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The Perfect Romantic Hero

3/18/2015

Who is the perfect hero?

Romance novels seem to think he’s that strong, silent type. The Alpha male. The guy who is gorgeous, has a full bank account, and drives a to-die-for sports car. Who looks impeccable in a Tom Ford suit, and can actually afford one. He’s the man who drives into a full parking lot and finds a space right in front of the store he wants. Nothing goes wrong for the Alpha male.

But, if that’s the case, why is he always without a woman in those books? You would think women would snap him up if he was that perfect.

It’s because the Alpha male is also misunderstood. Even though he’s cutthroat in the boardroom and Romeo in the bedroom, he’s still looking for that special woman to give him his happily ever after. The perfect mate who understands he has insecurities under all that arrogance.

So why is he still looking for Mrs. Right? If he is so perfect at everything he does, why can’t he find his other half? Ahh, now we get to the crux of the matter. The reason romance novels are gobbled up by female readers like Pac Man on steroids.

It’s because finding true love is tough. Keeping it alive is even tougher. And romance novels, for all their outrageous, never-will-happen-in-real-life scenarios, show their readers that no one, not even Mr. Alpha male, can find it easily.

These stories provide us with hope. When we are going around kissing toad after toad, in the back of our minds we continue to expect that one day we’ll meet the man of our dreams. The ying to our yang. The guy that will slay our dragons and wear Armani while doing it.

But seriously, that is why romance novels center around the Alpha male, instead of the plumber with droopy drawers. While this guy is much more true-to-life, he’s also not someone women typically daydream about. After all, most of us live with that type of man. The one who leaves his clothes on the floor, snores in his easy chair, and can’t find the butter in the fridge because he doesn’t realize he can move things around in there. Where’s the romance in that?

The Alpha male takes readers away from the mundane. Gives us that dose of “Ahhh” that we’re looking for in our humdrum lives. Lets us know that even perfect people are struggling to find happiness. And when he finds his true love, and commits to her in one steamy, sexy love scene, how many of us try to recreate that moment with our significant other? Enact our own romantic interlude? Romance novels afford us that opportunity to live out our fantasies.

And by doing so, we elevate our mates to Alpha male status. Perfection in an imperfect world. Gone are the petty infractions. The forgetfulness, or the good-bye without a kiss. In their places is that rare intimacy between two like souls. That love that may get trampled on by day-to-day infractions, but which will come back to life with very little coaxing. That love that the Alpha male struggles to find, but that the reader already has, if she but looks closely.

Yes, romance novels are wildly unrealistic. They are the brunt of many jokes. Women go to great lengths to hide the fact that they read them, from using book covers to slipping a book inside another, to hiding them under the bed. Yet they shouldn’t. The romance novel, and its Alpha male, serves an important purpose in real life. They provide hope. Hope, and the rebirth of finding everlasting love.

I guess you could say that the romance novel is the Alpha male of literature. Go figure.

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Where do I get my story ideas?

3/4/2015

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“Where do you get ideas for your stories?”

Readers ask me this question quite often. Story ideas come at me from everywhere. A song, a picture, something that catches my eye. Even an overheard phrase.

Take yesterday. I was at the grocery store, waiting to pay for my things. I looked up from reading the latest Kardashian escapade on a magazine cover and saw a tall, handsome young man in a gray suit walk by, carrying a bouquet of flowers.

Instantly Kim was forgotten. In her place I concocted a reason for the man’s fragrant burden. Maybe he was married, and just found out his wife was pregnant. Or, perhaps he and his wife (or girlfriend) got in a huge argument that morning, and he decided to soften her up with a floral apology.

Maybe he was meeting a girlfriend’s parents for the first time, and was hedging his bets with flowers for the mom. He could even be preparing for a blind date. The ideas were endless (as was waiting for the older lady in front of me to write a check. A check? Who writes a check nowadays?).

Then I delved deeper. Maybe he was supposed to be out of town, and instead he’d picked up flowers for his mistress, and was going to spend an illicit night of pleasure in her arms. And the wackiest of all: maybe he was giving someone flowers as a signal to an assassin that she was the person to be killed. Or, he was a serial killer that left a bouquet of flowers next to each woman he’d slain.

Okay, so maybe the last two are real stretches of the imagination. But that’s how I get my ideas. Something catches my eye, and my imagination runs with it. When I saw a prison road work crew while on a drive with my son, bam! My book Prisoner of Love was born

A couple years ago my husband and I went on vacation up into Oregon/Washington, to the Columbia River Gorge. That trip spawned a three-book historical series that takes place along the Columbia. And the song “Smoke Rings in the Dark,” by Gary Allan, gave birth to my first western, with a little help of past vacations in Texas.

Recently I’ve just started a story about a Greek tycoon and the woman who cuts him down to size. I didn’t want it to be cliché, so I started thinking of how to make my heroine different, not the same sweet, innocent young girl at the millionaire mogul’s mercy. And then my twenty-two-year-old son came along and said he’d signed up for Bartending School (not quite the school I’d envisioned for him when he was eight or nine, but, to each his own). And then the light shone down upon me.

My heroine in that story is a bartender, and she’ll definitely lock horns with Mr. I-Get-Everything-I-Want-Because-I’m-Rich, simply because she’s independent and he’s egotistical. The rest of the plot fell into place.

My family is getting used to my lightning flashes of inspiration. They now start to look at me in that tolerant, “There she goes again” manner. Or they even play along, like my husband did on Valentine’s Day when he took me to dinner. We sat on the restaurant’s patio and people-watched.
He was very good at coming up for reasons why one young couple wasn’t holding hands (they’d argued, but had already paid the babysitter, so they were going to stay out even if they were fighting). Or, the shy, college-age couple at the next table, who he said had just started dating and were having stilted conversation. His suggestions were really imaginative, and I told him so.

Yes, stories come at me from everywhere. They burst into my head at any given moment. Some hit me so strongly that I put aside a planned plot for another, unexpected one. I can only hope that God grants me a long life in order to share all these wonderful ideas spinning around in my imagination.

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The Perfect Romantic Hero

Where do I get my story ideas?

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