"The other half of his mind was focused on creating a man"

At this point it was probably last year that Mills & Boon teamed up with newsagent W.H. Smith and eBookseller Kobo for RoWriLife, or Romance Writing Life, for the longer, but equally problematic, name. RoWriLife gave authors the opportunity to recycle their failed So You Think You Can Write manuscripts. The Florida-based journalist Kerry McKay has since been announced as the winner. Her novel, A Country Affair, beat out 465 submissions and is described as, 'Highly original, eccentric but romantic, a traditional romance with quirky characters in uniquely British situations.' Meanwhile, on the website and blog, the competition organisers were kind enough to offer their Top Ten tips on how to Romance Write Life. Are these perceptive critiques on the typical problems plaguing amateur fiction? Let us delve in and discover that no, they are not.

1. 'Grab readers’ attention with a gripping first chapter and a killer first line.' Beyond the title, author's name, blurb, tagline, reader's biography and some legal details about copyright and publishing dates, the opening line of a novel is often the first thing the reader will read, assuming that they start at the beginning. 'The novel’s opening can’t be all build up or backstory – something exciting has to happen!' What exciting things would be appropriate for a Romance novel featuring few characters outside the heroine and hero? The entrants of So You Think You Can Write preferred the traditional concepts of other genres, using thriller tropes to draw readers in before the big reveal that their book was a tedious will-they-won't-they love story after all. Resisting the Billionaire Playboy saw its heroine scaling the wall of a nightclub, to introduce intrigue and danger into a tale of weddings and the business of weddings.

2. 'Establish the emotional conflict that your characters are facing so that readers are dying to know how it will be resolved.' Couldn't this statement be rephrased in the form of a question that doesn't make sense? 'What is that these characters want the most and what is standing in their way?' Thank you. Without the establishing of an emotional conflict, readers would be left to guess at was keeping the characters apart, emotionally. Once the reader knows what is happening they will often keep reading to find out how things will end. In the case of Romance, the ending will be happy

3. 'Keep your central plot unique and fresh but also a clear and defined idea that you can pitch in a maximum of three sentences. You want to entice readers into a compelling novel, not confuse them with too many plot strands.' Nothing confuses a romance reader quite like plot strands. One plot is usually enough, bulked out with two subplots that are easily resolved within the central story. To simplify matters further, the two subplots can be the same as the main plot. The challenge the author faces is stringing out their idea into three sentences without repeating themselves.

4. 'Avoid clichés. The hero and heroine bumping into each other and spilling each other’s drinks has been done 1000 times! Find something new that’s completely your own.' So many spilled drinks. Should people in the throes of love be allowed to carry beverages? History says not, but at least now that cliché has been pointed out, the days of either drink-carrying or drink-spilling may be over. The avoidance of clichés is important, as is recognising what a cliché is. Fortunately Mills & Boon have spent upwards of one hundred years creating every romantic cliché they could think of. Now it is up to a new generation of writers to create some more.

5. 'Your characters need to be complex – they can’t just have one trait personalities.' Does your heroine love horses? Perhaps they love horses because of unresolved issues with their father, who himself was a horse who abandoned his daughter when she was little. This is the different between superficial archetypes and characters who feel real. While heroes often have only one thing on their mind - marriage - they carry that same obsessional will into the other areas of their life, such as billionairing and home-decoration. If they are doctors they are often also single parents. Playboys are no longer just one-dimensional caricatures. Authors have added other identifiers, including Greek and Italian, and complex traits such as ruthlessness.

6. 'Your characters also don’t have to be perfect. Flawed characters with interesting emotional conflicts make for stronger stories than characters who are practically perfect in every way.' The days of idealization are over. As we move into a new era where people are more three-dimensional than ever, readers expect their fictional characters to accurately reflect this. Mills & Boon has expanded its oeuvre to cater for as many peculiar tastes as their marketing team are capable to thinking up. There are now subgenres devoted to rich characterisation, heart-breaking emotional crises and quirky small-town locations. The publisher's tendency towards idealising the hero physically has allowed them to play around with different kinds of personal deficiencies including committmentphobia, haughtiness and having more money than they know what to do with.

7. 'Your central characters need to go on a journey throughout the story. Usually from a state of (self) ignorance or misunderstanding about what will make them happy to a point of self-awareness and acceptance.' Sometimes involving physical movement, but more often than not the journey is one of worrying while stood. The questions every romance novel asks are a series of simple ones. What makes these two characters happy and what should make them happy and why is it taking so long for them to figure out that happiness can only be found in the formulaic results of Romance Fiction? The answers are independence, marriage and narrative.

