Romancing the Keyboard (Or, The Art of the Bodice-Ripper)

Let me begin with a confession.

I love historical romance novels. You know the ones. They typically feature a busty dame and a muscley hero emblazoned on the cover in an embrace just short of actual schtupping. The stories are usually formulaic, and the bad guys always meet their ends badly, and the good guys always live happily ever after and have lots of good sex. That appeals to me. It always has. As if in some mythical netherworld of heaving breasts and dinner-plate pecs, the world still works: the good guys win and the bad guys lose.

Though my reading is typically on the "serious" side, ever since I was 12 years old I've peppered my Proust and Nabokov with a hearty helping of spitfire heroines, rakish men donning barrel chests, and misty scenes of Medieval castles, Regency England, the Old West, or the antebellum South. It's just plain fun to choose a book to read not based on the quality of the writing, or the author's previous work, or the accolades of the story...but based upon how hot the guy on the cover is. In what I can speculate is only an attempt to further titillate the straight women and gay men of the world, I've noticed that many romance novel covers now leave the heroine off completely. They just sport an oily, sexy image of the hero, usually in period-garb, with a decent amount of chest exposed and a bulging crotch not achieved through the use of a codpiece, thank you very much. There were no small penises in Regency England.

A few months ago, I came across a downright brilliant website. It's called Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books. The two women who write this romance novel-driven blog are fierce. Intelligent, warm, insightful, and laugh-till-your-panties-are-wet hilarious. I don't know if men qualify, but I like to think of myself as an honorary Smart Bitch Who Loves Trashy Books.

Given my self-proclaimed Smart Bitch status, I've decided to write an historical romance novel. I've flirted with this idea for years, but it's never really come to fruition until now. Honestly, what propelled it to actually happen were the staggering statistics I read on romance novels:

• Romance novels generated 1.37 BILLION dollars in sales in 2006.
• Nearly 6400 romance novels were released in 2006.
• Of all the readers around the globe, one in five read romance novels.
• One out of every two paperback fiction novels sold is a romance novel. That's 50%, folks!
• Those who read romance novels have 70% more sex than those who don't.
• Those who read romance novels have 70% more sex than those who don't. (I just felt that bore repeating.)
  

These numbers called forth a romantic hetero love story I've been developing in the furthest recesses of my brain for the last five or six years. At last, a few weeks ago, I sat down and put this tale to paper, and I gotta tell you, it's a lot of fun -- and a hell of a lot harder than I thought it would be.

It's given me a newfound respect for both the genre in general and the romance novelist in particular. It is tremendously challenging to write these stories. Believability isn't so much as important as creating a natural progression to the unfolding of the story's dynamics. Love is capricious and can come about in a variety of ways, but stretching those ways to encompass 400 pages is a challenge. Sub-plots and sub-genres within the novel are key to making the story work and further solidifying the total rightness of the hero and heroine's love.

Also surprising to me was the amount of research required to write one of these novels. I mean, you can't just say, "She whisked the eggs in the bowl." You have to know very key things. Like when was the whisk invented? Did it exist in 1802? Was it used in the part of the world where the story takes place? What did it look like? Was it different from the whisks we use today? You see the hardship here. These ladies have to do their homework before writing even the most trivial detail. And I've found a lot of historical romances to be infinitely detailed, down to the smallest points worthy of note, and this, I'm learning, requires a major degree of scholarship and study.

I realize I face a major obstacle should I ever decide to try to publish this manuscript: I have a penis. Men don't write romance novels. This makes sense, of course, because what woman wants to pick up a female-centric love story written by a man? There have been, however, men who have published romances under female pseudonyms (the late Tom Huff, a.k.a. Jennifer Wilde, wrote some of my favorite historical romances), so this is the path that I too am going to have to take. Deciding on a female pen name is difficult, as I don't want to sound like a porn star, but I also don't want it to be a forgettable and commonplace moniker. Email me your suggestions, I'm open to anything flowery and saucy, but not slutty or cheap. Despite what you may have heard.

Undertaking this book has been, above all else, challenges aside, a lot of fun. I find myself thinking of these characters all day long, brimming with excitement to get home and continue their story. And it's just wickedly delightful to write love scenes. Love scenes, too, pose their own set of unexpected challenges, because where else in literature can you use words like "elongated hardness", "pink bud of pleasure", or "hard rosy aureole" with a straight face?

All this begs the question, How does one write a love scene and still respect their computer in the morning? Should I buy my keyboard flowers? Or should I ignore it for the day, despite its repeated voicemails on my cell phone? Or maybe I should get it something practical, like one of those aerosol cans with the long red straw that blows air between the keys?

Damn, that sounds kind of sexy.