“I could have been a burglar looking to expand my felony crimes to rape”

When writing a book of short stories the writer must always be wary of reader fatigue, a recently invented term for when the reader bores of the repetition of numerous minor alterations to the same scenario. It is, in many worrying ways, very similar to your experience reading this blog. Here we go again, you sigh while shaking your head bitterly and removing your trousers. Because of this, before under-taking the task of writing a romance novel the prospective author is recommended, by those who sell romance novels, to read as many as he or she can, over a hundred perhaps, until the structures, formulas and tropes become abundantly clear and they are fully immersed in the world, able to make those minor alterations to the same scenario which amounts to a career in romance fiction. While this might be the standard instruction, Bewildered Heart wisely recommends something much more attractive. You probably need to read two, three at the most. Read the second one to make sure the first one wasn't a fluke, some freak romance that escaped. If those two books are in anyway different read a third to understand which of the initial two was the typical fare. In all likelihood, of course, the first two will be so eerily interchangeable you will begin to believe you accidentally read the same book twice.

If you continue to read romance fiction after two or three books you will lose any of the passion for the genre required to write in the style to which you've grown accustomed. Speaking of losing passion, this brings us back to the matter at hand. We have almost finished with A Few Good Men, the quartet of stories by Tori Carrington, about returning marines and their tedious melodramas. After an attempt to enjoy the first two revealing briefs the old reader fatigue had indeed set in, especially considering the obstacles that our heroes had to overcome thus far had been frustratingly easy to surmount. Surely by the third character the exponentially-raising stakes would bring us our second most unlikely coupling. If this novel was a movie which was itself based on a novel, which it actually is, the third story would be Homer Parrish and Wilma from The Best Years of our Lives. Fortunately for anyone else foolish enough to read A Few Good Men, Carrington does indeed raise the stakes and our new hero, a strikingly tall and devastatingly handsome marine, must return home to the wife he loves and who loves him back. The only trouble this marriage has is in the time these lovebirds spend apart, which isn't a problem what with him now being home. Damn you to hell, Tori Carrington!

Yes, in a story redundant from the outset and clearly stolen from the least interesting of the Best Years of our Lives plot strands, Mateo Guerrero returns to the state this story takes place in, somewhere dreary, and finds his wife Ana more beautiful than ever, thanks to her new dancing hobby. However, Ana's new dancing brings with it a dance partner, a man Matt immediately punches in the face and never hears from again. Ana is surprised, but naturally aroused, by such negligent defiance. Still, for instantly forgettable reasons she is unhappy with Matt and forces him to sleep on a sofa. Yet no matter how angry Ana becomes with her husband she is “in complete lust with his penis” and soon joins him on the couch for some hot sex. That's the term these writers always use, hot sex. They don't use 'in lust with his penis' very often, mind. Everyone can only hope that is the first and last time they use that. Unlike the earlier episodes, Matt and Ana receive only five chapters, mainly because there isn't much to say about them. They still indulge in their two obligatory love scenes and we are even treated to a small bout of fellatio, because this twenty-year marriage is nothing if not completely credible. The happy couple have three children, but none of them are important enough to deserve a mention. Alright, a quick mention of the youngest, Teresa, whose nickname is Tete. Hah! Cubans.

The story concludes, suitably, with Ana deciding to stop being unreasonable and Matt agreeing to stop running away to Iraq every time home-life feels dull. Then Mateo leaves for the war-zone. All in all, a perfectly satisfactory short story, the kind written for those people who hate reading. It is concise and without any drama, tension or meaning with plot points introduced and then forgotten about by either the careless writer or the listless reader.

Moving thankfully onwards, the final installment involves Brian Justice, a man everyone calls Justice, because that's his name, and not because his character seeks justice and the author is an idiot. Having prematurely peaked into the pages of Brian's song, any remaining capacity for hope was certainly emboldened by something resembling a story. On the plus side Brian and his love interest have no romantic history. This makes their immediate love-making all the more incredulous, but we shouldn't have been shocked. After all, it is the end of chapter two and that's when the first sex scene always happens. This usual flippant disdain has turned sour, by the way, so you might want to brace yourself for the aftermath of our finishing. That's what Brian Justice says during sex. We didn't mean to imply Bewildered Heart wasn't enjoying A Few Good Men and will write scathingly about it once the remaining episode is read, because that was not what we wrote.

“The sun rose like a pale orange ball over the horizon, kissing the West Texas landscape like an indifferent lover”

Harlequin have recently begun a new romance sub-genre. Teenage Romance tells youthful stories of teenagers who have yet to acquire the neuroses and resentments toward the opposite sex that twenty and thirty-something characters are constantly thwarted by. When a thirty-two year-old divorced male, with rugged sexiness and a weary attitude towards relationships because of his previous fruitless and bitter marriage, meets a twenty-seven year old lady with shoulder length curly hair and bottomless emerald eyes sparks will naturally fly. When their instant attraction turns to emotional attachment the reader knows she is only one hundred and eighty pages away from the couple finding love, after some shenanigans known technically as the, We-can't-do-this-for-infuriatingly-unidentifiable-reasons-that-would-be-the-result-of-our-personalities-had-we-any-personalities conundrum.