8. 'Show don’t tell. Characters and events need to be revealed through actions rather than long passages of narrative which can weaken the tension in your story.' This point misuses the word narrative, and seems confused over what events are, but the argument for show rather than tell is valid, albeit irrelevant. Reveal character flaw, motivation and unresolved father issues through the nuanced use of action and subtext. For example, rather than this how-to guide telling the reader that spelling out Bewildered Heart's loneliness, instead we can reveal so much more by subtly hinting at the problem, to no one, because Bewildered Heart has no readers.

9. 'What your characters say or don’t say to other characters can often reveal a lot more about how they are really feeling than what they directly tell the reader.' This point is identical to the previous point, reminding the aspiring not to lay things on too thickly. Despite this, speaking directly to another character is not the same as speaking directly to the reader, at least until Mills & Boon invent the 'Make Your Own Romance' genre. Even then a gentle approach will most often be better, and perhaps this will be explained by a final thought that is the same as the previous two, only worded differently.

10. 'Know your market. Who are the author you write in a similar style to? What makes your book appeal to fans of these authors and what will make it stand out? Think about why a reader would choose your book over that of another author aiming at the same market.' The call for originality is idealistic and all, but the most important question to ask is, who is you most derivative of? Is they successful? Is they very successful? If so, please continue pursuing a career in romance writing. If your influences have struggled to sell their novels, you might as well quit now.

"Not a bad effort - for a girl"

As Mills & Boon enters into an era they will misguidedly describe as their renaissance, the public relation gurus of News Corp. International have found inventive ways to spread the message that their product is no longer for lonely housewives, lonely old ladies and the chronically-demented. While that dependable audience will continue to be catered for, new and lucrative markets are simultaneously being pursued. Modernisation was the buzzword of yesteryear. Now Mills & Boon have moved onto new words, such as realism and contemporariness. The days of colour-coordinated front covers are over, albeit ongoing, and the archetypal characters and chauvinistic plots are being complimented by new novels with subversions of industry standards. Gone are the days when a Mills & Boon book could be described succinctly by the Oxford English Dictionary as, 'a popular romantic novel.' Fans should not panic, however, as the romantic and novel parts of that description remain intact.

For greater insight, who better for the Daily Telegraph to speak to than one of the next generation of authors that have been chosen to bring Harlequin into the near-present. According to trendsetters, popstars are beyond sexuality, social media is a theme, beauty no longer exists and marketing forces dictate that everyone is attractive to everyone all the time. Radhika Sanghani marked the publication of her debut novel with an article for the Daily Telegraph in which she notes how times have indeed changed. Sanghani explains that Mills & Boon are moving away from, 'Chivalrous knights and coy maidens waiting to be deflowered,' and it is about time. Chivalry is dead and virgins haven't been coy since the 1860s. History belongs in the still-very-popular Historical subgenre. As if to prove the many points she has yet to make, Sanghani has entitled her book Virgin. The titular character's presumed modesty is implied.

The move towards progress has been ongoing for three years now, and undertaken naturally, spurred on only by happenstance. For the corporation, a widening of the potential markets saw Mills & Boon aim with a scattershot approach to younger women, teenagers and the intellectually mature who always believed Romance Fiction to be beneath them. The heroines are no longer just innocent ingénues, bakers, secretaries, maidens and Bridget Jones'. Now they are still them, albeit facing greater complexities, including bereavement and infertility. For example, the winner of So You Think You Can Write was notable for concerning a heroine unable to conceive, and the arrogant Sicilian billionaire playboy who seduces her. The new, improved formula has extended beyond competition winners and into the realm of non-competition winners, and has been hinted at, attempted and introduced to readers stealthily over several decades.

Sanghani elaborates, 'Anouska Knight's A Part of Me tells the story of a couple trying to adopt a child. It goes into detail about the role of social workers, and what it means for a woman to be childless, and though there is a romance plot, this comes second to the heroine’s quest to have a child.' It might appear that romance and child-having are mutually-exclusive plotlines, but this is probably inaccurate. What has changed from the standard setup is a twist on how the author prioritises themes. Where once the preference of Romance Fiction was on the romance, the appropriately-dubbed Women's Fiction has placed emphasis on the women. Knight's earlier attempt, Since You’ve Been Gone, is not the novelisation of a Kelly Clarkson song, despite the world's calls for such a thing, but is instead about a young woman’s journey through widowhood. Just when this sounds as if it has strayed too far from the Romance remit, details come to the rescue. 'Admittedly the heroine, Holly Jefferson, is distracted by charming men, but unlike the typical Mills & Boon maidens of old, she’s also focused on her career: a bakery business.'

