The fun part

You might feel like you have a book when you finish the outline. Or the first draft. Or the second draft. Or when you give the manuscript to your editor. Or when you finish making all the damn changes the editor “suggests.” Or when you incorporate the final changes from the proofreader.

But there’s something about having a cover in hand that truly makes things real.

I’ve never written a series before, so I had no idea how it would go when I assembled the cast of PalmSprings Heat and asked them what happened next. Here are some things I didn’t know going in:

• What the relationship of Palm Springs Heat’s central characters—billionaire Clay Creighton and Lara Dixon, the woman who tried to bring him down—would be like after their initial burst of romantic passion.

 

• How Fast Lane, Clay’s men’s media empire, would fare without Sushma Vishnuveda, the woman who saved it from collapse, at the helm.

• What Sushma would do after exiting Fast Lane.

• What Sushma did before she got there.

The most enjoyable part of writing Malibu Bride was finding out more about Sushma. Or rather, finding out that everything Sushma did in Palm Springs Heat proceeded from a back story I wasn’t aware of.

Or was I? I never write long, detailed character bios—or even short, general ones—but it simultaneously felt as though I was just getting to know Sushma and that I’d known her forever.

And, like a dope, I fell in love with her. As if one night I’d be in my La-Z-Boy watching Mythbusters or That Metal Show, and this five-foot-tall woman from Mumbai would sit on the couch and we’d have a marvelous conversation and she’d look at me through strands of hair and bat the lashes of her big, round eyes, and I’d suddenly be twenty-eight years old and single and...

What’re you gonna do? Write romance novels, I guess.

It turns out that there is no fun part; it’s a whole series of fun parts. And now there’s a book, and it has a cover designed by Dale Robert Pease of Walking Stick Books. And in a week or so, you’ll be able to click on that cover and shoot Malibu Bride onto your Kindle.

Good times, for sure—and more on the way. Book 3: San Fernando Dreams is already taking shape.

A whole 'nother list of reasons

A friend posted on Facebook that she had seen a headline about the “top three reasons men leave,” but couldn’t bring herself to read the article. A friend of that friend then posted this: 1. He's selfish. 2. He's an asshole. 3. He's immature.

That was intended to clarify the issue, but instead I took issue, asking why any man would want to stay with a woman who calls him a selfish, immature asshole. Or why any woman would want such a jagoff to stay.

I myself wanted to know what those three reasons were. So I turned to Google and came up with not three, but 300 million reasons. I didn’t have time for that many, so I just looked at the top 3 “Top 3.”

The first list was on eHarmony.com, where author Christian Carter says men leave because they can’t handle too much emotion, fear losing their freedom and don’t like someone trying to “fix” them.

Reason 1, Carter says, is a guy problem: “A mature man needs to be a source of support and masculine stability in your relationship. Yet, at times, even a good man can go into ‘emotional overwhelm.’ He can’t handle the emotions coming at him and feels so anxious that he ends up withdrawing.”

He says women can eliminate Reasons 2 and 3 by communicating better with men. He does not suggest women talk louder and slower; he says they should refrain from making demands and referring to their beaus as A-holes.

“If your relationship is healthy, fun, emotionally intimate and positive in the way you treat each other,” Carter says, “a man won’t think twice about continuing to devote his heart and life to you. You’ll be that rare special woman he fell in love with…and who he craves being with.”

Google hit No. 2 was date.info—where it was Carter again, dishing up a different Top 3. The first reason still involves men’s inability to deal with rampaging female emotion—but this time, he blames the femmes who freak out—and not the hommes who love them.

Reason two on Carter’s second list: men bolt when the jolt of attraction is gone. To amp up the voltage, he says, women need to stay “interesting, unpredictable and adventurous.” Carter says one way to do that is to “have a life outside the relationship.” A lack thereof connotes neediness—something everyone can do without.

