When placed inside a library with time to kill there is only one course of action for a Bewildered Heart, and that is to find a Mills & Boon with a suitably idiotic blurb and sit cross-legged, so as to avoid further social embarrassment, reading until the day is through and you can return to brighter and more productive activities, such as writing about Mills & Boon on t'internet. This week has been a week of such mindless entertainment. Having briefly browsed the literary fiction section, so as to appear intelligent, you make the choice to settle down with some light erotica only to realise you have become that person you see in public libraries who scares and repulses you, leading you to avoid said library from then on.
To make matters worse, Bewildered Heart has managed to forget the title, author and character names of the novel we so enjoyed and have no way to find them out. To counter, allow us to make up those details now. In The Rugged Hero's Beautiful Blonde Chick, the lead female (the titular blonde chick) is a twenty-year-old beauty who has recently reinvented herself from sexy geek to sexy sexpot, achieved by swapping glasses for contacts. There's a tip for you uglies out there. This girl, let's doth thee Roxie, works in public relations. Now, it is easy to read this brief character biography and think, 'Ugh, what a disgrace to humanity.' You'd be right, of course, and you would also be correct in pointing out that there has already been a book concerning a guy who works in PR. Thankfully Roxie's career in what amounts to advertising in this book, because the author clearly didn't know what PR stood for, has nothing to do with the story. Phew!
Roxie's reinvention aspires to avoid the pitfalls of being young and unbelievably sexy. She wants to be taken seriously by her office filled with morons and prefers to be seen as a twenty-something with experience and knowledge, because twenty-somethings are so grounded and self-aware, and people in public relations have to be knowledgeable and experienced. Hah, book no one could remember anything about. You're funny. Meanwhile, a tree surgeon (Hasn't there already been a lumberjack type? Shush) working in the car park catches Roxie's eye. Let's call this chap Hank. He's thirty, gorgeous and owns his own house, despite not having much of a career. He's also serious about love, not wanting to waste his time with dead-end relationships no matter how sexy the girl is. You know, he's your typical man, who likes romance, women's feelings and marriage.
Despite his supposed maturity, Hank isn't immune from enjoying the view of Roxie's ass and breasts and legs. No sooner has the reader thought, 'This is predictable,' than a spanner is thrown into the works. Roxie's step-brother's best friend was this one and same Hank, ten years older than her and still wanting different things from life. But does Hank remember Roxie as the childish brat-kid he once rescued from a swimming pool? No. And for the next one-hundred and fifty pages (which amounts to three days in narrative terms) Roxie and Hank have sex in a variety of positions with Hank's penis receiving positive descriptions and Roxie's vagina almost constant attention. Absolutely nothing happens in these pages despite mild descriptions of fellatio and thrusting. There's more character development in a pop song and this entire epic sequence could have easily been edited out.
However, with no attempts at character development, or plot development, the selling point of the novel is the sex, and so, in essence, the story should have been cut and the novel should have begun with a couple having sex. As the book ended with this same twosome having sex, it's tricky to imagine a suitable place to finish things. Of course, as with porn, the viewer is usually the one to decide when they've had enough. If imbuing, or endowing, or enduing your novel with drama, pathos and excitement actually takes you from the gamut of emotions that Mills & Boon wallows in, then, besides contempt, what situation are you, gentle author, left in? There were a lot of commas in that sentence, as there are a lot Mills & Boon readers sentenced to comas. Oh! Snap.
When a fond romantic reads Mills & Boon books they are surely struck by how intolerable the main characters appear. Far more than real people are fairly intolerable, although strangely for the same reason, because were are often trying to read a book and they are annoying us. How about, as a twist to conventional story-telling, we write some romance fiction with likeable, funny, intelligent people who aren't emotionally-retarded? Everyone likes funny, intelligent people who aren't emotionally-retarded. Not to say we all hate emotionally-retarded idiots who have no sense of humour, but we do, don't we? We hate those kinds of people. If we see them on the street and good grief do we always seem to see them on the street we do a dramatic eye-roll, or sneer and make a snippy comment, trying to not let seeing that person ruin our day.
