Romance!

 

Romance!

Romance! I’ve never been a fan of what one might call pure romance. I’ve always preferred my love stories to have other elements and more themes than the old-fashioned man meets woman, they quarrel, they make up and marry. I prefer the main characters to be real, rounded people with back stories and families, and fully established lives before meeting their heroes or heroines. I want to have the feeling that their previous interests and concerns will continue in a situation of mutual love, respect and generosity.

Romance! I’ve never been a fan of silly misunderstandings which have no proper purpose other than to keep the lovers apart and provide the black spot as it used to be called which appeared at about the three-quarter mark of a novel. That misunderstanding often concerned one of the romantic partners being told lies about the other, or truths that were spun to suggest the worst interpretation. The teller was almost always someone with no reason to wish the couple well. Does the newly-informed hero or heroine ask the other partner for an explanation? Of course not! That would be too sensible!

Romance! I like my romantic partners to have enough complementary or in-common attributes and interests to make it feasible that they’ll stick together into the foreseeable future. This doesn’t mean each needs to be honey-sweet, but there should be something that will hold them together and it will be very little to do with curves, muscles or physical beauty.

With that in mind, here are a few of my loving partners from various of my romantic books and my attempt to explain why they work as lovers by my definitions.

1.     Tamzin Herrick and Matin Campania from the seven-volume Being Tamzin series. Matin first saw Tamzin during a terrible period of her life when her very odd parents were forcing her to change her identity yet again, parting her from her first love just as they parted her from her best friend when she was eleven. Matin was in the thrall of a handler who also managed Tamzin’s parents, but, seeing her despair, he smuggled a phone number to her in a pair of shoes. When she eventually found it, some months later, she called him, and he facilitated her escape. Tamzin offered to stay with him out of gratitude, but he sent her away to a safe place even he didn’t know. They met up again nearly a decade later in their late twenties, each having made a satisfying life in the meantime. Finally, the time was right to debrief and to catch up on unfinished business. Tamzin had no proper family, being long estranged from her only relatives. Matin had a close-knit loving bond with his. Tamzin was a violinist and portraitist. Matin worked at a music studio and hoped to open his own studio in the wider arts. They really were made for one another… now…but only because they overcame their rocky first meeting by courage and a willingness to create their own futures.  

 

2.     Pippin Pearmain and Alain Barfleur from the nine volume Performing Pippin Pearmain series were both young actors when they first met. They enjoyed a brief friendship while making a film together, but Pip was only fourteen to Alain’s eighteen. They just missed working together again in another production a few years later. Alain left her a letter and a gift, but his agent made sure her return letter never reached him. Pip became an eccentric character actor who finally retired in her fifties after her mother and her agent died in the same week. She never forgot Alain, but he was just a lovely memory, the donor of a cup she used on special occasions. In her sixties, having spent a decade living in a seaside cottage with two conversational cats, Pip made a comeback in a strange film shot at a music festival, playing a part written especially for her. She met Alain again by chance when he was hijacked into the closing scene of the film…To their delight they still felt the tug of instant friendship. Both were single, and both were willing to take a chance—and they did. Pip, however belatedly, got to have her fairy tale with the best friend she’d missed for decades.

 

3.     Doctor Harry Fejoa from Rachel Outward Bound first met Rachel Traveller when they were both taking part in a human deep-sleep tanking experiment run by the Outward Bound company whose ambition was to send a colony ship to a distant planet. The plan was to conduct studies on the effects of long-term hibernation. Harry and Rachel met in the year-long simulation where they, and fifteen other candidates, inhabited a virtual world. Harry was a counsellor and physician and Rachel a nutritionist with an odd perception talent neither she nor anyone else could explain. Harry, from his fascination with Rachel from a scientific point of view, soon began to appreciate her odd approach to life. They realised they were in it for the long haul when they understood that the promise of shipping out with the new colony was less important than being together.

  4.     Oliver Farnorth from All Feb Up, Rage Against the Christine and The Fell Fowl ran a convention centre while his wife, Christine, filled her life with the committee meetings that befitted her role as mayor. The deeply conventional Oliver was mortified when Christine eloped with her deputy on the eve of the mayoral garden party, especially because she left him with a freezer full of ready meals and a standing order with the local grocer.  Her hastily elected replacement was the young and determined Eve Battle, who dug Oliver out of his den of sulkation and obliged him to help stage the garden party anyway. To Oliver’s bewilderment, he and Eve became good friends, with their acerbic wits playing off one another and their inventive mindsets constantly finding new topics of discussion. Their odd-couple friendship came to the attention of Eve’s grandmother, Vivienne, who liked to style herself the Widow Battle. Vivienne inspected Oliver, liked what she saw, and manoeuvred him into an interesting relationship. Vivienne was as forthright as Christine was woolly and insubstantial, and the now-divorced Oliver, once he got over the feeling that he ought not to be—er—enjoying himself with another woman (what would Eve say if she learned he was sleeping with her granny?), started to take a very definite interest in life. Arguing the point over exactly how they might term their arrangement made Oliver blissfully happy in his grumpy sort of way.

Romance! It is where one finds it. My characters find it because they are in the right time at the right place, meeting the person who will bring out the best in them and give them one more reason to be satisfied in life. Surely that’s what romance ought to do?

To follow on to the other bloggers in this blog hop, check out...

Bob Rich   https://wp.me/p3Xihq-3pV

A.J. Maguire http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/

Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com

Belinda Edwards https://booksbybelinda.com/blog/

Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog

Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/

Diane Bator https://escapewithawriter.wordpress.com/

Sally Odgers https://behindsallysbooks.blogspot.com/2025/02/romance.html (That's me)

Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea

https://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/