Top 3 list number three was a Top 5 at Just Barbara’s Blog. Barb’s list comes with two bonus reasons…but raise your hand when this starts feeling old:

5. Men don’t like when women try to “fix” them.
4. Men don’t like neediness.
3. The flame goes out.
2. Men don’t like freakouts and negativity.

So now it looks like the problem is that immature, selfish assholettes are shoving gents out the door. But, Just Barbara hits on something with her reason No. 1, which she calls The Pleasure Principle:

“Men and women want to FEEL GOOD…to have the people around them be a source of pleasure and comfort and support. Yourself included. When you are constantly freaking out on a man, you turn into one of the people that it DOESN’T FEEL GOOD to be around. And this has a huge impact on whether he wants to invest more time, effort and energy in you and your relationship.”

In other words, some men actually are immature, selfish assholes. But so are some women.

“It takes some maturity to accept that other people have their own way of seeing things and want what they want,” Barb says. “Once you learn to accept these things and start to work with them instead of against them, life gets a whole lot easier.”

Life is hard. Isn’t that why we pair up in the first place? The world’s a lot nicer when you’re first on someone’s Top Howevermany list.

Even the most pie in the sky Happily Ever After is going to be a bumpier ride than any romance novel suggests. But, really, if you’re dealing with selfish, immature assholes of any gender, you shouldn’t be too upset if they leave.

Note: It's been a long time between posts because the Top 3 items on my to-do list for the past several weeks have been 1) edit Malibu Bride, 2) edit Malibu Bride, and 3) make sure the DVR is set to record any old episodes of The Big Bang Theory we haven't seen yet. Malibu Bride is now with my proofreader...and still on track to be available before June 1.

What's is all about, Alpha?

Whether you’re a romance writer or reader, sooner or later the topic of alpha males is going to rear its ugly head. In a chiseled-featured, six-pack-abbed sort of way.

One friend of mine, an avid romance reader, says, “Please don't equate alpha male with romantic hero or I will barf all over your screen. They are a trope. A tedious trope.” Another friend, a very successful romance author, says, “I'm not saying every guy has to be an alpha hero, but beta heroes have a harder time gaining a following from readers.”

No readers vs. barf. Not an easy choice. But is it a choice I have to make?

These are two very smart women, so how could their views be so widely divergent? It turns out divergent views abound on this topic, so I’m gonna say it all comes down to the lack of consensus about what makes an “alpha male.”

Author Jami Alden told Romance University that she follows “a pretty standard definition.” An alpha hero, she says, is a “natural leader.” Smart, but not a know-it-all. A problem-solver. A guy who “cares deeply,” but is not emotional. Who may be focused to the point of coming off as brusque or insensitive. And while he doesn’t have to have six-pack abs, he should be “imposing, tall, strong, athletically fit, and generally hotter and sexier than the average guy.”

So Jack Reacher, but not Tom Cruise.

Alden’s definition may be pretty standard when it comes to romance novels, but if you do some hasty and ridiculously incomplete research on the Internet, you could easily conclude that, in real life, every man on the planet simultaneously is and is not an alpha male.

But, you don't have to do that hasty and ridiculously incomplete research, as I have done it for you.

In The Feminine Woman, a blog aimed at helping women find men who adore them, Renee Wade says an alpha male has “a strong masculine energy and is not afraid to be dominant.” Some men, she says, will be “dominant assholes,” but that’s “not necessarily a bad thing…some women still like this type of man, and it works for them, which is great!”

Which sounds a little disturbing. On the other hand, Wade does open the door to the possibility of nuance: “Just because a man is an alpha male doesn’t mean he can’t have a well-developed feminine energy, too. Remember that! It’s simply because he’s more multi-dimensional.”

Ah, complexity: Thy name is reality.

In my own hasty and incomplete research, I happened upon a guy named Roosh, who, I gather, traveled the world in a quest to get laid in every country. He claims to have done all right because he realized not only that alpha males aren’t universally popular, but also that altering his alphatude to fit his surroundings got him lucky more often. In Brazil, for example, he needed to amplify the alpha. In Poland, he beefed up his beta.

