How to write a romance novel

We all have our vices. Amid a litany of horrors, one good thing to come out of 2020 for me was a romance novel addiction. Before I’d dealt with a lock-down, having young children during a pandemic and the most stressful year of my career, I thought I was largely above the smut. But I needed a coping mechanism to make it through the flaming, poop-filled dumpster of that year, and meth seemed like a bad idea. So I decided to start reading books that always have happy endings. 

I soon learned not all romance novels are trashy. I found I prefer the ones with roughly one climactic (pun intended) love scene and not a bunch of sex. I even like Christian ones, too, with no sex at all but lots of furtive glances. I like contemporary rom-coms and historical (but they have to be British) ones. I try very hard not to ready any of the kinds that have a man with his shirt half open draped over a woman with a heaving bosom on the cover. At least not in public.

I’ve read enough of them by now that I think I’m ready to write my own. Based on what I’ve read, here’s what you have to include in a romance novel:

How the main characters smell - In historical ones, the men often smell of leather and the women of some kind of flower, regardless of the fact that pretty much everything in England smelled like body odor and horse shit 200 years ago. 

The main characters’ eye color - If their eyes are blue, they will always will be described as “pools” at some point.

A meet cute - They can’t meet in a normal way, like through mutual friends or on a dating app. It has to be dramatic! More than 40% of the time, this involves physically running into each other. “His strong arms gripped her tightly to keep her from falling.” You get the idea. For the enemies-to-lovers tropes (see below), it’s usually in a competitive arena: a horse race, interviewing for the same job, trying to buy the same real estate or publish the best book. Not surprisingly, books by published authors often involve characters who work in publishing. Write what you know, I guess. 

Sexual tension - This is THE BEST part of romance novels. When you’ve been in a long-term relationship, it gets those fun, new-relationship brain chemicals flowing again without you ever having to go to the trouble of committing adultery. In Christian romance novels, there’s often some heavy accidental hand-touching, or, if it’s really edgy, a breathy whisper in an ear. In secular ones, every time the couple gets closer to rounding the bases with the blood pooling in their crotches, there’s an interruption. These interruptions usually include:

- A precocious child

- A cute pet

- Someone they don’t want to know about their relationship showing up

- The “we shouldn’t be doing this!” pull-back 

- A random noise that shakes them out of their horny reverie. 

And don’t forget about one of the key elements of romance novel sexual tension:

Gazing at each other’s lips - This is how you know characters want to kiss. Does this happen in real life? Maybe in the heady new relationship phase? I’ve been with the same man for 16 years, and the only time I think I ever gaze at his lips is to inform him that he has food stuck on them. 

Why they aren’t together - Two people who just meet and start happily dating does not 300+ pages fill. There has to be a reason they can’t be together right away. The most common include:

- They hate each other (admittedly, the enemies to lovers trope is one of my faves) 

- Some deep-seated issue about how they’re not meant to be in a relationship. This can range from daddy issues to past hurts to “maybe I or a close family member has/have a terminal disease.” 

- Work is too demanding

- They don’t want to ruin their friendship

- One of them is hiding something big, like their real identity

- Different social classes (a duchess and an impoverished baron’s third son?! Scandalous!)

- Rarely, although I think it’s the most common in real life, one of the main characters is dating someone else. That person is either a complete douche canoe or really sympathetic. There is no in-between. 

How they get together -

- Fake dating - they have to pretend to date each other for some preposterous reason: to get match-making relatives to leave them alone, to look good and stable for a promotion at work, to make an ex jealous, to get an inheritance, etc. And you’re never gonna’ guess this: when they’re fake dating, they develop real feelings for each other!

- Forced proximity - Oh no! We have to go to our mutual friends’ wedding, and there’s only one hotel room available that we have to share!

- Sudden, redeeming epiphany about the character’s character - 

OMG, I had no idea he had such a soft spot for his aging grandparents! 

She’s only pushing me away because of her insecurity!

- Sudden, redeeming epiphany about the character’s hotness - Most common in the friends-to-lovers trope - one character sees the other without their shirt on, and the character has the realization their friend is a sexual being and they want to be sexual with that being. 

