The thing is, no teacher ever bothered to connect the dots for us.

“And today,” the teacher would say, “we are going to learn about the romances of King Arthur!”

“So,” we would reply, “like my mother’s romances in the cupboard—hooray! We’re going to learn about sex and happiness!”

“No!” The teacher was always scandalized at this point. “You are going to learn how sex makes people deeply unhappy and all of the life choices made under the guise of true love will ruin your existence forever.”
“Well shit,” we’d think. “King Arthur was a weenie who spoiled it for everybody.”  And then we’d get a big salacious thrill out of watching Arthur, Gwenevere, Lancelot, Tristan, and Gawain completely screw up their lives.

But we didn’t see how it was romance.

But there was still hope somebody would teach us later.

“And today,” the teacher would say, “we are going to learn about the American Romantics!”

“Hooray!” we would reply. “Finally someone to explain to us all of the beautiful and delicious mysteries of mom’s cupboard books and why that gorgeous rich boss always falls for the nineteen-year-old virgin secretary!”

“No! We’re going to learn about wild men going into the woods and living without plumbing and raging alcoholics drinking themselves to death after making $25 on their best work and how foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of little minds!”

“Are you shitting me?” We were sort of pissed off by now. “What’s romantic about that?”

“Well, it was like the hippies in the sixties, everybody believed all you need is love, and expanding your mind, and beautiful songs and here—read The Scarlet Letter, you will understand.”

“Those people were seriously messed up. If I was Hester Prynne I’d move to some place where sex wasn’t illegal and stop sewing, because her kid needed a swift kick in the pants and Hester wasn’t doing it.”

And the teacher would get mad.  “You people are completely missing the point. The American Romantics were a key period of time in literature. It was a time when the self was valued and the collective was suspect and people learned to listen to their own inner voices and—“

“Well that’s all very well and good, but where do we learn about the boy next door turning hot, like Ryan Reynolds and the girl next door wearing red lingerie—where’s the literary era that tells me about that?”

“Eventually,” the teacher says, pushing his/her spectacles up his/her nose, “you will lose the desire to read about that and dedicate yourself only to true literature. It says so in this teacher’s manual I have about the necessity of reading outside the literary canon which is why we give you ten minutes a day to read something of your own choice. Now commence Sustained Silent Reading.”

“Whatever.”  And then we’d all dedicate ourselves to seeing if the hero and the heroine can overcome the big misunderstanding, because then there will be kissing and hugging and maybe even sex, and we can be happy we’re human beings after all.

Eventually, we think, somebody will explain to us why all that other crap is called romance.

But nobody ever does, and although we continue to read the good stuff, the stuff with the love and the kindness and the exciting personal growth and the sex, we feel a vague embarrassment about not reading the stuff our teachers told us was good.  We go to garage sales with our mothers and buy (or learn to make) those quaint little book covers that keep our paperbacks from disintegrating and also hide the fact that we’re not all reading The Fountainhead or Joyce Carol Oates or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The Kindle is invented, and we can throw those covers away—but we still tell people we’re reading the literature so we don’t have to deal with romance reader’s shame—but nobody tells us why we should feel it.
Well, we shouldn’t.

Those original romances—King Arthur etc—were called romances because, instead of just coming in and blowing the bad guys out of the water in “I’ve come to kill your monster,” fashion, the heroes and heroines actually had individual personal lives that had nothing to do with the central military conflict.

There was no rule that said the personal life had to have a satisfactory ending.  Most of the time, it didn’t.

The romantic poets took that idea—the idea of heroes having individual personal lives—a few steps further. They said that not only did the individual personal life of a hero matter– but that the life didn’t have to be a heroic one to have impact. Your average every day shepherd or gardener or chimney sweep had a soul, and a purpose, and a reason for being.  It was this idea that allowed Jane Austen to write about a Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett when Elizabeth didn’t have any title or claim to royalty or even much money. She was an important individual by the grace of her intelligence and her person, and so we cared about what happened to her. So even without the happy ending (and the television viewer’s inner eye continually blessed by the vision of Colin Firth emerging from that pond in that big poofy shirt), Pride and Prejudice would still be a romance.