Being beta, he says, didn’t mean “being supplicant” or “holding anyone’s purse while they went to the bathroom,” but more or less “not being an asshole.” Or needy. Or too persistent. Or overy generous with gifts and flowers. “I led the interaction,” he says, “but considered their needs (by) asking them where they wanted to go or what food they wanted to eat. I did my best to increase their happiness.”

This echoes something shared by misogyny fighter David Futrelle, who cites scientists in his Manboobz blog to argue that the human alpha male is a false construct because it comes to us via botched research on wolves. Botched, because wolves don’t really run in packs where one alpha male hogs all the females; instead, they settle down in families headed by breeding couples. Males attract the foxiest wolf babes “not by being sexy badasses, but simply by siring and taking responsibility for pups. Alphas become alphas by acting like betas.”

This is starting to sound familiar. A panel of romance authors I saw a couple years back that included Isabel Sharpe and Helen Brenna concluded that alpha male characters should have some “beta” characteristics “to make them seem more real.”

Author and Facebook C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg got more specific, telling The Atlantic Wire that a dude who has a beta quality or two, like a propensity for doing the laundry, is gonna be glad when the lights go down. “Studies show this,” she says. “Husbands who do more housework have more sex with their wives.”

So what’s the takeaway? I mean, other than that, if you’re a man, you should really think about doing more laundry? I say my original two sources were both right. Of course your romance-novel hero has to have something kick-ass in his personality (if not in his pecs), but he can’t be a knuckle-dragging brute. Then again, who fantasizes about riding off on a white steed with a needy, purse-holding supplicant?

Clay, the hero of Palm Springs Heat, and Holt, the hero of Malibu Bride, are both alphas, but they’re also very different from each other. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone. They are, after all, going after different women—and it’s each heroine’s definition that ultimately determines who’ll be the alpha—read: number one—man in her life.


Malibu Bride will be available as an ebook and paperback at the end of May.

Sex—more or less a good thing

Sex and romance go together, right?

Right?

I think so. And so did one woman I know who read Palm Springs Heat and told me there should have been more sex to go with the romance. Another was of a less-is-more state of mind, saying “that guy sure thinks a lot about his you-know-what.” I didn’t ask if she was referring to the book’s hero, Clay—or to me.

No one should be surprised by the contrasting views. Our whole society wrestles with questions about how sex, love and romance interact.

“Most people think romantic love and sexual desire go hand in hand, and that you can't have one without the other,” says Monitor on Psychology, an American Psychological Association journal. But in the same article, University of Utah psychology professor Lisa Diamond says sexual desire and romantic love are “functionally independent.”

Yet a third source is quoted as saying, “Sexual desire is driven by the gonadal hormones of estrogens and androgens. Animal research indicates that attachment is mediated by the neuropeptide oxytocin, with a more robust oxytocin-receptor network present in the female brain.”

I believe that source would be Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.

Suffice it to say that there’s no scientific consensus on the connections between love and lust, romance and ribaldry.

“People use the word ‘love’ for, like… everything, and it confuses most people pretty badly,” success coach Jason "J-Ryze" Fonceca writes in his blog, Ryze Online. “Love doesn’t have to have anything to do with sex. Romance is the part of the relationship that makes it feel ‘special.’ Sexual attraction is that electricity which draws us toward a lover.”

Relationships based on romance alone are doomed, he argues, because they indicate “a hunger for acceptance, fulfillment, love from the outside, (while) acceptance, fulfillment, and love come from inside. You need self-acceptance and self-fulfillment before you can truly create a sustainable, joyful, intimate relationship.”

That leads us back to Monitor on Psychology and Pamela Regan, PhD (the actual source of that Sheldonian quote above), who says that “most people view sexual attraction as an essential ingredient in the development of romantic love, the spark needed to set passion burning.”