Moving on, 'Fiona Harper’s The Little Shop of Hopes and Dreams tells the story of a woman, Nicole, who works at an agency where she helps men to stage proposals for their future fiancées. It taps into themes of social media and entrepreneurship, while containing a love story.' The Little Shop of Hopes and Dreams probably shouldn't have been mentioned in a bid to improve the publisher's image. Still, how about Maybe This Christmas by Sarah Morgan? 'A girl marries her childhood sweetheart, after he splits up with the mother of his teenage daughter.' So many questions about the ages of those characters, but doesn't the synopsis have all the trappings of a typical romance? 'It has all the trappings of a typical romance, but also explores issues of bullying.' Perhaps bullying your childhood sweetheart into leaving the mother of his teenage daughter is a suitable opening for a different kind of romance novel, one where the heroine does not care about coming across as likeable. There is almost no need for her hair to frizz on sunny days.

After those less than appealing examples, what about you, Radhika Sanghani, and Virgin? Are there damsels in distress? 'There are no damsels in distress; instead readers meet Ellie Kolstakis, a 21-year-old student who’s desperate to lose her virginity.' After all, just what is the definition of a damsel anyway? While checking the dictionary, aren't desperation and distress synonymous? These are minor quibbles, of course, when compared to the originality of a twenty-something virginal heroine. 'Virginity is, of course, a common Mills & Boon trope, but Ellie doesn’t want to lose it to The One. Unlike a more old-school romance, the novel doesn’t end with true love; instead Ellie finds herself, and she finds feminism.' Old School Mills & Boon authors have argued that Feminism can be found in all life choices, and that includes sacrificing your innocence in exchange for money. Yet, the real issue with Virgin is less its attitude towards sexual politics and more its finale. Can a Mills & Boon novel without a Happy Ever After still call itself a Mills & Boon novel? The answer may be as simple and disappointing as a solitary tear running down the unblemished cheek of a coy maiden.

Surely women's favourite emotion factory will not desert what made them famous, influential and handsomely rich. The company has always been proud of its history, their back catalogue merely a reflection of the decades their books were written in. A move into the crowded marketplace of Young Adult will need a major facelift to remove the out-dated, misogynistic taste from the collective mouths of the readership. Yet, for the most part, Sanghani speaks of necessary alterations to keep up with the times. The focus of the evolution should have been in the quality of the writing, with more ambitious plotlines and richer characterisation. Sanghani does at least appear to be working to improve half of the last one. 'The more passive traditional heroines have been sidelined for stronger, younger women who don’t just want a man, but a fulfilling career, too. Gender roles are reversed in a way that reflects a wider social change.' If there is one direction heroines need to head it is younger. Yet how unrecognisable must Mills & Boon become, and for what purpose?

In Neurosurgeon... and Mum! the novel's heroine yearned for a family and found one, gaining confidence from their love and restarting her career in medicine. MacKenzie's Promise begins with a baby being kidnapped. In The Dad Next Door our lonely heroine inserts herself into a family recovering from divorce and the loss of a child. The author of Accidental Princess kills several families to bring her heroine to the throne. The majority of Romances involve blackmail, prostitution, unwanted pregnancy, arranged marriage, bad weather, office bullying, sexual harassment, gypsies, death and the pressure of arranging the perfect wedding at short notice. Tragedy and the occasional pirate attack are nothing new to the genre Mills & Boon single-handedly invented. Playing catch-up with reality seems an embarrassing failure on the part of the publisher, and yet the company remains dedicated to market whims, if feminism can be considered a whim. The inclusion of difficult subject matter is not a revolutionary idea, but greater complexity and deeper insight would be. Still, how can it be considered escapist fantasy if you have to solve your own problems?

"A woman alone is a deserted temple, full of the echoes of her dreams"

Hidden away rather appropriately at the University of Reading is Boons Mots: An Anthology of Artless Extracts, a fifty-year old pamphlet compiled anonymously by Mills & Boon editors. Highlights include favourite lines from aspiring authors and a letter from Violet Winspear, whose novels include Satan Took a Bride, Bride of Lucifer, Devil in a Silver Room, Dearest Demon, Lucifer's Angel, Darling Infidel, The Passionate Sinner and, just as a pattern appears to emerge, Palace of the Pomegranate. Winspear asks after the future of romance fiction, with questions ranging from the eerily prescient to the timelessly adorable. We may never know what prompted Winspear to write a list so long that lettering it proved myopic, but we may also never know any of the answers.

Much has changed in fifty years, of course, and modern Mills & Boon authors show little interest in the etiquette of bedroom door positioning, but there are several thoughts that require thinking about. As always, into this void steps Bewildered Heart. 'Are the books too long by present day standards?' Violet begins. Whether present day means the historical present of yesteryear when Winspear broached this subject, or the present day of today or the present day of the future when this will be read accidentally by someone searching for Hugh Jackman photographs, romance novels have always been longer than necessary. The formulaic demands of word count do not help and while Winspear offers solutions such as shorter passages of dialogue and cuts to descriptive detail, superficial alterations do not affect the larger problems of form. Nevertheless, was this crusading writer requesting a technical discussion on inherent romance structures, or was she looking for a simple yes or no? Romance novels are shorter than the majority of other genres, and therefore the answer is simple. The books are not too long by present day standards, but should still be shorter, unless extra words would make them more interesting, as well as longer.

