“Connor's boots halted abruptly, and they stared at each other”

Secrets Uncovered brought Donna Alward to Bewildered Heart's attention, as she wrote of black moments, stories dealing with darkness and tragedy in a genre and market seemingly afraid of any kind of unpleasantness. Unfortunately, we were only able to track down Hired by the Cowboy, Alward's 2007 Harlequin debut, a relatively frothy love story set in the mythical land of Canada. The book contains only a few of the challenging elements Alward had attempted to convince us she is famous for. In her opening Dear Reader introduction she hints at the drama soon to unfold. 'If you ask any mother, she'll say unequivocally that she'd do anything for her child.' While her dear readers ponder why anyone would bother to ask then, the author sets up the usual dilemmas and contrivances romance fans expect and appear to insist upon, inter-mingled with a handful of those legendary Donna Alward twists.

Alexis Grayson, Alex to her friends (Hi, Alex!), has no friends to count on when she faces her latest personal crisis. No matter, for this tough, resolutely independent young beauty needs no help from anyone. She has made it thus far without any assistance and she has been getting along pretty well for herself, thank no one very much. Despite her sterling record, at the beginning of Hired by the Cowboy, she is unexpectedly pregnant, working for tips at a smoky bar and unconscious in a convenience store. Awakening to the ruggedly handsome face of a stranger, Alex is embarrassed and thirsty, but quickly forgets such pressing matters due to the gentlemanly conduct of this sharp-suited and extremely good-looking chap. He reassures her, humours her curt quips and resolute independence and then buys her a mug of peppermint tea. Alex does not need his help to figuratively get back on her feet no matter how kind he seems and she does not need his help to literally get back on her feet no matter how sturdy his arms. She will work something out, she always does. Remember when she was jobless and alone she still managed to become impregnated with a baby. She is a survivor, in summary.

Connor Madsen does not like wearing suits, would prefer to not be taking meetings in the city and has little understanding of herbal remedies, but one look at this troubled, yet determined, young woman and he is smitten. Connor has problems of his own. Due to a beef scare of some description he faces the loss of the ranch that has been in his family for generations. With no cash reserves to see him through such a bleak financial forecast he requires the money left to him by his parents in a trust fund. However, he can only access this small fortune when he turns thirty, and his feisty grandmother cannot change the rules. If only there was a statute within the contract that allowed him to acquire the money sooner, say if he was on the verge of losing the ranch? No, but what's that? There is a disclaimer that states if Connor were to get married the money would be released. If only there was a woman in as equally dire circumstances as Connor, who might agree to a marriage of convenience in exchange for a place to live and some help through her, for example, pregnancy and destitution. If only Connor had met such a damsel-in-distress mere pages earlier, who was not only beautiful, but had the good sense to reveal her life story and mention how she could be found at a moments notice.

Connor visits the smoky bar and finds Alex too busy working to hear about a life-changing ultimatum, so instead he waits outside all night with a bunch of flowers, because Connor is nothing if not chivalrous and old-fashioned. Walking her home, he explains the situation and proposes a shotgun wedding, to which Alex responds appropriately. Sensing she may be a tougher nut to crack than she first appeared Connor gives her the opportunity to think it over and suggests a trial period of living together at his isolated farm to see how she likes it, because Connor is nothing if not chivalrous and old-fashioned. When the next day comes Alex tentatively accepts the offer, because there is nothing a mother would not do for her child, and also because Connor opens doors for her, worries about her well-being and has thick-eyelashes, the masculine triad of goodness. Soon after they begin the drive to Canadian cattle country and a hearty spot of lunch from Connor's plentifully-stocked refrigerator. They make sandwiches amidst heavy erotic tension and light social awkwardness. Before long, the man must go out to tend to the livestock, so the woman makes herself at home and begins to think what she will make for dinner and how else she can please the man who will pay her to marry him.