And that brings us back to Palm Springs Heat—and its sequel, Malibu Bride—which adhere to the school that says sex should be true to the characters and used to further the story. If the hero and heroine do it on page 150 of a 300-page novel, things between them should be very different in the second half of the book. The liaison should bring the couple closer—or push them apart. At least temporarily.

This school also recognizes points made by health writer Ann Roberts at I Love to Know.com: Sex is "an important act of bonding and an expression of meaningful love," regardless of whether a couple’s been together for thirty years or thirty days.

Is there too much sex in Palm Springs Heat? Too little? Everyone’s gonna think what they’re gonna think. But if the goal is to create characters that think and act like real-life adult humans as they establish long-term love relationships, I’m gonna have to say that romance and love and meaningful sex do go together.

They’re all part of the story.


Malibu Bride will be available as an ebook and in paperback in late May.

His and hers fantasies--more alike than you'd think

Coming clean about something he says he regularly does in the shower—and I’m not talking about washing behind the ears—Ray Romano explains one of the burdens of guyhood.

“We were given the gift of fantasy,” he says in a 1996 HBO comedy special. “I know women can fantasize—but you have no idea what men are capable of. There’s a cast of thousands in there. It’s crazy. Men need a director in their head, someone who can run the show. ‘We have a new cast member with us today: Julie. Hi, Julie…how’d you get here? He saw you bend down in the subway? Don’t be frightened. There’s a lot of scene changes. You’re in, you’re out, you’re in, you’re out. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Are you bisexual? Well, you are now.’”

It’s funny, but it got me wondering about whether things are more reasonably rhymed inside the head of a typical female.

My ridiculously shallow and incomplete research of the World Wide Web suggests the answer is yes. And no. You’d think someone would have been able to figure this out by now, but my limited sources conflict.

"A woman has a more erotic mind than a man," sexologist Robert Birch, Ph.D., told Men’s Health magazine. "A man is more likely to say, ‘Yeah, I want to have sex, let's get into it.' A woman is more likely to say, ‘Yeah, I want to talk dirty.' Women are more into the theater, the romance, and the drama surrounding sex, rather than just the act."

On the other hand, a study by the University of Granada in Spain found that men and women tend to have very similar fantasies, but that women have more “pleasant” ones. Which makes me wonder what would constitute an “unpleasant fantasy” and why anyone would entertain one.

Em & Lo of Em&Lo.com posit that women may be “less conflicted” about their fantasies than men. There may be something to that. For example, author Nancy Friday told People magazine in 1980 that while men love to fantasize about threesomes and orgies, they wouldn't ever share their wives or lovers with other men in real life. “It would set up too much ambivalence and anxiety,” Friday said, “but in fantasy it's fun.”

That, however, is no different than Ask Men.com’s explanation of its Top Female Fantasy No. 6: Threesome with another woman: “This (fantasy) rarely involves you (the guy) getting playtime with the second hottie, as most girlfriends do not want to see their man touch another woman. In this scenario, you’re meant to play voyeur until your woman is ready for something more hardcore. This allows her to experience the best of both worlds without having to worry about things like jealousy or sharing.”

Laura Anne Stuart, who owns The Tool Shed, an erotic boutique in Milwaukee, nailed the answer in her Sexpress column, which appears in the Shepherd Express newspaper: “Much of the anger and confusion about sexual fantasies comes from the fact that we don’t distinguish things we fantasize about from things that we actually want to do.”

For example, that Spanish study found that women are more likely than men to fantasize about being forced to have sex. But, I’m pretty sure I don’t know any women who are actually hoping some flesh-and-blood creep will drag them into a dark alley.

Anyway, I was pleased to see that the Granada study found similarities between men’s and women’s fantasies. Palm Springs Heat and Malibu Bride both have scenes in which the romantic leads fantasize about each other. In each case, the scenarios are exactly the same, but they’re told from slightly different points of view.

