Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination. (Voltaire)Happy Valentine’s Day! What makes Valentine’s Day good for you? Candy? Roses? A card with loving words? Maybe sugar candy hearts with “Be Mine” on them. Seems I remember hearing that they had jazzed up and modernized the Valentine messages on candy hearts. So now the sayings on the hearts are probably all shortened tweet-like love messages.
I like Valentine’s Day. It’s such fun to reach out to people with a smile and a love message. Romance can certainly be a writer’s best friend. Romance stories have been popular since day one. Can’t you just see Adam searching the Garden of Eden for the perfect flower to give Eve? And he surely had a fine choice before the serpent came along and started the ball rolling to mess up things. You can find lots of romance stories in the Bible. Jacob working fourteen years for Rachel. David falling into sin because he desired Bathsheba. Esther convincing the king to save her people.
We’re wired for romance. Scientist are working on proving what we’ve always known. Romantic love, when it’s right, makes us feel good. Releases all those good chemicals in our brain so that when people say we’re on Cloud 9, they’re not far wrong. We are sort of floating on air.
We like to read about people falling in love too and watch movies with great love stories. Romance sells books. Romance sells nearly everything. Gone with the Wind tells a dramatic Civil War story, but what do we remember? Rhett and Scarlett. We love a good love story. Some can be tragic. Think Titanic. Some happy ever after. Think Cinderella. And everything in between.
We yearn for romance in our own lives. We live it vicariously in the books we read and the movies we watch. So, most of us are eager to celebrate a day of romance on Valentine’s Day. A lot of writers seem to be eager to celebrate romance every day of the year in the stories they write.
The last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking a lot about romance because my new book, Words Spoken True, is the most romantic story I’ve written for a while. But my story is hardly like D.H. Lawrence is describing romances here. “And what’s romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything as you like it, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it’s always daisy-time.”
Always daisy-time. Not quite in most of my books. My characters have all kinds of obstacles to true love. They do get wet. They wave off the bugs and sometimes can’t find a daisy anywhere. But their story gets told and now Adriane’s and Blake’s story is getting read.
Thank you so much for reading. And I wish you a Valentine’s Day where all is smooth as a soft serve ice cream cone. Maybe we can keep it from melting too fast and dripping down our arm. A day to celebrate love shouldn’t melt, but go on and on.
Laugh as much as you breathe and love as long as you live.