Perhaps Violet Winspear wrote her letter seeking statistical proof that many of the archetypes and clichés of Romance actually work. This, after all, is a manifesto asking for permission to revolt. 'Are backgrounds more popular if foreign?' she asked. 'Are heroes more desirable if foreign? Are successful heroes and virtuous heroines passé? Are heroes required to be more ordinary? Are heroines required to be more ordinary? Are established romantic ideas out of date?' As it turned out, a handful of decades later, authors eventually covered every possibility, with local characters, down-to-earth sheikh surgeons and impoverished billionaires all making an entrance to varying degrees of popularity. Given that each book sold an identical number of copies, the Mills & Boon of Winspear's age found a way to avoid measurements of fashion. Nowadays, an in depth undertaking of what sells would be possible had anyone such an inclination.

There is a wider point of Winspear's befuddlement. What is convention? With a product such as Mills & Boon, the designs that have become so universal they are the generic jokes of anti-romance criticism were created not necessarily from readership desire but from a lack of diversity. As the author herself asks, 'Are readers satisfied with the romances? Are readers stating specific requirements? Are readers stating specific dislikes?' Once the publisher begins dictating requirements to their authors based upon the findings of market research creative freedom is diminished and Mills & Boon lose the individual voices it claims to crave. Yet Harlequin is a corporate entity motivated by profit. Original work is heralded and increasingly the company has looked to branch out, creating new imprints for more daring directions.

Despite this, playing to a formula, whether real or imagined, seems safe, especially in light of the victory for Resisting the Sicilian Playboy in the most recent So You Think You Can Write competition. Why Sicilian, modern day versions of Winspear might ask. Are Sicilian playboys that much more appealing to consumers than playboys from less exotic locations? Romance fiction has traditionally tended towards the far away, idealised backdrops of abroad. Thus it has been and the standard has rarely been questioned. New subgenres emerged to allow a move away from the norm.

When it came to offering alternative visions of classic romantic tropes, however, Violet Winspear preferred an innocent damsel in an exotic location. Her heroes were the hunters, hard-muscled, sardonic, rich, frightening and fascinating. She caused outrage when she commented, 'They must be the sort of men who are capable of rape: men it's dangerous to be alone in the room with.' Beneath the cynical exterior, however, her alpha males are lost, lonely and in need of love. Due to this, her heroines are passive creations by comparison, lacking in modern ideals such as self-esteem and sexual awareness. This was partly because of the era, but her novels are marked by old-fashioned attitudes towards sex, contriving plots of kidnap and forcible marriage to relieve the heroine of desire and moral responsibility in choosing to have sex.

Perhaps Winspear saw this as a necessary means to an end. She asks her editor, 'Are we to suppose (our) readers a bit dim?' It seems a worthwhile question and is followed later by Zb, 'Are authors to suppose their readers remain mentally backward?' Assuming that a writer begins their career in romance fiction under this assumption they would be wise to periodically check that they should continue to believe it. The answer then and today, for this question and most of the others is, 'Yes, but they shouldn't.' However Winspear defined mental backwardness is unknown, but it seems unlikely that this is a ringing endorsement of the intelligence of her readership. Mills & Boon novels do not challenge their readers with such demands as complicated sentences, politics, sociology, tension, unpredictability or even lengthy words, but there are powerful cultural undercurrents to what Winspear said and did not say. She wrote seventy novels in a career spanning twenty-seven years. Her books may belong to her time, and Romance has evolved to whatever it is now. Many of queries Winspear asked remain relevant, and continue to be unanswerable.

The type-written page of Boon Mots concludes with an insight into the direction Winspear saw her genre heading. 'Are authors to suppose sex measures maturing romance? Is sex the new name for romance? Are authors permitted to rebel against the above question?' The future played out as expected. In these times no one uses romance as anything other than a euphemism for pornography. Mills & Boon is a gateway to erotica, and the most popular exponents of the sex genre are published only if they contain light bondage as an indication of emotional development. Without regular sex scenes authors and readers have no idea how successfully a courtship is maturing.

Heroes are no longer capable of rape and heroines occasionally dare to be the aggressors, knowing what they want from a man and not being afraid to ask for it in exchange for money. Romance fiction of the 1960 and 1970s would look on forlornly, shaking its head at what has become of revolution. Where are the timid virgins, they would ask? Where are the dominating alpha males exercising control through wealth and masculinity? Why aren't all the novels set on islands in the colonial Dutch East Indies? What is escapist about reality? Romance fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, however, is misguided. Not much has changed, really, the business still caters for all tastes, but a little room has been made at the edges, for those authors who were allowed permission to rebel.