So far, no one has said, “Hey, Dave, your dual fantasy scenes are bogus. No man/woman would ever think that way.” To the contrary, these scenes have gotten some of the most enthusiastic thumbs-ups from my writing group members, beta readers and reviewers.

Which means I can proceed with confidence as I embark on writing at least one more full-length installment in the Fast Lane Romance series, and maybe a few shorter ones about some favorite side characters attaining their happily-ever-afters. I should have no trouble making their fantasies come true. All I have to do is enlist the cast of thousands that lives in my head.

Malibu Bride will be available as a Kindle download and as a paperback in mid to late May.

"Orgasm face?" What's not to love about that?

“Why He Hates Your Orgasm Face.”

That, says comedian Jessi Klein, is the Cosmopolitan magazine teaser that inspired her to write a joke about angst-ridden women staring into mirrors, screwing up their pusses to practice looking more comely when they’re climaxing.

“He hates?” I thought. “There are men who hate a woman’s ‘orgasm face’? Especially when it’s the face of the women they’re having sex with?”

This was an article I had to read.

Finding the article, from December 2008, was a lot more difficult than finding commentary on it that concluded men are scum and Cosmo is the fetid muck on which they feed.

For example, Dr. Amy Tuteur, an obstetrician-gynecologist and former Harvard Medical School clinical instructor, raged on Salon.com about how Cosmo was not just complicit in a plot to reduce women to being mere sex toys for men, but also the movement’s evil leader.

“You might be pretty, you might be thin, you might be well-endowed, and that will convince him to take you to bed,” she wrote in Your "orgasm face"? Cosmo and the pornification of women. “That’s not where it ends, though. He’s still entitled to judge your performance during sex and find you lacking.”

A post at Jezebel.com titled Once More, With Feeling: Ladymags Generate Anxiety Over “Orgasm Faces” accused Cosmo of manufacturing insecurity: “It's not enough that you have to worry about your pores, your body hair and your weight: Now you need to think about what you look like while in the throes of ecstasy. Because at the very moment when you're about to shudder from paroxysms of delight, your man is judging you.”

The first comment was, “What about HIS orgasm face? In my experience, his is way worse than mine.”

And in "Orgasm Face”: Be Sure You Don’t Turn Him Off!, a Society Pages.org post, Gwen Sharp, Ph.D., declared that “Cosmo is reminding us, in case we forgot, that a woman’s sexual pleasure isn’t really about her.”

All valid criticisms. Except, as it turns out, not of this article.

Cosmo’s article—Your Orgasm Face: What He’s Thinking When He Sees It—starts with news you can use: “According to a study, when men view women having sex, they look at their faces first and linger there longer than on any other area of their anatomies. Researchers speculate that a guy may focus on your face because he's looking for affirmation—your expressions register an honest, visible measure of whether his touches are arousing you and, possibly if you're having orgasm.”

It goes on to provide tips on how to “let the feelings of sexual bliss wash over you without becoming self-conscious.” Inhaling and exhaling deeply, for instance, will “bring you into a deeper zone free of outside disruptions, where all your senses are heightened and you can truly relax. It's almost impossible to obsess about your perceived physical flaws when your brain is being flooded with pleasurable sensations.”

Cosmo also suggests women check out their lovers’ faces because “chances are, he's squinting, mashing his lips together, opening his mouth, clenching his jaw or displaying other expressions of pleasure. Take his expressiveness as a cue to reveal the same passion freely” because “he'll most likely mirror those looks of excitement right back to you. Bliss begets more bliss.”

It finishes by encouraging you to moan, shout or “otherwise get verbal,” if that’s what you do. “You shouldn't stifle any sounds or facial contortions that happen naturally because the more you can let go when you're getting down with your partner, the more you'll actually enjoy it.”

