems that their marriage fell apart because they weren’t having sex.  Do you believe this was the main reason the marriage didn’t work, or was is it a side effect of a larger issue?

It is very much not the cause, but the effect of the secret that was eating away at their marriage from inside out.  They had plenty of good sex–lol, with her dreaming through part of it–so it’s not an issue of frigidity, but an issue of trust.  She could not trust him.  She could not forgive him.  She could not stand him, in a way, even as she desperately wanted him and desperately wanted everything to be right again.

4. Many feminists like Andrew Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon view sex as the ultimate form of male domination over women, while feminist Camille Paglia argues that female sexuality as the source of our power. How much do the themes of domination and power affect sex? Do you think Bryony’s sexuality makes her powerful?  And do you believe there is more to self-empowerment then just female sexuality, if so, what about Bryony and other romance novel heroines makes them powerful?

Um, whatever happened to sex just being mutually enjoyable?  :-)

I definitely think of the entire female reproductive system as an asset, both because men can’t get enough of it and because it is just biologically useful.  Where else are you going to turn if you want a baby?  If not your own womb, then someone else’s.  :-)  But all this talk about empowerment via sexuality, I’m not sure how to interpret it.

Chairman Mao had a saying, “Political power comes from economic power.”  Which is quite astute, if you think about it.  I think, in observing the world, I can say sexual power comes from economic/political power.  Certainly women find rich/powerful men more attractive because of it.  And throughout most of history, those women who practiced their sexual powers most assiduously were often not after sex, but economic/political power.

While I am a flinty-eyed realist, I very much believe that sexual power is not a long-lived power.  Because  sexual power is dependent upon infatuation, and infatuation is a short-lived state.  Which is fine is you are just using a man as a stepping stone to a man even higher up the foodchain.  For there to be a happy long-term relationship, there has to be more substance.

Bryony has that substance–even though she is emotionally stunted, in a way, she brings to the table a great competence. She makes a difference in people’s lives.  She is admirable.

And what makes her powerful in this book is that she is not willing to sweep Leo’s sins under the rug.  That if he wants her love–and access to her body–he has to earn it.  That she values herself too much to be  swayed by just good sex.

(Sorry for the rambling answer.  The question is so big!)

5. Do you think your characters Leo and Bryony challenge traditional gender roles? Why or why not? How do they challenge these roles both inside and outside the relationship?

They do challenge traditional gender roles, if we see traditional gender roles as the female as the nurturer and breeder.  Leo is definitely the nurturer.  And Bryony is no breeder.  :-)

But then traditional gender roles are so limiting, aren’t they?  Life is much more nuanced and complex.  My heroes, who are very secure in their mindset, do not find women with achievements of their own threatening.  They admire these achievements.  They think of their women as individuals, and not just as walking vaginas/ovaries.  This may make them unusual, but such men have existed all throughout history and hopefully today more than ever.

And my heroines are unapologetic about interests they have outside the hearth and the home.  Certainly there were many such women by the end of the 19th century and I’d like to think countless today.  By this I do not mean they repudiate hearth and home–Lord knows I love mine–but just that they are very comfortable with the idea that is not where their identity begins and ends.

And Leo, if you look at him, is very much a man’s man.  He is comfortable taking charge.  He is just as comfortable yielding the control of the situation to someone who knows better–he is not about to stitch his own wound when Bryony can do it so much better.  And yet she cannot persuade him to deviate from a course he believes to be right, i.e., taking part in the defense of the fort at Chakdarra, despite the danger and his injuries.

Never let it be said we don’t live up to our intellectual potential on this blog.  (Actually it could be said, but lol, maybe not today.)

It is inevitable that your H/H think about each other.  And they should.  But remember, do not duplicate real life here and write long scenes where nothing goes on except somebody reliving events that had already taken place.  We know what happened already. Move on to the next set of events.

But what about the non-POV character, you ask?  We need to know what the non-POV character’s reaction was to the kiss/screw/crisis.

It’s okay.  Move on with the story, have the hero and the heroine do what they need to do, and then to have them think what happened or think of each other only when triggered.

This does two things.  One, it improves the pacing of your story, always moving it forward.  And remember, pacing matters to chemistry.