Plot points are signalled when Alex finds a photograph, strewn haphazardly for all the world to see on the dresser of Connor's bedroom behind a closed door, and there ends the third chapter. For the publishers at Mills & Boon, Donna Alward's novel offers great potential, while never straying far from convention. The plot itself is a loose reworking of Solicititilation, but within the cuddly confines of Romance Romance the manipulative, misogynistic billionaire becomes a struggling, noble cow-hand and the recently unemployed, yet ambitious, female yuppie becomes seriously down-on-her-luck and pregnant. These superficial alterations are all that separate Hired by the Cowboy from the likes of Taken by the Sheikh or The Billionaire's Housekeeper Mistress. For Alexis the chance to play house, to cook and clean, look after a man and think only of her offspring is a welcome relief, having for years had to live within the gritty urbanity of Ontario. Thus her desire for feminine domesticity has been suspiciously embedded in character to avoid the understandable accusations of sexism. Alexis is an atypical heroine, but not necessarily a convincing one. Her pregnancy might be her defining feature, but it is utilised solely to make her acceptance of Connor's offer believable, much like Stacy's unemployment and tragic past allowed the reader to not judge her harshly for agreeing to The Millionaire's Indecent Proposal. As expected, due to the demands of the subgenres, Alex's situation allows for heightened drama while Stacy's befitted all those oily rubdowns and endless sex scenes.

Even at this early stage the reader will have no difficulty predicting the narrative turns toward this fixed marriage becoming a very real one. The blurb hints at airborne love, but there is no implication of conflict or tension. Has Alex made her biggest ever mistake by marrying the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with? the blurb asks, over-enthusiastically. It appears as if Alward can easily resolve her story without resorting to her favoured tactics of miscarriage, domestic violence or limb-losing. At this point, however, there is the nagging issue of Alex's baby and the matter of said child's conception. As with every Cherish title that involves a single parent, including The Dad Next Door, we are left to ponder where the father is, how he will further complicate the scenario and where has he been all this time? Will Connor seek him out, duty-bound and noble as ever, and will Alward develop a powerful, poignant human love triangle to make those last two hundred pages fly by? With an author seemingly so willing to embrace her every homicidal fantasy we cannot rule out genuine heartbreak, resulting in a happy ending all the more satisfying and fulfilling, but given Harlequin Mills & Boon's history, perhaps the reader should look forward to everything ending neatly without the author giving any thought to properly dealing with the issues raised by the narrative, something we should assume Alward is equally well-known for.

“Was he so perverted that he would risk death rather than be denied his sick pleasure?”

During our initial three trawls through the quagmire of wisdom that is Secrets Uncovered we learned of the basic elements involved in creating conflict for story-telling purposes. Following on from those lessons comes another fundamental insight, 'Emotional conflict needs to be emotionally impactful,' at least so say the editors at Romance HQ. However, these same editors proffer a warning that too much emotion will see your manuscript rejected just as easily as if you had not bothered with emotion at all. There is a careful balancing act to be performed, so your reader will be invested in your story and the journeys of your characters, but will never become afraid that something dramatic, or sad, is forthcoming, to shatter the warm buzz of romance and alcohol. Searching for additional insight, RIVA author Fiona Harper was drafted in to throw around her own experiences. 'New writers often make the mistake of thinking that emotion on the page is the same as drama on the page. However, too much high emotion can turn readers off just as quickly as too little emotion.' Once sense has been deciphered from that quote we are forced to ask, is this an implied call for subtlety, from the author of English Lord, Ordinary Lady and Swept Off Her Stilettos?

Ignoring that as skilfully as we have grown accustomed to, we move along. 'Too many manuscripts from aspiring authors feature heroes and heroines who are emotionally incontinent. You know the sort – the ones that just have to let it all out every time they get the urge! Toddlers might behave this way, but mature adults don’t. Or shouldn’t.' Until toddler romance fiction catches on a potential writer is best served reinventing the Mills & Boon standard with the introduction of mature adults, so long as mature means a woman no older than thirty and a man a few years older than his prospective bride, both of whom severely repressed because of previous relationships and unresolved issues with their parents. Now, instead of all this womanly talk of openly sharing, empathy and gin, we should embrace an era of heroes and heroines barely able to control their tempers, passions and other dangerous tendencies. 'Often, the most emotional scenes are the ones where a character struggles to keep a lid on their feelings. If your character doesn’t cry, your reader will.'

Therefore, the mental breakdowns of your protagonists must be carefully-structured, a deliberate-yet-inevitable build-up to forsaking all else for the love of a heartbroken cowboy billionaire recently returned from war. 'If you overdo the drama, you risk exhausting readers and they’ll switch off. Connection broken. Book put down. Also, if you use all your emotional ammunition on scenes that don’t need it you’ll have nowhere to go when the real emotional high points come.' Sound advice to many hopeful Mills & Boon fans, who must have no idea what they are doing in their new careers. There is an obvious pitfall to all this angst, hardship and crying, however. How much is too much and don't readers just want a hunky, yet egocentric, billionaire, a happy ending, a few sex scenes and about forty thousand words of padding? Surely depression, politics, addictions, heartbreak and brutal murder are at best ill-advised and at worst completely unjustifiable when telling the tale of two idiots falling in love against a backdrop of exotic paradise, or small-town America.