In other words, Cosmo is not saying women should change their behavior because men judge them, but that women should stop judging themselves. Not that men are turned off when women are turned on, but that women turn themselves off with anxiety. Not that men can’t stand it, but are thrilled, when their women have fun. Not that men hate a woman’s orgasm face, but that they love it so much, there’s nothing else they’d rather see at the moment.

Not manufacturing insecurity, but trying to alleviate it.

To her credit, Sharp recanted her initial screed. Not just parts of it. All of it. Every dot and dash. What changed her mind? She read the article.

Look, there’s plenty in this world to get enraged about. Especially when it comes to gender inequality. And, I know, there are men who suck at sex because they’re only concerned with, as, Laraine Newman once said on Saturday Night Live, “draining the lizard.” I’m right there with you, ladies.

And I’m not ranking on Jessi Klein—sometimes the truth needs a little sculpting to make a joke really kill, and the actual teaser, "Your Orgasm Face: What He’s Thinking When He Sees It," obviously didn’t fit the joke Klein wanted to tell.

But the very idea that a man would hate a woman’s “orgasm face?” Now, that's laughable.

I mean, come on.

Have I seen you before, or am I making that up?

One of the things about creating characters is that you can find yourself forgeting they’re not real. You start seeing flesh-and-blood people who make you say, “That woman looks just like someone I know.”

Only not quite.

For example, someone once asked me who I would like to see play Lara if Hollywood made Palm Springs Heat into a movie. I answered Julianne Hough—but with dark brown hair. Why her? Because I’d just seen her in a TV commercial and thought, “Wow, she looks like Lara.”

This phenomenon of seeing living, breathing versions of my fictional characters happens all the time. I can’t open a department store mailer, do research on dress styles or go to a restaurant without seeing approximations of Lara or Sushma, the heroine of Malibu Bride.

In fact, it was in a restaurant in Chicago where I saw a woman who was everything I imagine Sushma to be physically: Petite and curvy with big, Bambi eyes and short, slightly wavy hair. Man, oh man, I wanted to take a picture of that woman. But how do you explain yourself?

“Hi, I’m not a stalker or a creep of any kind, but would you mind if I took a picture of you because you look like an imaginary woman I’ve been thinking about all day, every day for the past several months?”

So I’m left with a collection of almosts and kinda-sortas. Like this gallery of Julianne Hough photos. (Sorry, you’ll have to click on the links to see what I’m talking about.) And this one of a blond Internet store model in a black dress like the dress I picture Lara wearing when she meets Clay.

This one of Dancing With the Stars babe Samantha Harris comes pretty close to my idea of what Lara and her “diamond blue eyes” look like with dark hair. I know, I know…Samantha Harris doesn’t have “diamond blue eyes.” They’re greenish. Like I said: kinda-sorta.

The picture that most closely coincides with my idea of Lara’s face and build is this one of a model wearing a lacy pink chemise. Of course, the model is blond. There’s always something.

For some reason, I’ve had better luck finding examples that illustrate Sushma. Maybe because, in my mind, Sushma kinda sorta looked like The Cooking Channel’s Bal Arneson before I had any idea The Cooking Channel’s Bal Arneson even existed. Here she is in a promo for her Spice Goddess TV show, wearing a purple tank dress, and sporting a blue sari. Before I set eyes on that last photo, I wrote a scene in which Sushma’s wearing a blue sari. If that’s not a sign from the universe, I don’t know what is.

Here’s another almost-nailed-it shot. I describe Sushma as being curvy, but this model is apparently the only woman ever to pose for Victoria’s Secret to whom the term “curvy” does not apply.

Oh, well. The point, I guess, is for me to describe the characters well enough for you to get my drift. Draw you a picture literally without literally drawing you a picture.

Can I do that so well that these characters seem as real to you as they do to me? What I hope is that someday after you read Palm Springs Heat or Malibu Bride*, you’ll open a department store mailer, check out some dresses online or be sitting in a restaurant and find yourself thinking, “That woman looks just like someone I know.”



* Malibu Bride will be available through Amazon later this spring.