Two Great Romantic Couples, And You Can Keep Them.

I’ve spent the last week or so re-formatting three books for paperback. Three? But wait! There are only two published! Yeah, I can count too. Flynn’s In is formatted and the cover is done for print, and I’m still trying to get one teensy-weensy little detail cleared up before I can release it as an ebook. Okay, it’s the cover for Chrysanthemum, stop nagging. I have the “Coming Soon” section at the end and I have a blurb for Chrysanthemum, but not a cover to preview. Even close is fine. But I rejected the first concept and haven’t got the second one back. (It takes hiring a model for one lousy picture, which takes time.) Romance! Now if I’d gone with kidlit, I could grab The Girl, hand her some crayons and tell her to draw me a picture of Cat or something for the cover. No. Had to be romance. More sex than in kidlit.

So, yeah, I write romance. Sort of. I write a different kind of romance.  Just wait, you'll see. In my formative years, my favorite romances - the classics - were Gone with the Wind and Jane Eyre. I'll just say it now, I wasn't an Austin person. Pride And Prejudice And Zombies? Yeah, I was there for that, but only because of the zombies. Sorry, lynch me now.

So, Gone with the Wind came first. I didn’t like Ashley, I didn’t like Rhett, and I thought Scarlett was a bitch who needed to be slapped. As an adult, I'll give Rhett the benefit of a second glance and we'll see. I really don't know why I liked the book so much considering the only character I liked was Mammy. (Did anyone like Ashley? Besides Scarlett and his idiot wife I mean?)

So much for romance, but hey, 7th grade, moving on. Jane Eyre, let's get dreary. Yeah, I never saw what she saw in Rochester. At least when they filmed Gone with the Wind it was in color. Even when they film Jane Eyre in color it was still in black and white. The character's life was really that drab. And I liked her that way. (I'm really mean.)

The point of this is two great works of literature, great romantic couples, and I don’t like them. What does that tell you? No idea. I'll have to ask my shrink about that.