But thank you Jane Austen for giving us the happy ever after to strive for.

Sadly, the American Romantics didn’t learn as much from Ms. Austen as we did—they continued the idea of the individual, but the writers made this idea political. The individual against society was their favorite trope, because in the new world of America, sometimes the individual could win! Huzzah! Wasn’t that romantic?
Well, it was to Nathaniel Hawthorn and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It was also romantic to Edgar Allen Poe, who took this whole romantic notion of individual importance one step further and made what went on in the diseased person’s mind the end all and be all of their world—but that takes us into Gothic romance, which is another fun essay.

In the meantime, the frustrated student within us is crying out, “But what do all these bozos have to do with our beloved paperbacks! Our seduced heroines! Our larger than life heroes! Our Big Misunderstandings and Virgin Nannies! Why is it all called romance?”

Because the individual matters.

Because the individual’s happiness matters.

Because two people, in an uncertain world, with clashing cultures, life experiences, or belief systems, can touch in the truly cosmic way that only two souls can.

The love, the touching, the sex, the soul gaze—this is all icing on the concept that two hearts, happy, can make the world a better place.

That’s the missing link between what we were learning in school and learning in life.  Individuals and their happiness are important. If all the individuals together can find happiness, you have a happy society. If two individuals have to fight the world to be together, you need to make a better world.

Because true love matters. Politicians may tell us that countries matter. Soldiers may tell us it’s wars.

But those of us reading the paperbacks from our mother’s cupboard know the same thing the great literary geniuses from history knew.

It’s that two people can meet, and touch, and fall in love.

That’s what matters.
​
That’s why we read.

Once upon a time, I was seven years old. My parents had just split up, my dad didn’t get back from work for a couple of hours, and the rule was, I didn’t go out and play unless he was home and knew where I’d gone. Our television was black and white and back then, we got two hours of child friendly programming before the news came on and that was it. (Gilligan’s Island, I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch--this is why everyone my age loves those shows.) I was lonely, bored, and probably hungry.

I wrote.

Not with a pen and paper, or, even better, a computer (God, what I could have done with a computer!) but by sitting my stuffed animals in a circle around me on the floor and telling them a story. They were a very good audience, except for the stuffed dog who kept falling over.

Didn’t matter. I wrote.

Several years later in a different time, I was a young-ish mother who had lost her job and had two children under two on a six-acre spread in a drafty house in the middle of nowhere. My son had a communication handicap, my husband worked and went to school eighty hours a week, and I had no car.

I wrote.

I wrote Harlequin romances, because that’s what I had read through college, and I submitted a couple when I could afford it, using an outdated Writer’s Market and no contacts or common knowledge whatsoever.

Didn’t matter. I wrote.

And still, later, teaching with its pain and glory had been stolen from me. I sat at home, blank and numb with my daughter—the last kid in day care—and tried to rebuild the frame of my life from the shattered boards of my career.

I wrote.

By then, I was writing for Dreamspinner Press, because they’d given me a chance, dammit, had heard my voice, believed in me, and when the rest of my mind was a hapless mess of crossed wires and self-recrimination, the part of me that could write—that opened up and poured words into the universe—still worked like a dream.

Oh, thank you gods, I could write.

Because I am prolific, people assume that the words just come. I always have words, I always have emotions, I always have a story to tell.

Well, yes and no.

There have been periods in my life when I could not write.

My first two pregnancies—there were no words. My third pregnancy, it was all knitting, crocheting, quilting, scrapbooking (for a minute) and craftwork.

My fourth pregnancy we didn’t even have a room for the baby, we had no money, my administrator literally chased me down a hallway as I waddled away from him after a disagreement, and later messed with my class schedule to make it more difficult when I came back from my leave.