"I concentrate on my bagel"

Due to it being the perfect occasion for a dubious dating decision, Valentine's Day was chosen as the day to release the cinematic adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey. The adult-only erotic blockbuster has broken box office records, taking $85million dollars in its opening weekend and comfortably knocking the previous erotic blockbuster, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: Sponge Out of Water, off the top spot. Christian Grey is all about the money, of course, as well as feeding the world and subjugating women monogamously, but what said the critics and the real critics, members of the public? Receipts in the United States dropped by seventy-five per cent in its second week of release, suggesting word-of-mouth had been unhelpful. Reviews, meanwhile, have been vitriolic, but the filmmakers might have expected this, especially when considering how bad the film they made turned out to be. Despite this drop, the $23.4million earned at the U.S. box office was enough to keep the movie at the top of the charts. Sequels and spin-offs are inevitable and given how abruptly the first film finishes, there should be no doubt that the audience's punishment is far from complete.

Fifty Shades of Grey: The Movie scores a twenty-five per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Early indications suggest this is twenty-five per cent higher than initial predictions. Many critics have praised the film for not being the book, and this appears to be the movie's main strength. The major failings of Fifty Shades of Grey: The Novel were found in the writing of E.L. James. The book was long, the plotting was tedious, the sex scenes were gratuitous, the inner goddess interior monologues were infuriating and the lengthy descriptions of the hero's perfection exhausted the reader's patience. The new and exciting medium of film alleviates these problems by swapping prose for images. Who needs to hear how beautiful Christian Grey is when director Sam Taylor-Wood fills her frames with Jamie Dornan staring intensely at the middle distance, looking all handsome? Who needs to be told of Grey's opulence when behind Jamie Dornan is proof in the form of product placement? Who needs to know what Ana Steele thinks? The screenplay pares down James' five-hundred pages into two hours of moving pictures, thus removing a huge number of offending words. The remaining offending words are still offensive, but there are fewer of them.

In her review for Sight & Sound, Jane Giles begins by listing classic romances. 'Like Cinderella, Bluebeard, Pygmalion or Twilight, (Fifty Shades) is a romantic fantasy and a fairytale, a story of sexual awakening in which the innocent heroine’s inherent strengths allow her to battle monsters, in this case capitalism and a male sexuality twice-warped by childhood abuse and adolescent manipulation.' The critics have joined the filmmakers in the psychological nightmare that is attempting to find subtext in softcore titillation. Capitalism is a monster humankind cannot fight with naïve virgins alone. Still, Ana doesn't so much fight oppressive economic models as she does admire all that they buy and then marries a billionaire for a life of financial comfort. The main antagonist Ana faces, besides the crazed stalkers, ex-girlfriends, parents, college students and mechanical malfunction, is male sexuality. She does this with a straightforward ease most becoming of how women behave in erotic novels. She asks Christian to change, which he does because the narrative requires it. Then she asks him to change again, in much the same way as before, except this time he refuses, again because the narrative requires it.

Critics have noted that the filmmakers were constricted by the source material and the author's sway over all elements of the process. Giles admits, 'One suspects that Taylor-Johnson was never free even to push at the edges of sexual representation, and the film’s lack of explicit imagery and grit is one of its disappointments.' Following a similar conclusion Margot Harrison at Seven Days noted, 'A more adventurous writer and director could have turned this twisted fairy tale into a full-fledged surreal fantasy, using its inconsistencies as assets. But James, who wielded considerable control over this production, surely wouldn't have given her OK to such escapades.' E.L. James is not solely to blame for wanting the film adaptation of her novel to have similarities with what she wrote. Audiences, too, were keen that their favourite scenes were loyally translated to the big screen. Had a writing team featuring Kelly Marcel, Patrick Marber and James herself deviated from the source material, changing characters or cutting those long, redundant sequences that readers loved, the disapproval of the viewers would have been felt in box-office figures. Fortunately, Taylor-Wood stayed true to that classic scene where Ana sits at her new laptop and tries to think of something clever to write.

