Missing Ingredient

My two latest reads were recommended by a friend. She’s a fan of the formula romance. For her, the ending must be happy, and the final chapter must be followed by an epilog, which tells readers that the couple has two children, great sex, and a thriving ranch. That sense of resolution is so important that she doesn’t buy a book without first reading the last few pages to make sure it delivers.

For me, the ending is not a problem, but what I learned over this last long week and a half is that something must happen in addition to two people falling in saccharin love, having the occasional tiff, and settling it quickly to return to an idyll of precious moments and specialness. I need a dose of intrigue, inner conflict, self-awareness, a struggle against society to keep me going, and no, the clichéd soul searching of lovers wondering if they’re moving too fast or stressing because they suspect their beloveds of being unfaithful don’t keep me interested because that kind of turmoil isn’t described in a way that makes it even a little reminiscent of the real.

Yes, yes, I know the real is not always the goal. Some people read to escape, hence the happy ending and the thriving ranch. But the assumption seems to be that a more realistic love isn’t as sweet, fumbling, and fanciful as these tales of attraction, doubt, and commitment suggest. My own observation is that ordinary love stories are fabulous, profound, and lasting. The ones that end in nothing are the ones that sound more like the books. So why not celebrate the ordinary, teach readers to find joy in flaws and minor miracles?

My own formula romance is about an unattractive woman who has feelings for a family friend. Most of the energy of the narrative is spent on her coming to terms with being plain, an important step for a young woman (yes, Puntitas is plain enough to have been mistaken for the campus tranny at an early teaching job) and on making the shift from friend to something other. The typical romance novel misunderstandings do happen, but they’re secondary to this other storyline.

Okay, I hear the alarm bells too: I’ve set out to write a love story, and I’m having trouble focusing on … uh … the love story. This is not good.

Puntitas reads _Smitten_ by J. Evanovich and _At First Sight_ by N. Sparks.

Stalling

Work was slow enough at the beginning of the week for me to do a lot of stewing. Stewing is bad–makes the neuroses come to the surface—so I spent a lot of time pushing myself to do things. Nothing as taxing as writing or housework. I made phone calls I’d been putting off and other inanities of the kind. Yet another reminder that happiness is as much about a set of habits as it is about a state of mind. Ah, well. What I haven’t managed to do is to push the habits beyond a nonproductive rut. Perhaps that should be my goal: to write, to maintain a routine, to think in active channels. Fortunately, the last two days became unexpectedly busy, and my ánimo, such an apt word for one’s general state of well being, seems to have recalibrated to the degree that I’m not thinking of a phone call as a major accomplishment.

I did nothing writingwise except think about it. I thought about dropping a character from my very fledgling extra terrestrial story (still at 300+ words), and I thought about sending manuscripts out.

I don’t know why I don’t send manuscripts out. When the reality of large manila envelopes, stamps, and SASEs is not on the day’s schedule, I believe in my own writing, but when it is, suddenly my work sounds like crap. Really need to get past that thinking. The Nobel committee hasn’t found my hard drive.

My current excuse for being stuck is that the extra terrestrial story is the one I want to work on right now, but I don’t have access to the setting, one aspect of which is key to the unraveling. I visited the location thirty-five years ago, when I was a child, so I have some vague memories to draw on. I’m reading blogs and touristy sites to gather more info. I’ll also ask my mother, who visited a couple of years ago and has a great sense of detail. She’ll probably hesitate to tell me what I want to know because she’ll think I’m making fun, mockery being something I’m accused of regularly, but it’s also very likely that she didn’t pay much attention to the feature I’m interested in. I’m sure I’m making this more complicated than it needs to be. The book I’m reading this weekend is set in India. It’s got lots of details about the culture, but so far, nothing is as specific as my head is telling me I should be, so odds are, my problem will be solved if I change the narrator’s profession from travel writer (really local news anchor who squeezes a free trip out of her boss by promising to do some nostalgia pieces for viewers far from home) to something less demanding on me.

Puntitas reads _A Child Called It- by D. Pelzer, _Cold As the Grave_ by P. Robinson, and _Holy Cow_ by S. MacDonald.

Getting to Know the Book

The working title is Fat Girl. Yeah, I know, it’s awful and politically incorrect. At the time I started, I needed a title that would help me keep track of the book’s controlling idea. When I was a student taking first- and third-year comp, I wrote papers called “Abortion” and “Sex Education: Why It’s So Important” for the same reason. Now that I read and write a lot more than I did then (and now that I’ve read ten years worth of student essays as stunning [and that really is the word] as my own), I know that the title and the controlling idea are two separate entities and that getting the former to express the latter takes a great deal of thought and experience. I also know that titles can be changed, so I’ll leave mine alone for now and deal with it later.

The plot is simple:

Amanda, the plain and plump, and Hernan have grown up together. She’s madly in love with him, but she knows he’s got a crush on her beautiful but disdainful sister Gabriela.

Those really are the only characters in the novel. A few other people (their parents, Gabriela’s boyfriend, some of the people who work with them) wander through the text from time to time, but they’re not well developed, serving as window dressing, as one of my professors would say.

The setting is a spacious house in an upscale neighborhood and an equally upscale boutique. Having just skimmed the first chapter, I think I’ll tone the upscale down. Most likely, I was going through my Danielle-Steel-diamond-cage phase.

The point of view is first person singular: Amanda. I remember that at one time it was third person, but I think I may have gone through the text and changed that twice.

The first paragraph is this. I’m not sure that I like it:

I stood on the landing above the great room surrounded by potted plants and cooking smells, looking myself over in the mirror beside the fanlight, and wondering if the dress I’d tried on in Hernan’s shop would really help. Hernan had said it would, and they always did. But scanning the homely face and the plump body in the oversized T-shirt with baggy jeans, I reminded myself that Illusions could only do so much.

The third paragraph may be a better start:

I shook my hips in the landing mirror, remembering the feel of the dress: the gauzy fabric, the dark background, the discrete white bouquet print. It had taken at least twenty pounds off me, and if I kept my back straight and my chin up, it actually gave me breasts, a waist, and hips.

Or deciding now may be premature.