Then I could write.

If I have a little bit of personal discomfort, some inconvenience, the first gasp of a wound—all of my effort goes to finding the mental lidocaine to take away the sting. Writing becomes difficult—sometimes, if I allow myself to be weak, it gets impossible.

When I’ve been gutted by a rusty emotional machete, that’s when I go deep into my soul and pull out the thing that has kept me sane my entire life.

The building of worlds, the building of lives, using tiny blocks of words.

This winter I had a moment of profound writing exhaustion. I wrote through it—because I’ve staked my family’s well-being on this livelihood and curling up in a ball of “I don’t wanna” is not an option. But what got me through that moment was pure professionalism—don’t get me wrong. I’d given my word—to my family, to my publisher, to my friends—and I wasn’t going back on it. That project was the writing equivalent of comfort knitting—it was all I could produce at the time.

And then things got worse. Painful, eviscerating—like those other times, saturated with self-doubt of the most insidious kind.

And without warning, I could write again.

It was like falling through the thin layer of self-protective ice. My heartblood gushed, and the well of my soul opened. The stories within—those were the world, my world, the only safe world in creation, built with the insignificant building blocks of my words.

I love writing from this place—my every waking moment is consumed with my characters. I cannot wait to sit down in front of my computer. These are the times when my husband looks at me sideways and says, “I hope that’s a good story, because you are having a hell of a conversation with yourself.”

Of course—I’m writing!

You can tell when I’m writing from the bountiful place. The kids are late to school, I forget to do the laundry, I spend $300 because I lost my car keys in my yarn bag, I don’t respond to e-mail—you know, human stuff. It suffers.

Forget human stuff—I am a god!

Well, sadly no. Not a god. I have to return to my human life eventually.

It’s a tough transition, that drawing from the deep well of soul to the basic nuts and bolts that make us people. The water isn’t nearly as sweet from the refillable plastic bottle on my desk as it is in the deep place where my imaginative building blocks assemble with almost effortless ease.

But resuming my place among the living is a necessary move, if I’m not to wreck my body, my financial situations, and my family relationships. What I need to do in order to make the transition work is remember the most important lessons I’ve taken from the depths of my imagination.

I control my own reality.

Sadly, not the stuff that happens to me but how I react to that stuff--that I can do something about. I do have a say in not being a victim, in recovering, learning, and moving on. In my first teaching assignment I had a day so bad I left school, came home, and pulled the covers over my head, vowing never to return.

My career lasted 18 years—obviously I went back. The place I write from is the same place of strength I drew from to do that. Revisiting this place reminds me that it’s there, and I’m stronger than I think.

If I’m still living and my family is okay, nothing is insurmountable.

There are stakes so much larger than my job. Even if it’s a job I love and worked really hard to make pay for me–as was the case with both teaching and writing. If that well inside me is still flowing, it’s because there is love to keep it going. Never take love for granted. Ever.

Writing is more than a paycheck for me.

One of the things I wrote this summer—nearly 100K of it, with an option to write more—is a work without a home. Yes—I know. I usually have places to send my work, it’s one of the sweet, sweet reassurances of having a publisher I really love. But this work won’t fit easily into my publisher’s mold—the concept for the first book and the books I’d like to follow it is really too big in scope for romance, and it needs a sci-fi or fantasy publisher. This means I have to step outside my comfort zone, relearn my trade, try to market this thing in another place.

This is scary for me—but not as scary as when I wrote from a purely mechanical place. Writing is more than a paycheck for me (although money is nice and pays the bills) and reminding myself that writing is the thing that has always brought me joy—even when my only audience was a gaggle of ratty, often garage sale stuffed animals—is important if I want to keep doing it.

