"You don't seem very excited about it," M comments as we take the pillows off the bed."No, I guess I'm not," is my honest reply.
"Isn't this what you wanted?" He asks as we draw the bed cover back.
"Yes, but to be honest I was hoping for more than just romance."
After nearly fifteen years of marriage, I still sometimes keep M guessing.
"But there is more to it than romance," he reminds me as we slip between the sheets. "There's poetry, children's stories, technical writing and editing."
Yes, he's right. I'm stuck on the one credential I don't like versus the whole picture. The excitement of being accepted for a writing course (see The Craft June 2010) evaporated with the realisation that the personal instructor, to whom I have been assigned, has written four romance novels.
I was hoping my instructor wouldn't be a science fiction writer, as I don't care to read that genre, but a romance novelist never sparked as even a remote possibility in me. I eagerly anticipated taking my instructor's novel out the library to read. And now the disappointment of reading a Silhouette romance novel settles deeply in me. I haven't read one since high school. A literature degree cured me of ever reading fickle fiction again.
And, yet, a long distant memory surfaces. The one time I thought I might make some money out of writing, I sat down one African afternoon, twenty years ago, and started a Mills & Boon romance novel. I still remember writing about a young woman motoring down the M1 into Cape Town to start a new life for herself. She was going to live in a little cottage near the sea, take barefoot walks on the beach, and ... and ... and what? I didn't know, so I stopped. "What are you doing?" I chastised myself then. "You're not even a writer." Those opening lines were deleted never to appear again. Or were they?
M switches off the light and we kiss good-night; we fumble in the dark trying to find each other's lips. As we settle to sleep, the truth of my concern surfaces: it's not so much that my instructor is a romance novelist, but rather, horror of horrors, what if I am?
And, yet, a long distant memory surfaces. The one time I thought I might make some money out of writing, I sat down one African afternoon, twenty years ago, and started a Mills & Boon romance novel. I still remember writing about a young woman motoring down the M1 into Cape Town to start a new life for herself. She was going to live in a little cottage near the sea, take barefoot walks on the beach, and ... and ... and what? I didn't know, so I stopped. "What are you doing?" I chastised myself then. "You're not even a writer." Those opening lines were deleted never to appear again. Or were they?
M switches off the light and we kiss good-night; we fumble in the dark trying to find each other's lips. As we settle to sleep, the truth of my concern surfaces: it's not so much that my instructor is a romance novelist, but rather, horror of horrors, what if I am?
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