Two, it actually heightens the tension.

Remember, we readers of romance read a romance for the relationship.  We are already, a priori, interested in what the hero and the heroine think of each other.  By getting on with the story, by withholding revealing what they think of a kiss, a screw, or each other, you are building that tension.

And when the reveal comes, it is more powerful for having been delayed.  And it is even more powerful for having been triggered.  By this I mean, because your hero and heroine are in conflict, they, or at least one of them, do not want this relationship to go in the direction it is inexorably headed.  They do not want to think about the kiss or the screw or the whatever that happened between them.  They just want to get on with their lives.

And by limiting the amount of verbiage you spend on them thinking about each other, by conveying the fact that they only think of each other when they must, and yet they are still thinking about each other all too much for their comfort, you are heightening the chemistry, you are doing the conflict a service, and you do not waste any forward momentum on just mere thoughts.

[Of course your characters can and should reflect on dramatic events.  The point is to do so judiciously.  It is rare that a book is criticized for the H/H never thinking of each other; but too often romances suffer because there is too much thinking going on.]

The example is from Laura Kinsale’s The Shadow and the Star.  We are almost halfway into the book.   There had been flashback scenes from his childhood and adolescence before, but this is the first time we get adult Samuel’s POV, the first time we know what he thinks of Leda–or how he tries not to think of her.

It would not have been so difficult, except for the distraction, the fate that had taken all the floating, chaotic energy of shikijo and fused it on her.  Samuel thought of her with her white shift pulled over her bare legs, drinking tea and arching her feet in a delicate motion like a dancer; he thought of her head bowed, all that shining hair, her hand poised over her notebook and the soft skin of her nape above the demure turned-down collar.  He could not keep his center; he kept falling from the way, losing zanshin, the vigilant unattached mind, and with it years of exercise and discipline.

To combat it, he spent long night hours sitting silently, trying not to want, attempting to shed all conscious desire, and still she crept into his mind like a slow heat.  He sat peacefully, facing a wall, thinking of nothing, and out of nothing the essence of her formed, the image of her brushing out her hair over naked shoulders, the curve of her back, the white roundness of her hips as she bent to step into her skirts.

Perfect.

And I do apologize.  I completely forgot that I hadn’t quite finished the series yet.  But we are almost there. 

Do your H/H affect each other’s growth?

Character growth can come from many different places.  But since we write romance, presumably our readers are most interested in growth that come from the events, realizations, epiphanies, and choices that originate from the core romantic relationship.

Pride and Prejudice–and I will totally challenge to a duel anyone who says P&P is not a romance—is beloved for precisely this reason.  [Well, and beautiful Pemberley too, but I will try to keep my shallowness in check here. ]

Read what Mr. Darcy says to Lizzie at the end of the book:

“Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: ‘had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.’ Those were your words. You know not, you can scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me.”

….

“My object then was to show you, by every civility in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to.

In more modern parlance, Mr. Darcy basically said, “Honey, you were so right.  About everything!  And I’ve changed because I recognized just how doggone right you were.”

Swoon!

Long live Mr. Darcy.

Armstrong had been hurting for a while, his body issuing miscellaneous warning signs.  But like most young men, and I would imagine, especially like most young athletes in superb conditioning trained to withstand tremendous amount of pain and discomfort in the pursuit of glory, he ignored his symptoms.  And ignored them.  And ignored them.

Until one day he threw up a sinkful of blood.

If you are sufficiently plugged into the romance world, you already know that it’s been an eye-popping, jaw-dropping couple of days.  Harlequin’s announcement of the self-publishing (or is it vanity publishing) venture it has branded, the riveting threads at Dear Author and Smart Bitches, and RWA’s swift and dramatic rescission of Harlequin’s status as a RWA-recognized publisher this evening.

In a way, you can say that I have no dog in this fight.  Harlequin is not my publisher.  My personal eligibility status at RWA will not change.  And as I am so freaking slow writing for even one publisher, I really have not been eyeing anyone else in the business for potential contracts.