The MISUNDERSTANDING

Everything is going well toward the end of the book. If it’s not a Christian romance novel, the sex scene has probably happened. (If it is Christian, there might have been a verbal declaration of love, possibly a kiss, but no handsy business except shoulder grasping.) Then BAM. The misunderstanding. This almost always involves poor communication and/or keeping things from each other:

“You were just using me to get back at your ex?!”

“You were just using me to write your magazine article?!”

“You’re really a wealthy duke?!”

“I can’t do this because the insecurity from my traumatic childhood has resurfaced!”

“You’ll be better off without me! It’s for your own good that I leave now because I am damaged goods/have a possibly terminal illness/can’t give up the career I love!”

“We ruined our friendship with fornication!”

The happy ending

In a 2020 world, this was what I needed. Consistently. Not prize-winning literary fiction books about the breakdowns of families or generations of inequity or man versus the horrors of nature. Not nonfiction ruminations on politicians, societal issues and how we’re all fat and anxious. I was living through awful things. I didn’t need to read about more of them. Just give me buzzing electricity between rival book editors or the earl and his governess, thank you, consummating (or not, Christian romance fans) in an ending where everyone is happy and in love. 

I’ve been addicted ever since. So read your sad books, drink your gross whiskey or take your PCP. At least my coping mechanism doesn’t make me fight cops naked or hurt my liver. 

Confessions of a 40-year-old beer cart girl

I always thought golf was a yawner of a sport for the elite. After my recent experience as a beer cart girl, I now I know it’s more of an alcohol-fueled pastime for lecherous old men. 

My employer was hosting a charity golf tournament, and I eagerly volunteered to be a beer cart girl. Instead of sitting at a desk all day, I envisioned piloting a golf cart around a beautiful landscape distributing beverages to fit, attractive men in polo shirts. (Preppy is kind of my thing.) There was some of that. But there were also a lot of drunk pervs in their 70s who missed the memo on the Me Too movement. 

Thankfully, I had my work bestie with me. I needed someone to share my befuddlement with, and perhaps some assistance fighting off horny geriatrics if they got handsy. Which did almost happen, but more on that in a bit. 

We filled up our cooler with donated beer, seltzers, sodas and waters and headed out at 8 a.m. In an attempt not to have to be at the course that early, I had previously asked some golfer friends that no one really wanted beer at 8 a.m., right? They assured me I was wrong. And boy, was I.

This was my first time on an actual golf course. I lack the interest, patience and hand-eye coordination to try the game, myself. Here are the things I didn’t know about golf that I learned that day: 

* Men just pee in the bushes on the course, despite the presence of restrooms.

* It was almost entirely men. There was only one all-female team and just a few with women on them at all. 

* You can play golf inebriated. I don’t think anything you can do inebriated should be considered a sport.

* You can just drive the carts on that beautiful grass! (Anything you can get your lazy ass in a cart and drive to your next move for also should not be considered a sport.) 

* Beer cart girls get tipped!

Anyway, on our very first beverage distribution stop, an old man made a joke to us about lube and buttholes. That pretty much set the tone for the day.

It wasn’t just the old men, either. My fellow beer cart girl friend is young, cute and single, and many of the younger golfers noticed. Offering their digits. Acting like insecure 14-year-olds. Example: One asked us to rate his friend on a scale of 1 to 10 based on appearance. We declined. He said, “It doesn’t matter anyway because he’s queer! Har har har!” I’m sure that was a popular insult for high school sophomores in the 1980s, but it does little to woo women in 2022. Quite the opposite, I’d say. 

As the unseasonably cool and drizzly morning wore on, blood alcohol levels among the players rose. One leathery old man pulled his cart up so close to ours that his knee touched mine, and I couldn’t get out. I asked him if he wanted anything. He raised his eyebrows and leered. “From the cooler,” I emphasized, pointing to it. He waggled his eyebrows again and said, “Oh, the cooler. When you asked me if I wanted anything, I was gonna say, does a bear shit in the woods?” I then pulled the cart forward to create an escape route. I didn’t need to, but I was prepared to throw some hands and break some hips. 