Why, then, should we be willing to read about their fictional romantic exploits? They never say anything funny or intelligent, oh and also, they're emotionally-retarded. To make them even more impossibly hateful, they are all incredibly attractive, to boot, both generically-handsome and genetically-handsome. Curse them. Every Mills & Boon hero looks like Barry Van Dyke, heralded for a square-jaw and little chin-dimple, much like an easy-going, non-threatening Michael Douglas with thicker, more manageable hair. In the real world (Barry Van Dyke doesn't really exist) people don't actually look like this. People are funny-looking, their beauty hidden beneath their despair and the over-compensation of their neuroses. They wear sunglasses to cover deformities and have skin issues. They're usually flabby in unfortunate areas and openly hate themselves over their appearance. Quite rightly too. It is difficult to empathize with the beautiful in the same way it is difficult to empathize with astronauts.
Stories such as The Rugged Hero's Beautiful Blonde Chick are impossible to enjoy. The tedious, empty and tirelessly superficial characters are shallow, their problems easily cast aside and their aspirations basic. No one is criticising Hank's determination to enterr a sexy twenty-year-old's heavenly warmth in a hammock. The problem with Hank is that he is an idiot named Hank. No one would want to be friends with this smug jerk, so no one can support Roxie's collapse into ever-lasting love for him. If the reader knew Hank, then they would high-five him during a homo-erotic game of handball when he boasts about banging a girl called Roxie, but that doesn't mean they recommend he marry a girl named Roxie. His latest conquest simply does not appear to be the monumental life-altering connection that the writer tells us it is.
By the same token, Roxie is a misguided dolt. She works in PR and is in love with a guy named Hank, who is old enough to be someone ten years older than her. To prove she is mature enough for a thirty-year-old man Roxie cooks for him and makes his house look pretty. Are we seriously supposed to believe their declarations of love at the story's climax when they haven't shared a single conversation over the course of the entire novel besides, 'Where are the condoms?' and 'Thanks, you're really good at that'? Or, as is more likely, do we assume they're horny cretins who have confused lust with love and have the shared emotional depth of a Mills & Boon story? Why should we care about the trivial issues of the beautiful people when they're too busy haven't amazing sex to notice them themselves?
To make matters worse, Bewildered Heart has managed to forget the title, author and character names of the novel we so enjoyed and have no way to find them out. To counter, allow us to make up those details now. In The Rugged Hero's Beautiful Blonde Chick, the lead female (the titular blonde chick) is a twenty-year-old beauty who has recently reinvented herself from sexy geek to sexy sexpot, achieved by swapping glasses for contacts. There's a tip for you uglies out there. This girl, let's doth thee Roxie, works in public relations. Now, it is easy to read this brief character biography and think, 'Ugh, what a disgrace to humanity.' You'd be right, of course, and you would also be correct in pointing out that there has already been a book concerning a guy who works in PR. Thankfully Roxie's career in what amounts to advertising in this book, because the author clearly didn't know what PR stood for, has nothing to do with the story. Phew!
Roxie's reinvention aspires to avoid the pitfalls of being young and unbelievably sexy. She wants to be taken seriously by her office filled with morons and prefers to be seen as a twenty-something with experience and knowledge, because twenty-somethings are so grounded and self-aware, and people in public relations have to be knowledgeable and experienced. Hah, book no one could remember anything about. You're funny. Meanwhile, a tree surgeon (Hasn't there already been a lumberjack type? Shush) working in the car park catches Roxie's eye. Let's call this chap Hank. He's thirty, gorgeous and owns his own house, despite not having much of a career. He's also serious about love, not wanting to waste his time with dead-end relationships no matter how sexy the girl is. You know, he's your typical man, who likes romance, women's feelings and marriage.
