When I Grow Up

Writers tend to play the "When I Grow Up" card often.  As in, "When I grow up I want to be Nora Roberts." Or Eloisa James or Marion Lennox or Barbara Samuel or Nalini Singh.  It's not so much an envy thing as a respect thing: respect for the writer, the woman and her work.  (Also we live a lot of our lives in a fantasy world!)

But long before I started respecting the dickens out of brilliant women who write brilliant books, I was a reader and there were only the books, which I immersed myself in from my early teens.  My introduction to romance was through the serialised abridged versions of Mills & Boons in an English  magazine which my mother bought for the recipes, knitting patterns and famous people. English Womens Weekly, I think?

Condensed, serialised, once a week, was never going to be enough.  To feed my obsession I haunted the op shop, picking up pre-loved M&Bs and Barbara Cartlands and Lucy Walkers.  Lucy Walker was my favourite and my absolute favourite stories featured a governess brought to the Australian outback by a tall, dark enigmatic stranger.  In my favourite of favourites he was A Man Named Masters, which I still think is an inspired title.

I wanted to be that governess.  Not only to the extent of living the story through her eyes in her point of view as a stranger to the outback and to masterful, enigmatic men, but I decided that: when I grow up, I want to be a governess in the outback.  To the extent that I longed for the weekly arrival of The Land and Weekly Times newspapers almost as much as the English Womens Weekly, because I covertly scoured the classifieds for such jobs.  (Being an early teen I was able to gloss right over the facts, such as the children. I was only thinking of the outback and the romance.)

I moved on, although I never stopped living the stories I read through the eyes of the heroine.  While immersed in a fabulous story, I've wanted to be a hard-edged FBI agent, an English aristocrat, a ride-at-full-tilt polo player, an attorney with all the smarts and all the lines, a doctor with the heart and the courage to work beyond borders, and a score of others.  That is what romance novels have given me: fabulous stories by fabulous women about fabulous women.

I don't need ask if anyone else is inspired by the books we love.  Or if anyone was as obsessive about romance in their early teens as I, but I will ask if anyone read books in those formative years which inspired "When I grow up, I want to be…" dreams.  Perhaps ones as fantastical as mine, perhaps ones with a tad more realism.

PS: In a weirdish moment of synchronicity, a spam email landed in my inbox while I was finishing this post with the subject line: Did You Dream of Being A Teacher?

In The Footsteps of....

by Sharon Archer

In the footsteps of ... lots and lots and LOTS of real-life heroes and heroines!

We're on the road in Outback Australia at the moment and soaking up the hugeness of the country, the red soil, the vast skies, the enormous distances. I'm loving reading about the people who came here and did amazing things... but today I want to share something else....  I'm following in the footsteps of the heroines of the Lucy Walker novels that I so adored when I was a teenager living in New Zealand.  Australia and the Outback seemed an exotic, faraway place!

I can't name any of the novels now but I'll never forget the enjoyment they brought me, the thrill of escaping homework and teenage-angst to immerse myself in the Outback, the taciturn heroes - so tall and handsome and capable, the huge stations, and the courageous young heroines, so far out of their comfort zones, who carved a place for their future.

For some reason, it's the names of the rivers that have really stayed with me - the Murrumbidgee, the Darling.  Tonight we're camped at Bourke in Outback New South Wales on the banks of the Darling River!

So, from the photos we've taken so far, I'm going to take you on a little tour of some of the things that a Lucy-Walker heroine might have seen...

The wide open spaces...

Huge dams for watering stock... and perhaps a nice dip on a hot summer day...

A misty morning, ghostly gums and a rich red road....

A wash out on a creek line exposing roots sunk deep in the soil...

A full moon in a billabong...

Maybe the hero would have brewed her a billy tea... though I'm sure he'd have settled his billy on the fire much better than I did!  Looks ready to tip over, don't you think!

I took lots of these pictures at a magic little place we discovered near Nymagee, NSW - Four Corners Farm Stay.  We arrived for one night and, loved it so much, we ended up staying for two weeks!

So how about you... have you explored places you'd read about in a book?  Are there places you've read about that you'd particularly like to explore?

Sickness, Soup and Sensitivity: give me a heroic bedside manner!

I'm coming to you from the House of Lurgy today - the dreaded red, sore croaky throat bug has invaded. The husband and eldest are first afflicted and I suspect more are soon to fall...

Sore throats suck I think - sure they're not the worst illness in the world by any stretch! But they're very painful and while they're around they affect every action - hurt when you breathe, swallow and above all, try to eat - something very important to me!!!!

Soup - by Simon Howden.
www.freedigitalphotos.net

So my nine year old is spending her second day home from school, curled up on the sofa under a rug, reading her favorite books in front of the fire. It's Autumn/Fall here and rain has settled in to keep us company today. I'm plying her with an odd combination of broccoli soup and lemonade. Guess which of the two she prefers!!! Really, it's not so bad - especially when she has Doting Mum on hand to provide for her every wish... (poor hubby is on a business trip away and suffering in stoic silent solitude).

Sickness often crops up in category romance - where either hero or heroine is laid low for a few days and we get to see how the other character copes and cares for her/him. It can show a lot about the relationship, especially in the earlier stages where perhaps any idea of 'relationship' between the two is being fiercely resisted!!!

I confess I rather love the idea of having a big strong hero swooping in to take care of me when I'm feeling poorly. How nice would it be to cuddle in to a broad, warm chest and be held close... But then pride rears up and I think - eeeeeuuuu--would I really want the guy I'd quite like to impress see me all sweaty and feverish?! Or worse, throwing up!

It's a plot point I've used myself. In REBEL WITH A CAUSE, very early in the story Sophy comes across Lorenzo who's mortified to be laid low with tonsillitis and a flu bug and no way does he want Sophy hanging round and 'helping'. So Sophy doesn't. She knows this guy isn't going to take that from her so she goes a step further and hires a nurse to care for him in that first twenty-four hours when the fever was at it's peak. He hates her for it, but he'd have hated it more in that part of their relationship for him to see him so weak - allowing himself to be vulnerable around her isn't something that he can do until much later.

I remember reading an old Lucy Walker as a teen (Lucy Walker wrote the most fabulous romances set in the Australian outback - I read them a billion times) - and I clearly remember one in which the heroine gets a snake bite and spends the night in a terrible fever. It was at a very bad patch in the relationship between her and the hero (she thinks he hates her and resents her being there) - but when she wakes she sees his stretcher has been pulled right close to hers, she remembers someone putting a cool facecloth on her forehead and giving her sips of water through the night... And we see the hero later looking very tired from that worry and lack of sleep... lovely stuff!!!!

So how do you feel about the hero or heroine getting ill within a romance?! Do you like seeing how the other literally cares for her/him?! Do you like that fantasy of having a gorgeous hero to wipe your brow or does it make you shudder in humiliation?!

And most importantly (from my daughter who's 'sick' of broccoli soup) what food and or drink do you think is the best medicine for a sore throat!!!