Speaking of which, for there to be cheap sex there must be alternatives in terms of price; expensive, modest, reasonable, bargain. There are possibly others. Fifty Shades of Grey falls across categories. On the one hand, it is sleazy exploitation, but that hand is gloved in decadence as designed by Armani. This presents an unobtainable vision of beauty and affluence to an audience just wanting to be aroused by an acceptable pornographification of status. To the uninitiated Fifty Shades may appear to be a subversive twist on the fairytale romance between prince and pauper, but it instead belongs to the Solicititilation tales of Mills & Boon. Ana refuses money from her lover-cum-owner, and his extravagant gifts are considered loans. She does not want Christian for his wealth and life of luxury, preferring to pretend there is her ideal man behind the emotional sterility and violence. His violence is not real violence, of course, but rather the fluffy kind of subjugation that is both pleasurable and sensitively-undertaken. Ana concludes her story victorious, married to the billionaire and with all the beauty and affluence that entails.

When an example of female empowerment is offered, where better to look for insightful critique than Playboy magazine? Stephen Rebello has few kind words. 'This gift to the world of schlock cinema tries valiantly to elevate the Twilight fan fiction-inspired source material to a level of melodrama worthy of ‘60s stuff like A Summer Place or Strangers When We Meet. It sometimes succeeds but just as often it sloshes around in a bubble bath of high camp a la 9 ½ Weeks.' Despite this less than impressive beginning, Rebello does admit that there are positives to be found in the glossy, fetishistic look of a perfume commercial, the film's lurid convictions and fifteen minutes of sex scenes so timid no one should be forced to shift awkwardly in front of confounded grandparents. 'The plot is as simple as its sexual politics are muddled,' he adds. Readers might have assumed this from their memories of reading, but fans of Romance fiction who missed Fifty Shades will assume this as well.

As to be expected from a Playboy article, the review ends a criticism that could just as easily be thrown back in its direction, with the sexes reversed. 'It floats in a female wish-fulfilment world of ridiculously handsome, chiseled dudes so engorged with desire that they whisk away average-looking virgins on their self-piloted private jets to their lavish penthouses featuring walk-in closets the size of Texas, drawers lined with an endless assortment of grey silk ties and, just for fun, a secret torture chamber.' Nothing says female wish-fulfilment quite like a lack of colour in decorative accessories, and yet, as we all know, there are only fifty shades of grey tie and that hardly constitutes an endless assortment. Despite this oversight, Rebello's review is consistent with those who have felt the need to weigh in on Fifty Shades. The overwhelming critical disdain was written resignedly, as nothing would stop the money train from pulling into every station. The Turner prize-winning director, the Academy Award-nominated co-scribe and the Oscar-winning producers combined their high-brow credentials for the veneer of artistic credibility, but their movie was always going to escape the box-office poison of expert opinion.

“Don’t you dare speak about the man I love that way”

The winner of So You Think You Can Write was announced shortly after contestants had submitted their entries. The champion was none other than the most predictable, Resisting the Sicilian Playboy by Amanda Cinelli. Nothing says Mills & Boon quite like a handsome tycoon overcoming resistance through a combination of handsomeness, money and strength, and the judges agreed. All those underwhelming rip-offs of Sleeping with the Enemy were no match for an underwhelming rip-off of everything Mills & Boon has ever published. For her part in the success, Cinelli receives the bounty of victory, which culminated in having her novel published on Valentine's Day 2015. Therefore Bewildered Hearts should look out for Resisting the Sicilian Playboy on bookshelves near them, taking pride of place among such titles as The Silician's Innocent Mistress, Love Slave to the Sicilian Billionaire, Bought for the Sicilian Billionaire's Bed, Captive at the Sicilian Billionaire's Command, Resisting the Billionaire, Bedded by the Italian Playboy and What the Greek Can't Resist.

The novel is available, in exchange for a modest fee, for all those who didn't manage to read it when it was free to download on the So You Think You Can Write website. The pitch introduced us to the characters and then to the plot, but the book itself tells a similar story with an equally predictable conclusion, albeit with thousands of extra and unnecessary words. Leo Valente is notorious among readers of tabloids, although the cause of his infamy is left vague. Still, wedding planner Dara Devlin needs his family estate for her client. Leo has only one request, that Dara work for him, as his entertainment-consultant and girlfriend. She accepts, as wedding planners are fearless pioneers willing to risk anything for the perfect wedding plan. What follows is largely guessable from the title, a playboy, an exotic location and some resistance. Dara's occupation suggests wedding planning, which leads us to assume the novel will end with a wedding in an exotic location.

The first chapter begins suitably enough with product placement and a heroine straddling a balcony ledge of a Milanese nightclub. Quickly come the Chick-lit asides that display a misunderstanding of how to wear footwear, 'A woman stood by her shoes, no matter how sticky the situation.' Dara is a woman only a sidestep away from being fully dressed, but there are bigger problems to deal with. Originally from Ireland, based in Syracuse and taking frequent trips to the mainland, Dara knows a thing or two about going the extra distance. Yet her latest assignment has been a series of failures. Desperation pushes her into a foolish plan, which she organises pedantically into three stages. Firstly, she must break into Platinum 1, which is either reopening or celebrating its ten year anniversary, Cinelli changes her mind. Secondly, she must find the owner, Italy's most beloved playboy Leo Valente. Thirdly, she must convince him of something. Her plan is both foiled and achieved when Leo finds her scaling a glass wall.