Writing for me has always come from the heart. Sometimes the words stumble—all building blocks have their flaws—and sometimes what looks like the right block in one context is completely wrong in another—but my heart hasn’t changed. I still want to write what is, to me, essentially romance—the genre in which people do the best they can with what they have to make a better world for people they love.

This is a place of joy. If it has become something different, it’s important that I’m reminded of why I started writing in the first place. Because everybody has a place where they connect their soul to the world around them. For some people it’s math, for others it’s art. For some people it’s animals and for others, it’s machines. For pretty much every person there is a physical concrete thing, a thing they can do that taps into the things they think and feel.

My stepmother is never so happy as she is on the back of a horse. My father used to work on cars when his classwork or his job was giving him hell. My daughter pulls out her art paper and draws.

I write. I’m lucky I’ve been able to make that work for me (so, so, so very lucky). If it ever stops working for me that doesn’t mean I’m going to quit doing it.

Ida Pollack wrote romance novels until she was 105 years old. I don’t think she did it because she needed the money. She did it because the world where the rugged older man rescued the ingénue was the place she went to be happy.
​
If I’m lucky enough to live to 105, I’ll probably still live in the world where mostly working class guys share turbulent first kisses and beat the emotional hell out of each other in the name of working shit out.
If I’m really lucky, it will still be my favorite place to be.
​

You know that moment I’m talking about.

The one where you have eaten nothing but non-fat protein and un-buttered broccoli for going on three days in a row, and suddenly you see it: That perfect combination of butter, refined sugar, white flour, candied fruit and/or marshmallow-swaddled chocolate—whipped cream and cinnamon optional, sin always required.
And you need to make it yours.

Oh… you need to make it yours. You will DAIEEEEEEE if it is not yours. You will mow down with prejudice the poor, well-meaning soul who stands between you and your Chocolate Mephistopheles and screams, “For the love of heaven, remember your diet!” and there will be blood, tears, and no remorse.

For the love of chicken and broccoli, how do you resist such a gut-ripping, life-blood-pumping, necessary to your sanity craving?

One of the most surprising bits of advice from Weight Watchers is… don’t.

That doesn’t mean eat Chocolate Mephistopheles all day every day (and if anyone can create a dessert that lives up to this name, I will eat it all day every day). It just means, on those days when your nearest and dearest are at risk if they intervene, get the Chocolate Mephistopheles—eat it.

Well, not the whole thing.

But, say, get your bestie, order your sin, and eat it with two spoons. Gather the family, take them to the patisserie, and split it four ways. Order it, cut it into eights, and stretch it out over two days.

There are a lot of ways to give into a little temptation without going up three sizes and running away from the gym in shame. Because the alternative?

Even the most controlled of martyrs has a snapping point. The person who fails to indulge in Chocolate Mephistopheles in a safe situation today is the person who goes face first and feral into the Cheesecake Azazel at two a.m. next week and washes it down with a diet coke and pomegranate juice to boot. (Anti-oxidants make up for everything, right?)

So indulgence is not a bad thing, really. In small quantities, it sort of makes us human.
Unless you’re talking about reading.

Reading—especially now that e-readers give us leave to read anything we want, privately—allows us some serious leeway to indulge.

But is there any harm in it? Will our brains become flabby and overloaded with bad prose and stale tropes because we sit down and stuff our faces with a daily calorie wad of badly written porn?

Mostly? No.

For the sake of your average romance reader, we’re talking the reading equivalent of, say, not even Chocolate Mephistopheles or Cheesecake Azazel.

We’re talking the reading equivalent of the cheap chocolate sold by large-eyed waifs door to door in the hopes that they could, please Goddess, get enough money to water their softball fields so they can play this year.

That crap. You know what I’m talking about. The “I would have to be PMS-ing during a break-up before finals week and after I got fired in order to eat that” chocolate.

Do you get fat brain cells from reading the equivalent of that?

Of course not.

What you get—and this is the case for the candy as well—is bored.