And yet I found myself on the phone this evening–a rare thing as I’m almost never on the phone–groaning together with my friend, who does write for Harlequin, among other publishers.  Her inbox has been inundated with hundreds of emails from the Harlequin author loops to which she belongs–and she gets her mail in digest form.

Afterwards I tried to explain the whole thing to His Hawtness, not just the facts of it, but why I was on the phone groaning.  And it was difficult.  The spouse is a very logical man.  He asked a series of very reasonable questions.  If there are already other vanity publishers, how does it make any difference that now there is another one?  If Harlequin Horizons tells people that they are paying for only possibilities, not concrete promised results, how does that hurt its current authors?  And how does anyone even know whether the venture would be a success, since the rates listed on the Harlequin Horizons website are, if not exorbitant, at least quite outside industry norms?

HIs Hawtness is not the only one asking such questions.  Jane of Dear Author, I believe, is also trying to nail down the exact source of the outpouring of discontent.  These two people have never clapped eyes on each other, but they have something in common: They have both long been aware of the decline and oncoming death of publishing as we currently know it.

We do too, we authors.  We see the unsustainable business model, the erosion of profits, and the stagnation of reading as a form of entertainment.  We prepare ourselves mentally for what news might come.  But we, in a sense, are Lance Armstrong: We are still ignoring the symptoms as much as we can.

Harlequin Horizon is that sinkful of blood that can no longer be ignored.  For me, it’s unease turning into anxiety.  For many other authors, I imagine it’s anxiety turning into near-panic.  How bad are things if Harlequin Enterprises, much envied and admired for its nimbleness, market penetration, and profitablity, not only turns to vanity publishing, but puts its vaunted brand name on the venture?

I understand business cycles.  I understand the changes often happen in bursts.  I even understand that Harlequin might NOT be pressured by its struggling parent company to produce maximum cash to help the entire conglomerate’s bottom line, but simply decided on its own to respond to a changing environment by trying something unprecedented.  But that does not alter the fact that the formation of Harlequin Horizons and the subsequent reactions to it together comprise the most visceral signal I have encountered thus far on just what kind of convulsive, likely cataclysmic changes there will be.

Let me make myself clear.  I am not saying that Harlequin Horizons will bring down publishing–far from it.  Publishing is already going down.  If publishing is the Titanic, then the current brouhaha surrounding HH is not the iceberg–not at all–but the scraping sound and the jolt that alert the passengers after the fact that something has gone awry.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know what happened.  Pandemonium.  First-class passengers got on the lifeboats while steerage passengers drowned.  And a lot of us authors, not to put too fine a point on it, are steerage passengers on the good ship Titanic.  What is going to happen to us now?

To me, that, more than anything else specifically about Harlequin Horizons as a venture, is the reason for the hundreds of email digests my friend is receiving from her fellow Harlequin authors.  It is the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.  It capstones all the worries and jitters that those of us who still have contracts have been experiencing–and fighting.

Of course, there is still hope.  To go back to the example at the beginning of this post, Lance Armstrong not only survived cancer, he went on to an astonishing athletic career, achieving more than he ever did before.  Who knows, maybe there will be a renaissance of reading.  Maybe the business will finally arrive at a sustainable, responsible, and profitable model.  Maybe we will in the end have less number of books published overall, but a far greater number of outstanding books.

But in the meanwhile, between that sinkful of blood and eventual glory, there were some awfully rough times for Armstrong.  And there will be in this industry for us.  No doubt about it now.

ETA: This post is very much influenced by Lynne Connolly’s post at The Good, The Bad, and The Unread, which I read last week.

Especially when the hero/heroine is viewed through the eyes of the other.

1. This is a very legitimate way to build physical awareness.  Because as one character is taking in the other physically and processing that information, they are, by the very nature of that act, becoming increasingly physically aware of that person.
2. We are full of minor, interesting imperfections that if we observe about ourselves, would make us come across as either anal or appearance obsessed.  By having another character do it, particularly if it is a little detail that might not even get noticed by someone paying less attention, underscores that person’s physic al interest in us.
3. By what he or she notices, you are revealing things about the POV character.
4. By what he or she thinks as he or she observes the other character, you are revealing even more about the POV character.

And here is a massterful example from Meredith Duran, excerpted from Bound by Your Touch:

“You think a great deal of your intelligence.”

