The first romance novel I ever read was a Silhouette Desire, I think. I stumbled upon it with my best friend, Rachel, around 1992 or 1993. I have since tried to locate the book online, to no avail, so I can’t tell you the author or the title, but the main characters were Acer Mullaney, an injured football player, and Lux Something-or-Other, who delivers a gigantic stuffed teddy bear to his house. Making giant stuffed teddy bears is her job, naturally. She’s an entrepreneur.
I don’ t remember much else about the book (there was a red silk blouse, and possibly rockets going off during the first orgasm), but it must have been good, because it got me hooked. I read around in the romance genre briefly — just long enough to discover that most of them didn’t have sex scenes, which sent me high-tailing it back to Silhouette Desire and signing up for the six-books-a-month hit of pure romance pleasure. They’d show up at my front door in a cardboard box, and the first shipment came with a green plastic “jacket protector,” aka “cover concealer.” Savvy, Silhouette. Very savvy.
These days, I prefer Harlequin Blaze to the Alphas of the Desire line, but I’m not choosy enough to turn down a nice Greek tycoon book if it finds its way onto my Kindle.
Yesterday, I read Vicki Lewis Thompson’s Nerd in Shining Armor (2003). Where has this book been all my life? The phrase “awesome sauce” was invented for it. My introduction to Thompson was via her recent Blaze trilogy of hot cowboy novels — Claimed! Wanted! and Ambushed! — which were great reads, especially Claimed!, though I could’ve lived without all those exclamation points in the titles. Nerd, by contrast, is sexy but much funnier, and the characters are much more Ordinary People in Extraordinary Situation. (The situation: They’ve been stranded in a small plane over the Pacific Ocean by a madman who expects them to crash and die. Instead, they end up on a desert island, alone together. Poor babies.) I mean, they’re still romance novel people, but the hero in particular has a wonderful awkwardness about him, a sort of worshipful crush on the heroine, Gen, that makes you root for him as he turns into a sex god with glasses.
I like a confident hero as much as the next woman, but I also admire writers who can pull off heroes who doubt themselves but still man up and manage to impress us. Isabel Sharpe does this well. Nate, the hero of her most recent Blaze, Long, Slow Burn, is a graduate student / bartender who’s floundering in a sort of extended post-adolescence, not quite sure what to do with himself until the woman he’s had a thing for since he was a teenager gets a makeover and starts dating, and Ol’ Nate figures out he’s got to get his act together if he ever wants to have a prayer of getting her to take him seriously. Plus, Nate and Kim are roommates, and so he gets to wander around half-dressed sometimes. (There’s a scene in there where they’re watching a movie together in their apartment that’s worth the cover price all by itself. Just sayin’.) I think there’s a fine line between this sort of hero, whom I love, and the sort who is a real whiny-baby, only pulling his head out of his ass at the last possible second before the happily-ever-after. I’m thinking of a particular Superromance, but I won’t name names.
I have a writing project in mind — maybe the next book I’ll write, based in part on the 1,000-word opening I wrote for a Harlequin challenge, which you can read here — wherein the hero is a bit of an Acer Mullaney. He’ll be a football player coming into retirement who finds out he has a daughter he didn’t know about. The heroine is going to be a little zany, very funny, and very unimpressed with him. But thinking about Nerd, I’ve been toying with what I might be able to make of this fellow, and with how I can construct his struggle without letting him be a whiny-baby. Because honestly, the injured sports star whiny-babies are my least favorite kind. At least the injured soldier whiny-babies have PTSD as an excuse, you know? So how to make this fellow appealing and real, rather than obnoxiously pouty and tragic? Figuring it out will be half the fun.
Meanwhile, I may have to do some more “research.” There are six other books in Thompson’s Nerd series.