Poor quality chocolate is good for maybe a bite. Poor quality reading material does eventually get boring.
When I taught high school, they used to tell us to let the students read anything they wanted to during their free reading time. Yeah, sure, it was painful to watch the fifteen-year-olds walk in with Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, but the fact was, those books are high interest, low difficulty—even if the kid’s reading level was way above that, the thematic content was so good that the student got something out of the book. And reading—anything—often, produces fluency, which gives students a leg up on comprehension when they decide to level up from Diary of a Wimpy Kid to something more age appropriate—like romance.

Yes, romance.

It used to drive me bananas when my all-male staff room would bitch and whine about how the kids were all reading romance during Sustained Silent Reading—weren’t they supposed to be reading something more challenging? More quality? Better than romance?

Weren’t they supposed to be getting bored with the low-quality reading?

Of course, the disconnect was in the assumption that all romance was the crap-chocolate. It never occurred to those men that the crap-chocolate got abandoned in the corners of the room, while the Chocolate Mephistopheles and Cheesecake Azazel got passed from student to student like the single spoon at the table of a multi-breakup pity-party dessert fest.

Because even high school students (sometimes especially high school students) know the difference between crappy literature and the good stuff that they can really sink their brains into.

And often, the good stuff was even better than Chocolate Mephistopheles. At its best, romance is the entire meal—it’s Satan Steak, Prince of Darkness Potatoes, and Broccoli Beelzebub.

And Chocolate Mephistopheles.

And Cheesecake Azazel.

What it’s not is boring.

So it’s okay to glut your brain on whatever you’re craving. If it’s bad for you—or just plain bad—it will bore you soon enough. Even if it’s not bad, your brain knows when to move on. How many amazing series have you needed to step off from—not because the series was bad or the author failed, but because your brain just needed a different taste? Got bored with steak, moved on to chicken? Decided green beans were tastier than broccoli—especially with bacon. (Mm—those really are the devil’s green beans, aren’t they?)

So let’s go back to our original metaphor.

When I was teaching, I’d always start the summer absolutely certain I was going to read a “health food” book during my two-month hiatus. A whole nine or ten weeks to spend with the kids? I could sup full up of novels of the highest order. I could read Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates and John Gardner.

I could eat the high-grain bread, bean sprout, sautéed eggplant sandwiches of literature and come back with a fit and healthy brain fed on only the highest quality ingredients.

I would have the Olympic athlete of brains.

I forget when this idea died—I’m thinking it might have been around the year Goblet of Fire was released and the family took turns locking ourselves in our rooms for twenty-four hour stretches while food was brought to us and we only left to pee so that we could finish the book and pass it off to the next person before we resorted to stealing the thing while the reader snatched scant hours of sleep.

But the more I try to remember, the more I think this idea was destined to fail earlier than that.

I think my resolve to develop a low-fat brain was doomed when I discovered the first twenty books of J.D. Robb’s In Death series. Or maybe the first nine of Anita Blake. Or was it earlier? I would make the resolution afterwards, but I was probably destined to ignore the beansprouts and gorge on Cheesecake Azazel from the moment I went on maternity leave with my oldest, and my mother-in-law snuck me big bags of Amanda Quick and Julie Garwood for my recovery. Or maybe my downfall came earlier than that, when I was reading college textbooks and slipping Harlequin Temptations in front of them so my parents—or later my husband—wouldn’t accuse me of skivving off when I was supposed to be studying?

Maybe it was earlier than that.

Maybe it was when I was a kid and my parents shipped us off to our grandparents with only a scant couple of books available to pack, and I stole grandma’s Harlequin Presents.

Maybe it was when I was in preschool and I would read street signs on long trips to avoid getting bored.
Whenever it was, however the idea got started, I will stand by it.
​
If the literature you are reading fills you up, makes your dendrites tingle and your neurons dance, it’s not bad for you. While Chocolate Mephistopheles is best only eaten at special occasions, the literary equivalent can be read every day of the week.