She pursed her lips.  The movement exposed a hint of dimple.  In conjunction with her starchy manner, it seemed wholly incongruous. A mere anatomical fluke, he told himself; just a trick of her tightened lips.  Nevertheless, he found himself staring at it, wondering what he might do to make it deepen.  Breathy gasps, flashing dimples: the idea came to him that Miss Boyce’s body liked to sabotage her.

“Of course I do.  I’m a woman.  If I don’t think highly of my intellect, who will?”

He wrested his eyes from the dimple.  Such a peculiar mix of affront and bravado. Her sisters were the acknowledged beauties, but Miss Boyce had her own charms—made particularly visible now, in the context of her improvisational honesty.  Her eyes were alert with intelligence.  The other night, he had looked into them and discovered they were heavy-lidded.  This gave her a perpetually sleepy appearance, so she looked always as if she had just risen from bed.  He smiled, suddenly won over.  She had risked her own comfort to come here.  Let her have her victory.  “Touché, darling.”

She did not like the endearment.  Her face, so bright when she defended her learning, went as dark as a shuttered window.  “But let me come to the point.  You must wonder why I’m here.”

“To beg forgiveness for your father’s foul deeds, I suppose.”

Her mouth tightened further.  Christ, but that dimple conspired against her.  It drew attention to her mouth, which was overly wide and completely unfashionable, and suggested prospects that were not appropriate to the moment.  Or, for that matter, precisely legal.

Amusement stirred in him.  Odd, unexpected, and undeniable: he was wholly attracted to her.  At some primal level, his body took note of hers.  The imperative it issued was blunt and unpolished: five thousand years ago, he would have dragged her off to a cave somewhere.  And no doubt Miss Boyce of the Stone Age, bereft of an education to sharpen her tongue, would have sharpened a rock instead, and neatly gutted him.

Now of course this is fair, as Meredith is probably the prose stylist among our generation of romance writers.  But this is a perfect example of how to deepen chemistry through what for another writer might be a throwawa bit of dialogue: the noticing and interpretation of quirks, the increasing physical attraction, the ironic self-awareness on the hero’s part.

Learn from the best, I say. 

A perfect example below, from the Loretta Chase classic Lord of Scoundrels:

“Perhaps I had better demonstrate how the thing operates,” said Dain, yanking her attention to him.

In his low voice, Jessica recognized the too innocent tones that inevitably preceded a male’s typically idiotic idea of a joke.  She could have explained that, not having been born yesterday, she knew very well how the timepiece operated.  But the glint in his black eyes told her he was mightily amused, and she didn’t want to spoil his fun.  Yet.

“How kind,” she murmured.

“When you turn this knob,” he said, demonstrating, “as you see, her skirts divide and there, between her legs, is a-” He pretended to look more closely.  “Good heavens, how shocking.  I do believe there’s a fellow kneeling there.”  He held the watch closer to her face.

“I’m not shortsighted, my lord,” she said, taking the watch from him.  “You are quite right.  It is a fellow-her lover apparently, for he seems to be performing a lover’s service for her.”

She opened her reticule, took out a small magnifying glass, and subjected the watch to very narrow study, all the while aware that she was undergoing a similar scrutiny.

“A bit of enamel has worn off the gentleman’s wig and there is a minute scratch on the left side of the lady’s skirt,” she said.  “Apart from that, I would say the watch is in excellent condition, considering its age,though I strongly doubt it will keep precise time.  It is not a Breguet, after all.”

She put away the magnifying glass and looked up to meet his heavy-lidded gaze.  “What do you think Champtois will ask for it?”

“You want to buy it, Miss Trent?” he asked.  “I strongly doubt your elders will approve of such a purchase.  Or have English notions of propriety undergone a revolution while I’ve been away?”

“Oh, it isn’t for me,” she said.  “It’s for my grandmother.”

She had to give him credit.  He never turned a hair.

“Ah, well, then,” he said.  “That’s different.”

See what I mean?  With her poise and her presence of mind, Jessica Trent forcibly strikes Lord Dain as an equal–or at least as someone he could not easily dismiss.  Tremendous chemistry in that book and little wonder.

