Winter Break and the Romance Novel

As a writer, I would like my novels to be more of the high literary kind. I should like to have complex characters, an intricate plot and lots of meaning. I would like my readers to leave the book feeling that they have grown through the reading experience, or at least learned something meaningful and worthwhile about themselves and the world. For example, with my Anna Mara fairy tale, I’d like to let girl readers know that they can be boyfriend-less and still important. Female empowerment, you know?

I’ve been thinking about all these high-brow ideas for so long, and doubting my abilities to convey my messages to humanity so often, that my head has literally began to shrink. I need a break, and I need it to be something fun and enjoyable. Sexy, even. So I was thinking maybe I’d write a romance novel for a while. Maybe romancing a novel would be less pressure than trying to imbue a fairy tale with so much meaning. Light and easy. After all, a romance has pretty much a preset plot line.

Girl meets Boy. Boy has a dog and a truck. For some reason Girl believes she can’t be with Boy. Boy pursues Girl, trying to prove that he is different from all the other boys who have broken her heart in the past. Girl and Boy have sex, which makes Girl even more adamant to stay as far away from Boy as possible. Girl has a change of heart through some experience (this can be paranormal, mysterious, violent, a dream, or something like that). Girl pursues Boy and has sex with him again. But now Boy thinks maybe Girl is right, and she is better off without him.

It can go on and on like that for a while until they both come to their senses and get married, at which point the sex basically ends, and so we have to end the novel.

Just kidding.

You get the idea, though. This could be fun! So for the next few weeks (till we come back from all our various vacations to the four corners of the world), I’m going to try to write anywhere between one and two thousand words a day in a romance novel about an artist and a rock climber. It’s going to be romantic. It’s going to have sex. It’s going to be full of high drama. And I’m definitely going to hide the fact that I wrote it so that no one could ever connect me with it for as long as we shall both live. But don’t worry. I’ll still keep you posted. You know you want me to.

By the way, I did notice the fact that I just finished a sentence and a paragraph with a preposition. I think I’ll leave it like that. I am practicing being less stressed out about perfection.