My Own Little Bit of Romance

I've said it before but I love romance. I watched Battlestar Galactica for the Starbuck/Lee Adama love story. I have a list of book boyfriends that I swoon over (Jonah Griggs, Mr. Darcy, Clayton Danvers, etc). And of course, it's the romance that inspires my own writing. 

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen that recently I've had also my own bit of romance.

It's all thanks to this guy.

He's helped me make a lot of my dreams come true already. He's the guy who inspired Unraveling and Ben Michaels, and he makes me laugh like no one else.

I could describe him in great details, but I'm not sure I'd be able to give you an accurate picture of him. So instead, I saved some of his own words.

I give you the some recent compliments the boyfriend has given me:

This song (Every Breath You Take by Sting) reminds me of you. Because I'm always watching you. 

You're just so beautiful it makes me physically ill. Like sick to my stomach. 

I love your calves. I just want to take a bite out of them. 

I love you so much I want to put you in a locket and wear you around my neck. 

You're too cute. I just want to sell you on eBay. 

You have a really cute nose. I just want to eat it. Would you mind?

These are not actually the weirdest ones I've gotten, and despite their originality or maybe because of it, they always make me smile and laugh.

It all went down on a Thursday. He planned a date--and was adamant that it would be an epic date. He even sent flowers with a note saying a black car would pick me up at 4:30 pm and I shouldn't wear heels.

He didn't leave his name on the card, but I knew it most likely the boyfriend and not a serial killer inviting me out for a night on the town.

The car showed up on time with the boyfriend in tow and we headed up to 5th Avenue and then Central Park. The boyfriend had a picnic basket with a bottle of chilled white wine. 

We debated where to go for a moment, but quickly decided to be touristy and rent rowboats. The boyfriend did all the rowing so I just enjoyed the view.

We split the bottle of wine and when we passed under this bridge, the boyfriend stopped rowing and took out a box in that beautiful shade of blue.

And then he proposed.

It was prefect.

And if you can't tell, the ring is also perfect--very me.

I sort of have a thing for the color purple.

This proposal was a complete surprise for me. It's true that the boyfriend and I have been together for about/almost four years and that he moved to New York because I lived here, but we hadn't really talked about it. 

After we rowed back to shore, we did dinner at Sarabeth's (one of my favorites). 

Then over the weekend we met up with my sister and her husband to celebrate before hitting up an improv show. 

 We got to regale them with the story and hear about their two week honeymoon in Maui which meant it was just about the best weekend ever.

Best Couples

I've already said that Unraveling came to me because of a guy. Well, this guy is pretty special to me. He always listens to me, he buys me flowers some times just because I'm having a bad day, and when I'm stuck and feeling frustrated during the writing or revising process, he's always up for brainstorming--and these are just a few of his best qualities.

But he's out of town for Valentine's Day this week, so I'm going to have to celebrate with my favorite fiction, and I thought I'd share them.

So these are my top five favorite romantic couples.

5. Bella and Edward from Twilight

When I first read the Twilight books, I loved them--like more than I'd care to admit.

I read Twilight and New Moon two days in a row, and then I waited impatiently for twelve weeks for Eclipse to come out.  And then I was one of those people who stood in line and went to a midnight release party at my local B&N when Breaking Dawn came out. And of course, I've seen all the movies.

No matter what the critics say, so many people have read and loved these books, and the relationship between Bella and Edward is at the center of that.

And, ready for a cringeworthy moment, when I was in the middle of reading Breaking Dawn my boyfriend at the time was trying to argue with me about something, and I actually told him the argument would have to wait because I was reading the conclusion to one of the great love stories of our time.

4. Rhapsody and Ashe in The Symphony of Ages Series (Rhapsody, Prophecy, and Destiny)

Other than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings I hadn't read much fantasy. It wasn't until I was introduced to Elizabeth Haydon's first novel Rhapsody that I realized how much I loved reading about other words.

Over the course of The Symphony of Ages trilogy, I sat enraptured by the main character, Rhapsody, who fell in love on her thirteenth birthday with a boy who claimed he was from somewhere else and then disappears the next day.