Another excellent example would be the movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith–and if you haven’t seen it, please do so at your earliest convenience.  The whole of Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a metaphor for the modern marriage.  At the beginning of the movie the titular couple have fallen into a complete familiarity-breeds-contempt rut.  Then, as they discover each other’s secret identity, things heat up–they have to consider the person they thought they knew in a whole different light.  And during one of the movie’s pivotal scenes, when they are fighting mano-a-mano, that mutual respect is literally pounded, kicked, and whacked into them.  And the old fire roars back to life because there is now something much stronger to feed it.

What makes for good chemistry?  Great conflict.

What makes for great conflict?  As my critique partner Janine asks, what are the lies that your character tells himself to get through the day?  Who is the person who by the very fact of her existence, by everything she says and does, exposes your character’s lies to himself as just that, lies?

In other words, who is this person who would cause the greatest amount of emotional disturbance in your character?  Who is the person your character most fears for the truth she represent, and yet who cannot be dismissed, precisely because of the truth she represents?

Put these two people together and you have tension, conflict, and chemistry.

Example:

People could not keep their eyes off her.  Yes, she played it very well indeed, the role of the simple, serene martyr, giving up her life and all its brilliant promises to save her people from annihilation.

She basked in the attention.  And she broiled in it.  This had been the part of her Calling she loved the most–that was, before she came to hate the Calling itself.  She still got shivers from it, the way some people looked at her, in sincere, almost head-shaking admiration.

And then there would be others who watched her because she was the freak, a dead woman walking.

Ten days.  They were all that remained to her, before she marched into the maws of death.

If she marched into the maws of death.

“May I have this next dance?”

She turned around slowly.  There were exactly nineteen mobilecams bobbing in the air about her, several representing various media outlets from her home planet of Pax Cara, the rest bearing logos of the interstellar communication conglomerates that were on hand to cover the glamorous goings-on.

The mobilecams had been trained on her, as she gazed up at the dance sphere, her expression the tranquil wistfulness she’d long ago perfected for such occasions.  And she knew just what the voiceover would say too, above heroic music played at a muted volume: What is going through the mind of this young woman, knowing that the fate of her people rests on her shoulders, that her life will end before it has fully begun, and yet her name will live forever?

The man who asked for the next dance had just as many mobilecams hovering around him.  Eleian of Terra Illustrata, the most beloved prince in living memory, the one person she resolutely did not want to meet.

The heir of a non-ruling house, he’d come of age during a time of great instability for his thirty-system principality.  A decade-long civil war that had begun before he was born had produced a dictator who held power by brutal oppression.  After the dictator’s death, chaos threatened to reign once again.

With almost unbearable courage–for his life could have been forfeit at any point-the young prince had stepped in and stood up to those who sought power solely for their own gain.  Against all odds, he’d guided his people back to their nearly forgotten tradition of representative government.

“Your Highness,” she said, with a searing admiration.  And envy.  And a resentment that almost choked her.  His had been true valor, whereas hers was but the appearance of it.

And he’d survived.

“My lady,” he inclined his head.

She was a commoner.  But here the media had taken to call her a prince of her people, and styled her accordingly.

The mobilecams swarmed close, eager to capture the expression on her face.  What would they see?  She had not practiced for this, for dealing with this one man who reminded her with his very existence the fraud that she was-and the bigger fraud that she planned and prayed to be.

(This is from a SF romance novella that I’m working on, as part of the One Beginning anthology with Janine, Meredith, and Bettie Sharpe.)

He certainly disturbs her on a most profound level, doesn’t he, merely by breathing?  And I swear I didn’t alter it after hearing about Janine’s remarkable thesis on chemistry.  This was how I conceived it: the one who plans to run from her burdens vs the one who faced his head on.

Come to think of it.  It actually gets a little better.

“Then why?” she asked.  Why would anyone want to marry a woman who was about to die a very public death?

“The Quiet Girl,” he said.

The Quiet Girl was a documentary film about her, shot when she’d been seventeen.  It had been produced as summer project by a pair of student filmmakers and sent to a Sector-wide vis-media festival on a lark.  To the surprise of everyone involved the film had been selected for inclusion at the festival; to their further shock it had won the grand prize.