Leo Valente is not your standard sort of enigmatic hero. His hair is slightly askew. His eyelashes are overgrown. He has stubble. His gaze is smouldering. His voice sounds like silk, were silk able to make noise. His eyes are a unique shade of dark forest green. His chest is quite hairy. Despite these physical imperfections, he does at least have unresolved father issues. Herein lies the crux of the novel. Dara wishes to use his Sicilian castle for the wedding of Portia Palmer, the most famous English actress Ireland has ever produced, and requires Leonardo's permission. Leo has no interest in being reminded of another piece of property he owns, because this one just happens to be a metaphor for his arrogance and intimacy issues. Dara and Leo must wrestle for control of a metaphorical building that is also a building, only then will they be able to live happily ever after in the metaphorical building that has changed its metaphorical representation from his emotional aloofness to their empathetic love.

Leo has furnished the opulent Castello Bellamo with haunting memories. This explains Cinelli's follow-up prequel, The Sicilian Playboy's Incompetent Interior Decorator. Meanwhile, in the present, our titular playboy is a troubled man without paint or photographs of nice things. His father's ruthless business actions have alienated him from his homeland, the fictional town of Monterocca. At this moment, a beautiful blonde breaks into his private floor and offers him several opportunities. After all, she is on first name terms with Mr. Umberto and Mrs. Gianni Lucchesi, despite Gianni changing her name to Gloria halfway through the novel to avoid confusion when a man named Gianni Marcello turns up. With her reputation bolstered by the approval of potentially important characters, Leo realises that Dara's plans could repair his broken image among the poverty-stricken yokels of Sicily. More fundamental to life than business, family, island economy and identity, of course, is a visible bra strap. Leo and Dara have gone so long without sex the only thing they need to have sex is each other. This seems sure to happen, but a phone call interrupts their conversation and the first chapter ends abruptly, without much of a story to show for itself. Fortunately for those still interested, the second chapter soon follows and ends within a few sentences.

In the third chapter, Leo takes Dara to his favourite restaurant in Milan, known for its magic coffee cups. They talk for pages about their personalities and readers are well-advised to skip over this sequence. From there they head to the party Leo has asked Dara to organise in the few minutes between courses. Her skills at uniform designing and party-guest-separating impress Leo, who until meeting Dara had only hired inanimate objects to do his thinking for him. Yet Leo does not want Dara for her meticulous eye for detail, although he does also want her for that. No, Leo wants Dara to be his fake girlfriend, and not just any fake girlfriend, but a fake girlfriend he can have sex with and treat much like a real girlfriend. Why not just ask her to be his real girlfriend if he always intended on seducing her? Such are the vagaries of the Sicilian playboy. Still, a game is afoot. Can Dara resist? Will Dara's femininity melt Leo's heart and allow him to open up to estranged family members? Will Leo be disgusted by Dara's premature menopause or will his love prove to Dara her only physical flaw need not be an impediment to happiness? Will the wedding of the century go off smoothly, making Dara's career and allowing her to plan the weddings of whatever minor brittish royalty is?

For those wishing to read the completed manuscript, this can be achieved in the usual variety of manners. However, for those who prefer their books with all the grammatical mistakes and continuity errors left in, the winning draft submitted by Cinelli remains available online. Unlike many of entries Resisting the Sicilian Playboy defeated in the competition, its title was considered suitable enough to be retained. How much has changed in the few months Harlequin editors had to work with Cinelli can only be known by reading both original and published stories. This seems unnecessary punishment, even for those driven by an insatiable curiosity. Resisting the Sicilian Playboy is indistinguishable from the usual fare of the Modern subgenre. The indefinable certain-something that Mills & Boon look for and believe they found in Cinelli is nothing more than marketability.

"Something inside the princesse changed after giving birth"

To help prepare aspiring authors submit to So You Think You Can Write, Harlequin editors have explained how to construct the perfect novel. While this may have been redundant after the publication of Secrets Uncovered there was much that the how-to bible failed to advise on. Equally important, of course, was judging by the first chapters entered into this year's competition, no one has really learned anything despite the many lessons. For this reason, Associate Editor Rachel Burkot has written, Good Pacing: Better Than a Solid Pair of Spanx. Pacing is so important to quality writing that Mills & Boon rarely mentions it or shows much evidence that they know what the word means. Fortunately, Burkot is here to help with a series of obvious statements entirely unrelated to the topic of pacing.