It's a love story that spans time and civilizations and surrounds two people who were never supposed to meet let alone end up together, and there are dragons which is just plain awesome.


3. Westley and Buttercup from The Princess Bride

I love everything about The Princess Bride in general. It's a fabulous fairytale with great characters. It's got humor, romance, and adventure.

But mostly I love the story of a boy who loves a girl and will set out to earn his fortune in order to marry her, survive the Dread Pirate Robers, brave a giant Turkish wrestler, an expert fencer, a criminal genius, the fire swamp, come back from the dead, and kill the evil Prince, just to get her back.

What guy is better than that?




2. Allie and Noah from The Notebook

I read my first Nicholas Sparks novel in 2002 (It was A Walk to Remember and it was right before the movie came out). After that novel I was hooked, and I read all of his books, but my favorite couple from all of them is definitely from his very first published work.

One of the things I love most about them is that they're a real couple. They argue and fight and they have different opinions, but they love each other at the same time. And of course there's the fact that they're from two different worlds, they shouldn't end up together in the eyes of society and her parents, and yet everything he does is in some way for her.

Oh, and there's those amazing and swoonworthy romantic scenes, depicted so well in the movie (and Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams were perfect!).

1. Claire and Henry in The Time Traveler's Wife

In 2004, I wandered into Mysterious Galaxy feeling aimless and looking for something new to read. I follow a few series religiously but I was reading faster than the authors were writing and needed a new book.

I picked up Time Traveler's Wife based on the cover and flipped it open to the first page. And I was sucked right in.

I bought it, read it that night, and fell head over heels for Claire and Henry. I love the aspect of romance spanning time, and I love that she's been in love with him her whole life, and for most of his life, she's the only person who knows his secrets.

Some of my other favorite couples on TV include Buffy and Spike from Buffy, Damon and Elena from Vampire Diaries and Max Evans and Liz Parker from Roswell (I never read the books for the last two). I love Taylor and Jonah in Jellicoe Road and Sam and Grace from Shiver.

Which ones did I miss? Who are some of your favorite couples?

On the Inception of Unraveling

Like most of the crazy stories in my life, this once starts with “So I met this guy…”

Only, I didn’t actually “meet” the guy in a traditional sense—I became friends with him over the internet. He was a friend of a friend, funny, intelligent, charming. We traded meaningless comments or jokes with friends, but the more I got to know about him, the more it seemed we had in common. We liked the same movies and television shows, we both loved to read and to write, and we just seemed to be on the same intellectual wavelength. We recommended books to each other and we could talk about anything and everything.

And somewhere along the line, I realized he had become my best friend—and then we met, and it just felt like we belonged together (I’m a hopeless romantic, I know). Of course, he lived in another state and neither one of us had any ambitions to ever move so we started muddling through a long distance relationship, making up our own rules and trying to figure out what worked best for us.

Which got me thinking about long distance relationships. They’re hard—flawed and tragic. Most of them are doomed from the beginning. The emotional highs and lows in that type of relationship add an intense stress to even the most calm lives.

In June 2010 (during one of those emotional lows), I thought about how universally unfair it was, that I’d finally found this guy who was perfect for me, who really belonged with me, and yet he actually also belonged somewhere else. And that was the moment of inception of UNRAVELING. Because at its heart, it’s a star-crossed love story. Janelle and Ben are from different worlds, and in their darkest moments, they find each other.

I am also a huge science fiction and fantasy nerd, and I hate the perception that science fiction just has to be space operas (though I like those too) so I wanted UNRAVELING to be accessible to people who don’t know a lot about science or who don’t normally read science fiction. I spent about two months thinking about the plot and writing down character ideas in a notebook while riding the subway, and then I started writing pieces of dialogue and a few key scenes.

Then in December 2010 I wrote the first 100 pages. Unsure whether I should finish or set it aside, I shared those pages in a writing workshop in early 2011 and in March I reluctantly sent them along with a synopsis to my agent.

 The day the book sold, I was at lunch with three friends. Near the end of lunch my agent called and said “where are you?” When I told her she said “Come to my office. Don’t even pay your bill. Just get up and leave.” I did and when I got there she told me about the offer.

And I promptly called that guy who inspired it all.