The film’s subsequent dissemination had garnered her a degree of interstellar fame that had been unheard of on Pax Cara.  She’d always turned down each and every request for her to go off-world: Modesty, or at least the appearance of it, was an important part of her persona.  But she had enjoyed it, the fame, and the adulation that came with it.

“What of The Quiet Girl?” She hoped he didn’t hear the tremor in her voice.

“I saw it when I was nineteen–and struggling with the course of my life.  I had my aerie in the mountains.  Our princely hold of Terra Luminare was at peace.  I needed not involve myself in distant political turmoils.  Moreover I was afraid: I’d had little dealing with the more uncouth elements in life.

“I was inclined toward cowardice until I watched your story.  Your determination and wisdom quite shamed me.  And you faced certain death, whereas I face only danger and the possibility of bodily harm.”

Stop, she wanted to say.  Stop.  That me no longer exists.

But she listened with a stark hunger.

“And whenever I thought my courage might fail me, I would watch it again.  I can recite word for word what you said near the end of the film: ‘I would have liked to live a thousand years, for life is such a remarkable and marvelous thing, is it not?  And yet I cannot say I regret being chosen for this task.  I live more incandescently for it.  And I am not afraid to die when I have lived so.’”

She’d watched The Quiet Girl not too long ago, hoping to find a renewal of courage in her unquestioning bravery of old.  Bu all she’d felt, as she watched herself give that little speech, had been a numb despair.

He brought them into a closer spin.  “It would be a privilege if you would accept my suit and allow me to share the rest of you days.”

The rest of her days.  All ten of them, unless she managed her escape.

I think Janine might say I did pretty well in setting up this conflict.    It’s not a particular original conflict, that of the erstwhile romantic ideal fallen from the pedestal.  But it is a good one.  Oh boy, is it a good one.

Rest assured that the rest of the examples I will use are not mine.  I wasn’t going to use any of mine at all.  But there I was, at the hotel in D.C., fretting over my workshop which wasn’t coming together, and boom comes Janine’s remarkable insight–related by Meredith, I must add.  And suddenly I said to myself, wait a minute, I have something exactly like that on my C drive.    And it went into my workshop.  The first part, that is.  I didn’t even think of how the second part works on the same principle until I was putting together this blog post.

Next one in the series in a couple of days.

And in the meanwhile, today I’m being interviewed at Romantic Crush Junkies.  Come say hi.

I shed my first tears within moments of the beginning, when the clockmaker’s backward-turning clock was revealed, and he spoke of how he wished that time could flow back and bring back all the young men (his own son included) who had perished in the Great War.

The tone of the movie was set. From then on, I was completely and rapturously enveloped in the gentle yet unsentimental journey of a man who ages backward. I’d read other aging backward stories, most notably in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, so I already know it is a peculiar genre that moves me. But still, I cried and cried at the end of the movie and then went home–it was like 2:30 am when I got back–and cried for another half hour. Because it touched me so. Because for me it spoke so eloquently of the fragility of life, the inexorability of death, and the gallantry of love, knowing in the end that it might not even be remembered or recognized.

But I seem to be in the minority in my uncritical love of this movie. When I’ve talked to people about it, they feel the movie was too long and rather boring at parts. My mom in particular, from whom I inherited my shallowness, complained at length that there wasn’t enough young Brad Pitt for eye candy.

Now, what else do I love uncritically?

Some of you might know that I had a lot of trouble with DELICIOUS, that I had to throw out the equivalent of two entire drafts before my editor accepted the third version. (I am, without a doubt, the best edited writer in all of romance–bar none.) When I received the first final copies of DELICIOUS hot off the press, I sat down and read it through–for probably the very first time, since before that I always had to make changes. My verdict? “Powerful but imperfect,” as I wrote in an email to my editor, vowing to keep the powerful but get rid of the imperfect with my next book.

Some of you might also know that I had some major trouble with NOT QUITE A HUSBAND in the home stretch–namely, I sent it in and my editor sent it back with a few choice words that had me wander around my house shellshocked for half a day or so before I pulled myself together to redo the book in the three weeks. (Otherwise my pub date would have to be moved back to 2010.)

