How to Write an Annoying Romance, by Victoria Alexander.

This list is pace my recent reading of "Secrets of a Proper Lady," which was not quite up to snuff.

1. Start with the Arranged Marriage plot, and add the Mistaken Identity twist, so that your main characters are lying to each other from the start.

2. Add a bunch of secondary characters whose only purpose is to make difficulties for no purpose whatsoever, then make them complain about how unreasonable the main characters are being on all fronts.

3. Have your main characters fall in cowardly, cowardly love all while taking every opportunity not merely to support their ridiculous charades, but to actually make them exponentially worse.

4. Reference Shakespeare and his hidden-identity plays as much as possible, so people realize the author is smart and is Playing With Sources rather than just Fucking Around. Nobody will be reminded how great Shakespeare's romances are in comparison to this drivel -- I promise.

5. Keep increasing the financial stakes at dramatic moments just to make your main characters twist in the wind as much as possible. Who doesn't like reading endlessly about that?

6. Make the conclusion the least promising wedding scene in history. For instance, when at the end of the ceremony the vicar (clearly appalled) mentions snidely that a kiss is customary, by all means have the bride and heroine respond: "I would rather die."

7. This may be the most important point of all: Definitely add as an epilogue a first-person scene where the author is forced to debate the subject of her next romance with a bunch of her past characters. Extra points if you mention that previously one of your characters has faded away and out of existence from an excess of two-dimensionality.

Incipit

When I was five, I found and read my first romance novel. I've been reading them ever since, both good and bad and terrible. The most recent discovery is one called Brazen Ecstasy, a truly terrible example of the white chick/Indian chief variety most seen in the 1970s, when people were trying to be sensitive (white chick and Indian man respect and love each other between periodic bouts of perfectly acceptable steamy sex!) but ended up striking more of a Noble Savage kind of tone (pure Indian way of life superior to corrupting Western influences). I am rather fascinated by 70s romances in particular -- Sweet, Savage Love, anyone? -- and so paying fifty cents for this one at a grocery store in Kirkland seemed like a bargain. The love of my life eyed the title warily. "The ecstasy in those things is always brazen, isn't it," he opined.

"Or savage," I agreed, "or sweet, or tender --"

"Or furious?"

"As long as it's a hyperbole." I laughed as something occurred to me. "As for me, I would love to lose myself in mild abandon."

And thus this blog was born -- a blog which purports to chronicle my tentative forays into degeneracy, both modern and otherwise. A toast to the start of the endeavor!