A golfer friend told me beer cart girls weren’t too much higher than strippers on the “loose women” hierarchy of employment. I have no idea whether that’s true, but I am a white-collar professional in real life who just gave of my time and cart-driving talent that day to ensure everyone was drunk enough to bid stupid amounts of money on the silent auction afterward. 

There was some good stuff, though, like tips! The ones who tipped were never the gross ones. My friend wore a V-neck shirt, and I suggested she could put the bills in her bra with a grand gesture to encourage more tips. She declined. I would’ve, but I had a crew-neck T-shirt on, and I probably would have to reach my hand up through the bottom, and cumbersome just isn’t sexy. (We did donate our tips to the charity at the end. Because we’re quality, moral people like that.)

Driving a golf cart is fun - even though a large bug committed suicide on my chest - and my friend and I cracked each other up discussing everything from gross old dudes to real estate. She’s also lucky I’m a mom and that I brought sunscreen so she could use it to prevent sun damage to her décolletage. She’ll thank me when she’s my age. 

Despite the light sexual harassment, I had a blast and can’t wait to do it again next year. And if my real job doesn’t work out, I now know I can throw on a push-up bra and a miniskirt and rake in some cash handing out beers to men who think they’re playing a “sport.” Well, if anyone hires 40-year-olds for that gig, anyway.  

Survive and thrive while flying the friendly skies

If you’re going to go on a flight any time soon, I’m here to offer you some unique tips about flying postish-pandemic like the travel blogger that I’m not. 

I fly a few times a year and have been lucky enough to do so a couple times in the past couple months. And by lucky I mean not really winning-the-lottery lucky so much as “well it’s really too bad you lost all your belongings in that flash flood but at least the rescue boat got there in time to get you and your dog before you died” lucky. 

Due to a pile of complicated economic factors that I don’t claim to understand but I think include pent-up travel demand from COVID, understaffing and record-high fuel prices, flying on a commercial airline right now is more unpleasant than it’s ever been. And I once had to spend the night in Cincinnati after a missed connection only to  find my dirty underwear tossed all over my suitcase by the TSA for a “random check.” Based upon my recent experiences, here are five things I would rather do than go on a flight right now:

1. Attend an all-weekend youth baseball tournament that starts at 7 a.m. each day during which the heat index is 105 degrees.

2. Listen to my 9-year-old tell me about Pokemon for hours every day.

3. Start a conversation about race on Twitter.

4. Swim in a lake with unhealthy levels of E. coli in the water.

5. Watch people eat oysters.

With constant delays and cancellations, you may have heard the advice to give yourself lots of time, get the earliest flight possible, use the airline’s app, etc. And that’s all true. But here are some tips you may not have thought of: 

Weep

Yelling at the airline staff will get you nowhere. It’s not their fault, and they’re tired and stressed out, too. But what I found does work is sobbing. On my delayed-many-times-over flight earlier this month, ugly crying got me half-price on checked bags and got a gate agent to help me when I was at the wrong gate because I didn’t want to wait in the long line at the one I was supposed to be at. I wasn’t trying to be manipulative. They were real tears of frustration, but darn it if they didn’t grease the skids. 

Elevator Music

Pretty much the first three minutes of any call to an airline’s customer service number is them telling you to use their web site instead. You think I didn’t try that first, Southwest?! You think I wanted to listen to a robot tell me what a dumbass I am for calling you and be on hold for 45 minutes because I was able to accomplish everything I needed on your app? And don’t use the get-a-call-back feature. They will never call you back. Put that elevator hold-music on speaker and go about your business: typing, hanging drywall, whatever. They will only pick up when you’re pooping, anyway, so maybe head to the loo to speed things up. When you finally get a human being on the phone is when the magic happens.

7,800 Calories Worth of Snacks

My most recent and most difficult flight was with my family, to include two children. Our flight got canceled on one airline and then delayed a total of about 16 hours on the other. We’d packed snacks for the plane, but they were not enough. Food options at the current KCI Airport are very few after you get through security. (A new airport is opening next year and they just DGAF about the current one anymore.) You need to pack enough nonperishable snacks to feed a family of four for two to three days. Even if you’re flying solo. You can spread the love with your fellow stranded passengers. This is even more vital for children because if they have food in their mouths, it’s much harder for them to whine. 

