Thursday, April 28, 2016

Sunday, April 17, 2016

A Field Guide for Romance Writers or Maybe Not

Have you ever wondered what it is like to be a romance writer? Wonder no more.

Romantic Comedy

Told he has one year to live, Jack Lamont, a thirty-six-year-old bachelor, decides to advertise for the perfect pretend family, a beautiful women with two well behaved teenaged children. Mary, a desperate widow with kids to feed, lost her job and recently evicted from their home, responds to Jack's ad for a pretend family. Not quite meeting the man's criteria, she has to be a bit creative with her reply. Mary is expecting a platonic relationship, in exchange for Jack's cabin and college money for her kids, when he dies. Jack is expecting Mary to only have two kids and to look like the woman in the photo. There's no love at first sight, but reality finally sinks in. Jack and Mary are both running out of time. Jack learns that having a family often requires sacrifices of the highest order? Mary comes to the realization that her kids will lose another dad, even though he was only supposed to be a short-term pretend one.

A Mystery

A violin and three gold coins hold the key to solving a sixty-eight-year-old mystery. For over six decades, people have traveled to a small Southern town in America in hopes of proving the young man found dead in the city park was their long lost relative. Or are they really trying to make a claim on the gold the deceased man supposedly hid before his death? No one has been able to prove a verifiable link to the unidentified body, and the hidden gold has not been found. Now, sixty-eight years after the death, Rebecca, a young woman from England, has come to the town to set the record straight. She has a different story. But can she prove her version of what happened? She needs a little help from the one man in town who is the most skeptical of all, with good reason. A novelette, approximately 10,000 words.