Chapter One

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Writing a romance novel can be hard.

Very hard.

Not actually hard like a slow, throbbing, erect dragon waiting to release its masculine fire inside you, but hard like difficult.

This is especially hard (and no, not stiff like the most taut muscle you have ever held in your tiny virginal hands) for a person who cannot manage to pen a grocery list without it somehow sounding cynical. Thus, the idea that there is a part of my brain that can create a male character who not only understands that farts should be silent, but who can also save me from a pack of lions and an evil 16th-century king right before he makes me orgasm twice in a row and then holds me is a difficult idea to believe. Hilarious even.

Having been in writing circles for the past four years or so, I happen to know that romance novels are big business. They are a great way to enter the writing field, and there are pretty serious returns if you can manage to produce something that is both uncomfortably graphic and embarrassingly unrealistic. I tried my hand at this for the first time in the fall of 2004, shortly after I returned from college and moved back in with my parents. Thinking that there were few places better than a Colorado Springs Barnes & Noble to have sexy thoughts about Silently Farting Men, I started to write something really, really disturbing on my laptop computer screen only to have Ben Ebbs from high school approach me to say hello. And to read my computer screen. And to tell me about all the missionary work he had been doing lately and about his newborn baby. And since we all know that there is nothing sexier than a newborn baby about to be baptized into born-again Christian doctrine, I immediately quit writing my romance novel and having sexual thoughts for that day and the following 603 days.

But now I’m back! Back to penning sexy, unrealistic endeavors between women and men or, as the guidelines said, “women and anything really…neither the supernatural or the fantastical should be out of the question. Do not hesitate to engage your main character with a vampire or a yeti...” Because yetis are so sexy. When my boyfriend’s chest hair is busting out of his polo shirt, I tend to think, “That’s it. That sexy yeti is going to get it now.” And, I’m back because I read an article the other day that stated that even though the United States economy is basically dead, a prominent romance novel publisher had their best quarter ever.