Despite his supposed maturity, Hank isn't immune from enjoying the view of Roxie's ass and breasts and legs. No sooner has the reader thought, 'This is predictable,' than a spanner is thrown into the works. Roxie's step-brother's best friend was this one and same Hank, ten years older than her and still wanting different things from life. But does Hank remember Roxie as the childish brat-kid he once rescued from a swimming pool? No. And for the next one-hundred and fifty pages (which amounts to three days in narrative terms) Roxie and Hank have sex in a variety of positions with Hank's penis receiving positive descriptions and Roxie's vagina almost constant attention. Absolutely nothing happens in these pages despite mild descriptions of fellatio and thrusting. There's more character development in a pop song and this entire epic sequence could have easily been edited out.
However, with no attempts at character development, or plot development, the selling point of the novel is the sex, and so, in essence, the story should have been cut and the novel should have begun with a couple having sex. As the book ended with this same twosome having sex, it's tricky to imagine a suitable place to finish things. Of course, as with porn, the viewer is usually the one to decide when they've had enough. If imbuing, or endowing, or enduing your novel with drama, pathos and excitement actually takes you from the gamut of emotions that Mills & Boon wallows in, then, besides contempt, what situation are you, gentle author, left in? There were a lot of commas in that sentence, as there are a lot Mills & Boon readers sentenced to comas. Oh! Snap.
When a fond romantic reads Mills & Boon books they are surely struck by how intolerable the main characters appear. Far more than real people are fairly intolerable, although strangely for the same reason, because were are often trying to read a book and they are annoying us. How about, as a twist to conventional story-telling, we write some romance fiction with likeable, funny, intelligent people who aren't emotionally-retarded? Everyone likes funny, intelligent people who aren't emotionally-retarded. Not to say we all hate emotionally-retarded idiots who have no sense of humour, but we do, don't we? We hate those kinds of people. If we see them on the street and good grief do we always seem to see them on the street we do a dramatic eye-roll, or sneer and make a snippy comment, trying to not let seeing that person ruin our day.
Why, then, should we be willing to read about their fictional romantic exploits? They never say anything funny or intelligent, oh and also, they're emotionally-retarded. To make them even more impossibly hateful, they are all incredibly attractive, to boot, both generically-handsome and genetically-handsome. Curse them. Every Mills & Boon hero looks like Barry Van Dyke, heralded for a square-jaw and little chin-dimple, much like an easy-going, non-threatening Michael Douglas with thicker, more manageable hair. In the real world (Barry Van Dyke doesn't really exist) people don't actually look like this. People are funny-looking, their beauty hidden beneath their despair and the over-compensation of their neuroses. They wear sunglasses to cover deformities and have skin issues. They're usually flabby in unfortunate areas and openly hate themselves over their appearance. Quite rightly too. It is difficult to empathize with the beautiful in the same way it is difficult to empathize with astronauts.
Stories such as The Rugged Hero's Beautiful Blonde Chick are impossible to enjoy. The tedious, empty and tirelessly superficial characters are shallow, their problems easily cast aside and their aspirations basic. No one is criticising Hank's determination to enterr a sexy twenty-year-old's heavenly warmth in a hammock. The problem with Hank is that he is an idiot named Hank. No one would want to be friends with this smug jerk, so no one can support Roxie's collapse into ever-lasting love for him. If the reader knew Hank, then they would high-five him during a homo-erotic game of handball when he boasts about banging a girl called Roxie, but that doesn't mean they recommend he marry a girl named Roxie. His latest conquest simply does not appear to be the monumental life-altering connection that the writer tells us it is.
By the same token, Roxie is a misguided dolt. She works in PR and is in love with a guy named Hank, who is old enough to be someone ten years older than her. To prove she is mature enough for a thirty-year-old man Roxie cooks for him and makes his house look pretty. Are we seriously supposed to believe their declarations of love at the story's climax when they haven't shared a single conversation over the course of the entire novel besides, 'Where are the condoms?' and 'Thanks, you're really good at that'? Or, as is more likely, do we assume they're horny cretins who have confused lust with love and have the shared emotional depth of a Mills & Boon story? Why should we care about the trivial issues of the beautiful people when they're too busy haven't amazing sex to notice them themselves?
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