Teenage boys can't be rugged, or divorced. Teenage girls can't have built-up mistrust of men because of a previous failed love affair. Teenage romance cannot end with marriage as that would be unrealistic. Pregnancy, maybe. Finally, for now, teenagers don't have characteristics and haven't been screwed over nearly enough to justify two hundred pages of dithering. Modern kids want everything immediately because of the instant gratification of MTV, Facebook and microwave cooking. Twilight was canny enough to add the supernatural element to undercut the noticeable lack of credibility to every one of Bella's decisions, but Mills & Boon authors face a tough battle in bringing honesty to teenage romance fiction. Fortunately for quality, September's releases include Past Midnight, the story of a teenage ghost-hunting girl. There is also Unraveled, a new mini-series from Gena Showalter about a teenage girl recently moved to Crossroads who falls for a werewolf whose girlfriend is a vampire. To further distance itself from a popular franchise no one is comparing it to the supernatural beasts of Unraveled have the ability to time-travel, raise the dead, possess minds and tell the future. For pity's sake, the world.

Still, it is a major achievement of this little web-log that as soon as we suggest a teen romance genre the Mills & Boon website claims to have had one all along, which no one would have seen if they hadn't been actively searching for it. Coincidence? Proof that people are starting to listen to Bewildered Heart? A mistaken belief that the genre only appeared after it was mentioned on the back of an article written about a successful book series that was first published years ago? Well, perhaps we were misguided with a slight sense of self-importance, but wait. There's more. We have, on many occasions, criticised the structure of a Mills & Boon for the limitations it puts on the author, and the harm it does to a novel when things such as challenging plotting are removed for the sake of minimizing word count. In turn, this causes a particular problem most of the books have. They are needlessly long and poorly edited, because complex narratives work against their ambitions. The story is reduced to its most basic simplicities and then stretched out interminably to the detriment of the characters' supposed intelligence and the reader's supposed sanity.

And so, there has been a call of sorts for the potential of romantic novellas. Appropriate names include Tight Shorts and Revealing Briefs. Scarcely had this rallying call been rallied than a Harlequin short story collection been published only a year before these words were first read by you, our only reader. This isn't so much coincidental as it is stealing ideas and the food from the mouths of Bewildered Heart's children. Tori Carrington is the pseudonym used by a husband and wife writing partnership, named Lori and Tony Karayianni, and this couple is merely the invention of a super-computer based inside a hollow mountain in West Virginia. The Sofie Metropolis series is also by Carrington and perhaps you know what that is. At this site we are more interested in their numerous Harlequin Blaze novels. One of their more recent attempts is A Few Good Men (Love that cover!), a linked set of four short stories, each concerning a male soldier on leave from whatever war the United States currently fights. In the prologue Cyprus is mentioned, and why not, there is probably an American military presence on Cyprus.

A helicopter brings the boys home for some R & R, which stands for relaxation and something else beginning with r. The men include Eric, Eddie, Matt and Brian. The book is then broken into four fifty page chunks, each dedicated to a male hero. We begin with Eric Armstrong, who has been communicating electronically with a mysterious gal who goes by the name Samantha, and Samantha has been leading Eric on a sexy dance until she learned he was returning home, at which point she vanished from the internet. Now safe on American soil Eric learns the name of his dream woman from an army computer whiz, and to his horror it is the one woman he could not believe it could have been, even though it seems entirely predictable that it could only have been her. Yes, Samantha is in fact Sara, the widow of Eric's best friend, Andy, who had died saving Eric's life during a war. Eric always harboured feelings for Sara, but could never act upon his urges. Now with his best friend dead and Sara freshly single, there is nothing to stop him except a moral code. Still, seeing Sara in the flesh, wearing a jumper, pushing strands of blonde hair behind her ear, patting a dog on a beach he is infatuated once more and determined to make her his.

Sara, widowed and doted upon by Andy's parents, has a little more to risk by beginning a steamy romance with Eric, but you wouldn't know it from the purple prose. They kiss within ten seconds of Eric's arrival and shortly after have fallen into bed, fitting into each other's bodies like it was meant to be and exploding with pleasure in ways left up to the reader's imagination. The next day guilt has returned and Sara and Eric cannot face their exploits or even themselves. Nevertheless, that evening they mate, their words, again only to break up when Eric asks Sara to follow him to Texas for the brief period before he returns to a battlefield. After a few days the narrative thankfully skips over, Sara does arrive in Texas and Eric's story is laid to rest, with merciful succinctness. There was bad dialogue, there were unlikeable characters with severe emotional dilemmas that were quickly overcome through the use of bad dialogue, there was a dog, there were two sex scenes and there was a happy ending where woman in car meets man on horse and they stare devotedly at each other, finally able to submit to domesticity. All over and done with after forty-nine pages, leaving the reader time to get on with the rest of their day. The rest of their day presumably involves reading the next part of A Few Good Men, entirely defeating the point of the short stories saving them time.