Probably Still Wear Masks

People still have the ‘vid, y’all, and everyone I know who has had it lately got it after coming back from somewhere on a plane. It’s just not as scary anymore. My family is vaccinated to the hilt, so while I’m not scared of the disease, I am absolutely terrified of spending 10 days quarantined with my children. And there were people with some juicy, phlegmy, coughs on my last flight. I’m probably going to just wear a mask on planes forever because I often got a cold from them before. Look at me funny all you want, Diane, but I won’t be the one congested and sneezing in 80% humidity. (You do NOT want a summer cold in the Midwest.)

Like the glutton for punishment that I am, I’m flying again in a few weeks. But I’ve got tears ready to fall, enough protein bars for a large police academy class, an N-95 mask and all day to listen to smooth jazz on speakerphone,  so come at me, airlines!

The sad demise of Hermit Neighbor ... maybe, possibly

This is a story about hermits, HIPPA, nosy neighbors, police, basements, public records searches and Twizzlers. 

But before you read this, first you need to read this.

You get all that? OK, so I wrote that six years ago. Hermit neighbor has continued hermiting since then. No further real-life lady friends have shown up to bring him out of his shell. (I can only speculate about his online relationships.) 

I noticed early this past summer he appeared to have lost some weight. This was observed in one of his rare outside appearances that only occurred when he mowed his grass down to the dirt every three weeks or so. 

Then on July 22 in the year of our Lord 2021, Nosy Neighbor approached me while I was out getting mail. Nosy Neighbor moved in five or six years ago and is catty-corner* to my house, and next-door to Hermit Neighbor. (Hermit Neighbor is directly across the street from us.) Nosy Neighbor is the gossip of our subdivision. He was on the executive board of the homeowners association for a while, but he claims he was ousted after being a whistleblower about how the HOA was paying another guy on the executive board to do landscaping at the neighborhood entrance and what a conflict of interest that was. He often summons me to gossip about our neighbors when I get mail, as our mailbox is almost directly across the street from his. He is our very own Gladys Kravitz. (“Bewitched” TV show reference, for you young’ens.)

So on this summer day, Nosy Neighbor informed me that he took Hermit Neighbor to the hospital earlier in the afternoon. I gasped, mainly because I couldn’t imagine Hermit Neighbor asking anyone for help or riding in their car with them. He seemed the type to prefer an anonymous ambulance. I asked what was wrong, and Nosy Neighbor advised me that Hermit Neighbor told him that he had stage 4 colon cancer. I felt bad for thinking he’d just done keto or something to lose all that weight. Nosy Neighbor also had a detail I’d never known before: Hermit Neighbor’s name and approximate age (50)! I filed both in my memory bank for later potential cyber stalking. 

Then the next night, I got a knock on my door. It was two police officers. They asked if I knew the whereabouts of Hermit Neighbor. They’d been called to check on his welfare. I told them about Nosy Neighbor taking Hermit Neighbor to the hospital and pointed them to Nosy Neighbor’s house. One of the officers was notably relieved. 

“Oh good!” he said. “Because we thought we were going to find a body in there.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because the house is weird. Looking in the windows, the upstairs is all dusty and doesn’t look like anyone lives there, and the basement is just packed full of stuff.” 

Confirmation of my long-held theory that Hermit Neighbor lived in the basement! But more perplexing than all of this was who would call for a welfare check on a man who seemed to have no relationship with anyone? 

Of course Nosy Neighbor briefed me on his police contact the following day. When I asked him if he knew who called the police, he told me the cops informed him that it was some guy from Nebraska that Hermit Neighbor regularly played online games with. When he didn’t show up for some game, Nebraska gamer got worried. And yes, more of my theories of how Hermit Neighbor lived were getting confirmed by the second. 

Nosy Neighbor also informed me that Hermit Neighbor had put in some kind of no-contact order at the hospital. He set it up so they couldn’t tell anyone he was there. How on brand of you, Hermit Neighbor. Hermit Neighbor had agreed, however, for Nosy Neighbor to get his mail while he was away. 

