The Day Dreamer

By profession, I’m an organiser. As a film production manager, I plan everyone else’s lives and make sure they all know where to be and when, and that they have the tools to do their jobs. I have to be on top of everything all the time, keeping all those plates spinning, because if I drop one the repercussions could be enormous and costly.

How did I ever land up in this job?
Because I'm really a ditzy blonde, just like you see in the movies. Though I’m sadly a lot less glamorous and a lot less organised than Alicia Silverstone in Clueless.

I’ve been told I’m actually quite good at the day job. Perhaps that’s because I’m over-conscientious. I’m so scared of failing that I work extra hard to get it right. But exactly because I do it at work for 9 to 10 hours of every day (and sometimes more) I’m the complete opposite in my personal life. As though the day job gets all the energy and effort, and there’s nothing left for my home life.

In school, I was the kid forever staring out the window, lost in daydreams. These days, I’m the mother who might actually forget to pick up the kids from school because I got side-tracked by a project and simply forgot. When I still had a safe local library to borrow books from, I was the person who always had to pay hefty fines because I forgot to get the books back on time. I’m also the moron who only checked if my passport was still valid when I arrived at the airport for a holiday that had been planned months in advance. (It wasn’t, and that’s a whole other story. Maybe one day you’ll read about it in one of my novels).

So when I read stories in which the hero does absolutely everything for the heroine, from buying her clothes and shoes, to booking romantic dinners or private planes, I’m in love! The feminist in me doesn’t stand a chance against the fantasy of a man who can pick up his own phone to organise flowers (or his own dry cleaning), who can run a bubble bath for the heroine, and who can even pay his own bills without someone else’s help.

What heroic characteristics do you admire, and why?

I love my dreams

Many of my stories start out as dreams. I'm grateful for the gift, but writing the stories down does have a tendency to spoil all those lovely dream emotions I wake with, as I then have to face hard reality. Suxh as, how to make something that seemed so plausible in my dreams, logical to the waking mind.

Most often my dreams are like incomplete movies playing out in my head, but the really precious ones, the ones that can influence my whole mood for a day or two, are those that I experience emotionally rather than simply watching them unfold. Is this just me, or do you also have dreams that take you through an emotional wringer too?

I had one of those dreams in the early hours of this morning. What was really special about this one is that this story wasn't just a snippet but the entire story; from the time the characters met, through their joy of falling in love, their darkest moments, until they reached their Happy Ever After. Trust me when I say that waking from a dream like that is almost impossible. I wanted to lie buried in the duvet and hang onto those good HEA vibes forever.

But at last I dragged myself out of bed, grabbed pen and paper and tried to capture the feeling. Only as I wrote I realised this story would never work as a category romance. The reason is the hero: he's the ultimate Player, whose bad boy days aren't all in the past. He's a man who drifts from one woman to the next, sometimes moving on before the previous woman is even out the door. And the dream opened with the heroine meeting his current girlfriend. Not at all suitable for an Alpha male in a category romance.

Even so, I fell in love with him. (If you write romance, you know that it's very possible to fall in love with someone who doesn't exist!) I really believe that this hero deserves his moment, so maybe I'll have to save him up for a Single Title. Because a man like this is exactly the type of hero you want to see brought to his knees by the heroine. He's the reformed rake and of course we all want to be the heroine who reforms him.

This dream was incredible not just because it introduced me to a gorgeous hero, but because it also opened my eyes to something I've never experienced first hand: The Proposal. In real life mine went along the lines of an offhand "so let's get married." At the time, the whole getting down on one knee thing seemed terribly outdated. But in the early hours of this morning I discovered the heart stopping magic of having a man go down on his knees to propose. My nameless hero even went a step further ... he offered to give up everything he had to be with the heroine, he loved her so much.

Now what waking reality can possibly measure up to that?

His name is Alexis Georgoulis

As a follow up to my previous post, this is the gorgeous Greek god of My Life in Ruins. I'm not a big fan of Greek heroes and have no foreseeable plans to write one, but this man could change my mind ....


Can you tell that I'm trying to get away with very little writing in my blog posts?

Chick Flicks

There are some really great movies for women (and all other hopeless romantics) on circuit at the moment.

The Proposal has received coverage this last week over at Pink Heart Society. Despite the fact that the cinema had awful sound (at least we got free movie tickets afterwards to make up for it!) I loved this movie. It's definitely one for the keeper collection, and Ryan Reynolds is very drool-worthy.

The other recent movie I saw is My Life in Ruins. We chose this for the simple reason that it's set in Greece and we're off on holiday this coming week-end to a Greek island. I'm so glad we did! The movie was fun, full of both laughs and sighs.
Early on in the movie I had a few concerns about the leading man. Could they have not found a good-looking Greek actor for the role? Then about half way through he emerges bare-chested from the sea and I thought "Okay, so that's why he got the part! But couldn't they have at least found someone with a prettier face?" Then in the final scene he appears in a suit and I just knew why he'd been cast in the role. Yummy!