"Their Sexual Adventures Put her Old Wild Ways to Shame"

Looking for something a tad more sensual, imagine the delight in finding out that Mills & Boon cater specifically for readers who prefer their romance with extra helpings of blandly described sexual acts, often at the expense of story and character development. Whereas Modern Romance covers are blue and have a staged photograph of half-naked models caressing each other on them, Sensual Romances are red and have a staged photograph of half-naked models canoodling on them.

Learning Curves is the debut novel by one Joanne Rock. Thirty more titles have since followed. This Learning Curves isn't to be confused with the hundreds of others, written by women who have noticed the same tame double entendre and decided that idea was strong enough to deserve an entire book. Learning Curves isn't the only Harlequin either, another by Cindi Myers has cropped up and we haven't heard the last from Cindi Myers, the author of Do Me Right, a book surely worth tracking down with all the dedication you would normally expend bringing yourself unhappiness.

In Joanne Rock's Learning Curves, the curves in question belong to Maddy, a virginal graduate student somewhere in the United States. She wants to write her dissertation on human mating rituals, but her application for a grant has been rejected because, in her opinion, she lacks the necessary experience in human mating. In the reader's opinion, of course, her idea is silly and redundant. Instead of rewriting her proposal, Mad (Let's call her Mad, eh?) decides to have a very public affair with campus bad-boy, and part-time lecturer, Cal Turner, thus shattering her good-girl image. She believes this is a smart idea, under-mining the novel's scenario that she is a graduate student.

Of course, Cal (once-divorced) has no intention of having a long-term relationship or a short-term fling. Firstly, he doesn't believe he's capable of love despite his previous marriage, which, for logic to win out, must have been loveless from the get-go. Surely another heavy defeat for logic. Secondly, Cal and Maddy have been friends for years and he doesn't want to risk their friendship for passionate sex with a sexy woman. Right on, guy! Thirdly, Cal is in the process of gaining custody of his teenage sister, and so his womanising image needs cleaning up if he is to win the case.

A public, sexual relationship is a no-no, and who wants a sexual relationship with a sexy woman unless it's out in the open and watched by all, including the university board whom write your cheques? In his spare time Cal owns a franchise of garages, where he works hard, and dotes on his kid sister.He's a true woman's man, always covered in grease. Yeah. He's rich and gorgeous and in love with Maddy. The question lingers, Can two people who love each other find love with each other? Clearly the stakes are high and the obstacles insurmountable. Fortunately Rock has two hundred pages to resolve matters, and by the looks of things, she'll need them!

For those readers who believe Learning Curves doesn't share their one-track mind, Cindi Myers is happy to oblige, somehow cramming more sex into her novels, while maintaining the tedious and painful narrative of a woman falling in love with her ideal man as she sex with him, repeatedly. Wild Child is the third book in the Sex on the Beach trilogy and concerns the sexy exploits of sexy office worker Sara, who, while on vacation on a beach somewhere in the United States, meets the sexy surfer Drew. Sara has trouble working for her Uncle Spence, but he's nice really, while Drew has trouble working with his Grandpa Gus, who's actually lovely, and Drew and Sara bond over trite family issues and being sexy. After exhaustively describing their boring problems to one another they have life-affirming sex in a myriad of places and positions. Him on top, standing, her on top, done. Who knew it could be like this, they ask? Silly them, of course, because with Mills & Boon a romance is never made as straight-forward as it really is, and after two hundred pages of bad dialogue and euphemisms for Sara's vagina, they split despite being in love. Four pages later, though, everything has worked out fine, and they go back to the inane dialogue that they bonded over.

Blaze! supposedly cranks up the sex quota and Wild Child does indeed have more sex scenes than books from other genres, with the added liberty of being allowed to describe matters explicitly. Myers says penis when she means penis and there's even a hand-job in the ocean, under-taken because there are no condoms floating nearby. Obviously this pair holiday at very different beaches to the ones Bewildered Heart visits, for reading and other pleasures. Despite all the sex scenes, however, they are never embedded into the plot with any success, meaning each lengthy example is gratuitous, and never serves the novel beyond helping to achieve Myers' intended word-count. Sara and Drew's implied lifetime of wedded bliss has more to do with trust and empathy and less to do with Drew's inability to contain his throbbing manhood when inside Sara's heavenly warmth.

Sure, we readers appreciate being treated like adults when reading adult fiction, but no one with a discriminating mind will accept this nonsense as either entertaining, worthwhile or an unlikely hybrid of the two. Nothing happens and nothing matters. The issues raised by the characters through their conversations are not dealt with by the narrative. The status quo the story challenges was not worth keeping and is not affected by the decisions of Sara or Drew. If their actions have no impact on the plot why does the writer waste time following their actions? This isn't character-driven, it's forced by structure, as if the principles are stuck inside a romance novel and can't escape. Is this fate? they ask. No, Cindi Myers replies, it's Chapter Twelve so you're in love with each other now. We're racing to the end, and why, because, you stupid author, all you have is an ending.