What is pacing, Burkot asks. Where better to begin than with the pacing found in an instruction manual for building a shed? 'Steps have to be listed in the correct order, otherwise the pacing will be off, and you'll never get your product put together.' This is correct, albeit irrelevant. Without a floor and walls a roof will simply fall to the ground, and will not even be considered a roof. In terms of romantic fiction, the sequence of events must be ordered to best maximise emotional resonance. Traditional romance fiction prefers linear narratives with a couple of sex scenes to pad out the second act and love neither realised nor declared until the final pages often after a misunderstanding or disagreement that separates the pair for long enough for them to see that life without the other is not worth living. This is the classic formula no one wishes to experiment with, and while pertinent to writing for Mills & Boon does not explain pacing. Still, the article has more comparisons. There is an email to an old friend, cement between floors of a house, dental work and Spanx. All either require pacing or are pacing.

Yet, just what is pacing? According to Burkot, pacing romance is especially difficult because the process of courtship is, 'Less transparent, more on-the-page than in other genres, since the characters are meeting, going on dates and falling in love.' While the pacing of much fiction and non-fiction has its pacing off-on-page, Romance paces its stories with words and those words are always within the book, often printed as part of sentences. There is nowhere to hide in Romance and a lack of pacing will reveal itself by every letter appearing together as one large incomprehensible black smudge. Burkot elaborates, 'You can't have characters declare their love on the first date and get engaged on the second. That’s just not reasonable or relatable! Furthermore, the book would end at the second date.' Thus, delaying the inevitable must be what Mills & Boon thinks pacing is.

When it comes to avoiding the trappings of poor pacing Burkot has two issues. She does not want to see hero and heroine fall in love too soon and she does not want stories without conflict. 'If it’s obvious only one-quarter in that the characters are ga-ga for each other and neither hell nor high waters will keep them apart, where’s the hook to keep reading?' she asks. Secrets Uncovered delved deeply into defining conflict as the things that stop the couple from being together. Burkot explains them incorrectly as, 'Plot-wise (externally) and within themselves (internally).' Proper pacing, therefore, must be observed in both the storyline and the emotional dilly-dallying that is also the storyline. Pacing can be found within conflict, but conflict is not pacing. Nevertheless, when writing an essay on the importance of pacing without fully comprehending what pacing is, it seems sensible to stress the importance of things that you do comprehend, just as long as this advice is properly paced.

What are the benefits of including pacing in a story? For starters, there is the illusion of unpredictability. 'If you can make a reader forget that she already knows the ending of a romance for just a split second, you’ve done a fabulous job with pacing!' But what is pacing? With this sentence concluding the article it seems safe to assume that Rachel Burkot does not know either. Nevertheless, there is one valuable lesson that can be learned from favourably comparing speed and rhythm to an American hosiery company. If a romance novel is good it has either been properly placed or has an abundance of pacing. If, however, a romance novel is bad its failure may be the result of either improper pacing or no pacing whatsoever. When pacing a blogpost on the topic of pacing, a Bewildered Heart must include epiphanies at around this point to provide the piece with a reason for existing. Most readers will have skipped down to the final paragraph anyhow, safe in the knowledge that everything up until that point was filler broken up with crude innuendo.

To better understand what is clearly a misunderstood subject, we turn to Writer's Digest and an article by Jessica Page Morrell from Crafting Novels & Short Stories. She begins by asking, 'What is Pacing in Fiction?' Good question. 'Pacing is part structural choices and part word choices, and uses a variety of devices to control how fast the story unfolds.' These choices include sentence length and the use of verbs. Pace can be quickened and slowed by a variety of methods, depending on the nature of the scene. The difficulties for Romance authors stem from their preference towards a leisurely flow to the drama with plenty of stops for emotional gestation, handsomeness-noticing, skin-tingling and neuroses-having. Action scenes are rare and when they do occur they are often interrupted by lengthy summaries of what the reader already knows. Heroes and heroines are afflicted by internal conflicts created in their pasts, and this curtails narrative momentum. Writer's Digest offers an insight into action, suspense and excitement, but these words are rarely used to describe the Romance genre.

Nevertheless, what would be so bad about inventing a new form of modern romantic fiction employing some of the suggestions made by Writer's Digest? Readers would be swept along, not by wondering why the world's sexiest and most sensitive billionaire is still single, but by an author skilled at story-telling. Of Morrell's seven tips the most significant is action. 'Action scenes are where you “show” what happens in a story, and contain few distractions, little description and limited transitions.' Were Romance novels to have plot development this insight would be invaluable. The traditional Harlequin output struggles with pacing due to deeper, inherent difficulties with structure and story. A gentle pace is used to mask what is lacking. Once an aspiring author has mastered the basics they can begin to consider technical adjustments, and thus we await Rachel Burkot's next article, which will hopefully explain what the basics are.