But then Hermit Neighbor never came home. Nosy Neighbor dutifully mowed Hermit Neighbor’s lawn and collected his mail and packages. I helped weed sometimes. (Read: I let my kids pull dandelions out of his yard and blow the seeds everywhere because he wasn’t around to be pissed about weeds, and even when he was, his lawn maintenance was limited only to that required by city code.) 

I knew people who worked at the hospital, and even they couldn’t tell me whether Hermit Neighbor was dead or alive. Nosy Neighbor didn’t know either and had stacks of Hermit Neighbor’s mail. So being the former reporter I am, I set out to put my cyber-stalking skills to good use. 

I couldn’t request a death certificate because I’m not next of kin, but I could search obituaries. I didn’t find any for Hermit Neighbor, but the obits - along with some other public records - led me to what appeared to be his family in Louisiana. Yes, Hermit Neighbor had a mom, a deceased dad and a sibling or two!

A few months later, with still no word, I dug into County property records and saw Hermit Neighbor’s house had been sold in a tax sale (i.e. he didn’t pay his property taxes for a few years) and purchased by some property flipping company in September. I informed Nosy Neighbor of this news the next time I saw him. 

Whereas I was just happy to know this information, Nosy Neighbor took it one  nutha’ futha’. In fact, he took it about six ‘nutha futhas’. He called the woman I’d found whom I suspected to be Hermit Neighbor’s mom. I don’t want to know how he got her phone number. She was apparently estranged from her weird son (shocker), and when Nosy Neighbor told her that he had all her son’s mail and didn’t know whether he was dead or alive, she freaked. She seems to still care about him a great deal. I told Nosy Neighbor to advise her to request a death certificate, since she was next of kin. He did so.

Nosy Neighbor even called the property development company that bought Hermit Neighbor’s house. They told him that due to some law, they couldn’t take possession of it for 12 months. It has sat vacant since he left that day in July. In that time, we’ve had horrible heat, a storm that ripped off several of the house’s shingles and now sub-zero temperatures. I never once saw any kind of maintenance van at his house, so I can’t imagine it’s in good shape. 

Nosy Neighbor also found the Nebraska gamer who was apparently Hermit Neighbor’s BFF, and learned that guy hired a private investigator to determine what happened to him. 

All of Nosy Neighbor’s frantic contact with Hermit Neighbor’s mom, online BFF and the property company happened in early December. Then when I came home from work last night, there was a firetruck and three police cars in front of my house. And who was standing in Hermit Neighbor’s driveway talking to the cops and firefighters but Nosy Neighbor? 

I asked him what was going down. Here’s where the plot thickens: Hermit Neighbor’s mom did request her son’s death certificate, and THERE WASN’T ANY. So she called the cops this time, and now there’s a missing persons investigation. They were going through the house, and there were more lights on in the upstairs rooms than I’ve ever seen in our decade of living across the street from him. The nosy neighbor deep down inside of me would give anything to see the way that guy was living in his basement. There also was a detective’s business card in my front door with a request that I call him. 

An Amazon package also had mysteriously appeared on Hermit Neighbor’s porch. Was he still ordering stuff to be sent to the house from a bunker somewhere? Or from beyond the grave? But Nosy Neighbor informed me it’s a 5-pound box of Twizzlers that arrive on auto-ship every three months. Given that he’s been collecting his packages, Nosy Neighbor has accumulated enough of Hermit Neighbor’s Twizzlers to send a couple Little League teams into diabetic shock. 

For the last several months, I’d been using Hermit Neighbor as an object lesson for when my 8-year-old gets mean. 

“If you’re mean to people, no one will want to be around you and you’re going to live and die alone like Hermit Neighbor across the street!”  

But now I’m not so sure that Hermit Neighbor is dead after all. Maybe he lied about the cancer and just decided to leave his demanding life of no human contact behind for something and somewhere new with none of his possessions. I hope this is the case. But maybe he was catlike and curled up under someone's porch to pass away quietly. Maybe he was involved in some Bitcoin shadiness that got him assassinated. Regardless, I have to come up with a new empty threat for my kid until this mystery is solved. 

*Catty-corner: Midwestern for diagonal from your position; across and over one