In what Bewildered Heart has chosen to describe as research we have witnessed the odd murder, the kidnap of a baby, the accidental death of a toddler, casual sexual assault, war and journalists in our past experiences with romance fiction. In the majority of those examples the serious issues felt unsuitable due to the superficial treatment they received in a character's back-story for present-day motivation. Despite this prescient warning, Secrets Uncovered turned to a self-proclaimed author of feel-good, emotional stories for Cherish, the sub-genre known to Bewildered Heart as Romance Romance. Donna Alward was more than happy to take some time away from fetishising cowboys to explain how to balance dark themes with inoffensive loving. 'There are times I walk a really fine line between deeply emotional and depressing. Let me say right now, if you have these tendencies, embrace them. It’s not a bad thing.' Fair enough, Donna Alward, but what kinds of gloomy tendencies should we expect from A Family For the Rugged Rancher, Honeymoon With the Rancher, or other depressing-sounding titles featuring ranchers?

'I’ve dealt with the death of a baby, miscarriage, physical disfigurement, post-traumatic stress disorder, physical abuse… I do emotional trauma.' There is nothing wrong with the big issues that plague the everyday lives of everyday people, and if Alward's books contain those traumas within the context of the stories, rather than as prehistoric scarring, then kudos to her. How does Donna do it then, and could she possibly tell us while skilfully publicising one of her own recent novels? 'I’m going to use my book Her Lone Cowboy as an example.' Well played. 'Noah is home from Afghanistan where he lost his right arm in combat. From the start I knew that he could be down but not out. He needed to be fighting to get his life back and reaching for a goal which may or may not be happiness.' Self-pity is not attractive, as most of us learn the hard way, and therefore Noah grasps heroically, albeit vaguely, for an objective that can be held in one hand. We can surely predict that his objective will involve a loving woman and maybe a ranch, with some horses.

The secret to Alward's definition of success? 'It’s about going deep. The conflict is not the issue, but it is easy to confuse the two. It is not that he has lost his arm and needs to adjust. It’s the ripple effect: his loss of identity as a combat leader, finding a new place in the world, reconciling himself to being home and the death of his father, falling in love but being unsure that he is man enough.' Suddenly his missing arm is the least of his troubles, as narrative necessities push it toward the periphery. Certainly, his disability is a telling metaphor for his feelings of emasculation, but Her Lone Cowboy is a poor example of chiaroscuro. The tale of Noah and Lily seems comparable to another Cherish title, The Dad Next Door, which heaped on the tragic crises, and then wasted them on soap opera histrionics. The sadness of losing a child, being jilted and the worst recesses of grief had happened before the story began, and this left the book itself to deal with the less dramatic telling of a coupling, one revelation that proved inconsequential, and the return of a secondary character, which was then dealt with ineptly. Alward's explanation is no showcase of the depth of Harlequin Mills & Boon, but merely proof that the tearjerker-elements should be kept to a non-existent prologue and then only sold under the Cherish banner.

The advice contained within Secrets Uncovered amounts to nothing more than Alward's statement that Noah is, 'Not self-pitying but proactive, always moving forward. A reader cannot cheer for your characters if your characters don’t cheer for themselves.' However, he must be proactive and moving the story forward, not to gain the reader's sympathy, but because he is a romantic hero, and the ostensible protagonist of the novel. With this the Conflict Chapter ends and the readers are left to ponder a few questions. How is our own attempt shaping up in view of these guidelines, and, just as importantly, were any of these guidelines useful? We have learned that our publishers share our dream of one day seeing a one-legged hero accidentally-impregnating a heroine, causing much internal conflict for them both, and while Bewildered Heart and our many followers pursue that immediately clichéd concept, we will examine Donna Alward’s debut Harlequin to see if her writing lives up to her shameless self-promotion. There is a wedding on the front cover and words such as pregnant, gorgeous, temporary and mistake within the blurb, so we can only assume that she learned about depth and ripple effects after Hired by the Cowboy hit the shelves.