Close your eyes and imagine with me for a moment...
You are an editor in the Romance division of a well-known publishing house. The holiday season is fast approaching and your goal in life is to sell as many of your authors' books as you can. So what do you do?
You ask six authors (some fairly well known, some new) to write a short story (about 40 pages long) centered around romance and Christmas, which will become a holiday anthology.
The result? 40 pages...not long enough to have any meaningful character or plot development, but the basic plot which boils down to this...
1. Two people who either have a past or have been lusting after one another for awhile now.
2. They decide to immediately hook up (and by hook up, I mean point #3) by page 5, after mooning longingly at each other for six months or more. Either to get the other out of their system or to finally make their move.
3. Sex. Lots of it.
4. Some dialogue interspersed in between aforementioned point #3 to hastily explain the couple's history to the reader and quickly resolve their relational problems in 40 pages. Always ends with "I love you!" and a proposal of marriage.
5. Lots of campy lines. Here's an example in which Earl (in a short story by Susan Donovan), a furnace repairman, is mysteriously called to a beautifully dressed, lonely woman's apartment to repair her heater on Christmas day. They desire each other and decide to engage in point #3.
Before #3: "She was...hotter than any furnace he'd ever had the pleasure to repair."
During #3: "She began to howl, and the sound penetrated Earl's soul. God, how he loved to make a woman howl..."
After #3: "He chuckled. Maybe he had tuned the furnace up a little to high after he restored the power, but the house had been a freaking meat locker!"
Because you know that your most hardcore of romance readers (and we all know that Mir is, as with all of her favorite things, hardcore about romances) cannot resist and will buy a holiday anthology even if it is completely cheesy.
You are an editor in the Romance division of a well-known publishing house. The holiday season is fast approaching and your goal in life is to sell as many of your authors' books as you can. So what do you do?
You ask six authors (some fairly well known, some new) to write a short story (about 40 pages long) centered around romance and Christmas, which will become a holiday anthology.
The result? 40 pages...not long enough to have any meaningful character or plot development, but the basic plot which boils down to this...
1. Two people who either have a past or have been lusting after one another for awhile now.
2. They decide to immediately hook up (and by hook up, I mean point #3) by page 5, after mooning longingly at each other for six months or more. Either to get the other out of their system or to finally make their move.
3. Sex. Lots of it.
4. Some dialogue interspersed in between aforementioned point #3 to hastily explain the couple's history to the reader and quickly resolve their relational problems in 40 pages. Always ends with "I love you!" and a proposal of marriage.
5. Lots of campy lines. Here's an example in which Earl (in a short story by Susan Donovan), a furnace repairman, is mysteriously called to a beautifully dressed, lonely woman's apartment to repair her heater on Christmas day. They desire each other and decide to engage in point #3.
Before #3: "She was...hotter than any furnace he'd ever had the pleasure to repair."
During #3: "She began to howl, and the sound penetrated Earl's soul. God, how he loved to make a woman howl..."
After #3: "He chuckled. Maybe he had tuned the furnace up a little to high after he restored the power, but the house had been a freaking meat locker!"
Because you know that your most hardcore of romance readers (and we all know that Mir is, as with all of her favorite things, hardcore about romances) cannot resist and will buy a holiday anthology even if it is completely cheesy.
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