Having gone through three drafts with DELICIOUS, getting a sucky draft sent back shouldn’t be anything new for me, right?

Well, it was a new experience. Each time I handed in a not-okay draft of DELICIOUS, I sort of knew that it wasn’t okay. The first time I actually prayed that my editor wouldn’t hate it too much–she did, and I wasn’t too surprised.

This time I was really, really shocked. Even after I’d rewritten and resubmitted and had my new version accepted, I couldn’t stop wondering about it. Why was my assessment of the original version of NOT QUITE A HUSBAND so diametrical from that of my editor’s? The ability to judge one’s own work is an important quality to have for a writer, especially a professional writer. And I’d thought that I’d finally acquired that ability.

Then I read the new version of NOT QUITE A HUSBAND in anticipation of the line edit and the copy edits. I cried–and cried and cried. It dawned on me finally that NOT QUITE A HUSBAND, even the much-flawed original version, was just like Benjamin Button for me.

Have you ever read a book that hurts so good that you lose all critical faculties? A book of deep lovely pain that make you feel with such intensity and rawness that you cannot grade it on any objective measure, because you don’t care, because it just knocks you out in all the right ways?

That is NOT QUITE A HUSBAND for me. Me, not my editor, fortunately. The book as it originally stood had a couple of significant structural weaknesses which I completely ignored because I was an emotion junkie getting her fix with the rest of the story. My clear-eyed editor pointed them out and made me fix them.

And the new version gets to me even more.

It feels unsettling, almost, to speak of a book of my own that way. And I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I could very well end up in the minority here, as NOT QUITE A HUSBAND is not an easy story, nor does it have a secondary romance to lighten things up from time to time. But it is, in a way, a marvelous experience, to write something that jives with me so much that I’m utterly blind to its faults, that upon reading it I am incapable of anything but teary-eyed happiness.

The rest of you, prepare to be sorely disappointed.

What I don’t know could float supertankers.

Writers are often told, “Write what you know.” Well, as you can see, that would put me in real trouble. Not only have I never been to any of the places or times I’ve set my stories in, but I’ve never committed a fraud or run away from home or fallen in love with a boss.

Or, as is the case in NOT QUITE A HUSBAND, ended a marriage.

Instead, my own rule has always been, Write What I Understand.

There are things I do not understand. Ménage-à-trois is the first thing that comes to mind—or basically any kind of multi-partner arrangement. Not that I don’t understand why people do it, but that I do not get, given my own views and experiences, how that leads to durable contentment for all parties involved. My take on relational happiness is two people focused on and devoted to each other, in faithfulness and equality.

But beyond a few such dead ends, I understand a great many things. Based on what I already know of my own immaturity, impulsiveness, and lack of will power, I can see how people would go beyond where I would pull up to a dead stop. I can see how they would do the unforgivable. I can see how they would make stupid decisions because they either cannot see any other way out or choose to ignore the consequences for the gratifications of the moment.

And then, there is my other rule: Write What I Can Imagine.

Or perhaps, What I Aspire To. My greatest aspiration is to one day achieve true generosity of spirit. It is easier to understand human frailties than to forgive them—all cynics understand human frailties. And it is easier to just understand that I’m a certain way rather than to undertake the effort to be better, to explore my own true potential.

So my books, in a way, are my meditations on this sincere but frequently bumbling aspiration of mine, on true generosity of spirit. Given that I understand how my characters get into such troubles, how do they extricate themselves from it? How do they rise above? How do they deal with their often justifiable hurt and anger? And how do others among them deal with their regret and self-loathing over things that cannot be undone?

I like to believe that my characters find the strength and courage and maturity in themselves to do what they need to do, whether it is to refuse to back down, to sacrifice, or to forgive.

Getting them there is the most difficult and, in the end, most rewarding part of writing. Because it is like getting myself there, however briefly. To bask in the extraordinary grace the human heart is capable of.

What I know is and will always be very limited. But my understand is deeper, and my aspiration has the potential to encompass the whole universe. (Why not dream big, eh? )

That’s why I do not confine myself to writing what I know.