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Ah, it’s Friday. Let us loosen the waistbands of the restrictive week and slide like lard through a careless colon into the weekend. And let me tell you about my fall into romance....

(There is a special effect here. It involves a kind of ‘backwards tunnel’ of pinkness, falling rose petals and hearts flashing on and off. We don’t have the kind of budget that would support this, so if you could imagine it we’d be most grateful. Thank you. Oh, and there’s a plinky-plonky musical effect, like an elderly aunt trying to recall music lessons she had when she was seven.)

Romance. Ahhhhh. Like many girls, I experimented with romance in my youth. Starting with the short stories in magazines like ‘Jackie’, we kidded ourselves that this was only ‘romance’ in name – that we were in no danger of becoming hooked. No, we could stop it any time we liked. Just as soon as we’d finished this week’s serial and found out whether Jason and Marie ever did get to the cinema, despite the machinations of the evil Wendy. (We knew she was evil because she had flicky hair. No-one good ever has flicky hair. The nice girls always had centre partings and smocks. And they smiled a lot.)

So, when I started out on my trail to becoming a Writer, I began with romance. Unfortunately, since this was completely lacking in my life, I found myself writing versions of the Jason/Marie v Wendy stories I’d read. I didn’t understand enough about people, about motivations or about what makes people tick, which are all vital things when writing proper, ‘real’ romance. So I stopped. And began writing science fiction and fantasy instead. Badly, obviously, because I still hadn’t grasped that what a writer really needs to have (as well as a good pen, lots of Eccles cakes and an idea) is a knowledge of psychology. Even non-humans need motivations.

I dillied and dallied about, and grew up. And with growing up came disappointment (thank you, Simon – see yesterday’s blog) and rejection and unhappiness. No! No – stop crying, these were good things! Honestly! All right, at the time they weren’t, they were horrible and made my mascara run and I stopped shaving my legs for weeks at a time. But! They gave me an understanding of how people behave in many different conditions, although not Arctic conditions because I’ve never been there. But I learned the ways humans deal with misery and also happiness. How they can learn to like the former and sabotage the latter, by setting treacle traps and buckets of whitewash.... oh. That’s slugs, is it? Well, people sabotage happiness in lots of ways, probably not, it now turns out, with treacle or whitewash, but they do.

However. When I re-started my romance writing career (as I like to call it), I found myself with an essential dichotomy. This proved susceptible to treacle traps and nightly whitewash baths, however I was still left with a problem. Heroes.

The conventional ‘Hero’ (or Dwayne, as we shall hereforth call him) is a man shaped like a root vegetable. No, not a potato, you at the back! Anyhow, potatoes are tubers not roots. I’m thinking more of your parsnip. Carrot, possibly. You know, the wide top tapering down to a pointy bit. All big shoulders and stomachs that look (through Dwayne’s body-hugging Tight White T) like iron bars on a paving slab.

Well, OK. But, do the heroines of these stories ever stop to ask ‘how does he get a shape like that?’ I mean, no man is naturally built like a brick bus-shelter, not without hours spent working on his shape. Just like I don’t naturally go in and out in the right places, not at my time of life – I have to spend hours working on it. That, and some really punitive underwear. So. Dwayne = hours in gym. Heroine = feisty young woman. Great. But what happens – runs my over-imaginative imagination – when they’ve got together, settled down, maybe had a baby or two? Is he still going to be spending those hours working on those pecs, leaving her in the house with two crying toddlers, an underexercised German Shepherd, two bottles of white wine and that nice young guy from downstairs who everyone assumes to be gay? Huh? Or is he going to have given up all that tedious ‘working out’ garbage in favour of staying home, eating carry-outs and watching that manly chest gradually sink down until it becomes one with the beer-belly and he has to apply for an extension to his belt? Not so romantic now, huh, Dwayne?

And besides, I don’t find that kind of man attractive. Please, tell me I’m not the only one.... I like my men on the skinny side of thin. They don’t even have to be tall, as long as they can see my face when they’re sitting down, that’s fine. Muscles? Pah, not so much. You can’t go wrong with a guy who spends his days doing something geeky, like programming computers, because a) he’ll be intelligent and, therefore, those evenings when you’re stuck at home with the screaming toddlers, underexercised German Shepherd and the wine, you won’t need the (possibly) gay guy from downstairs to give good conversation, b) they tend to have strong finger muscles, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone here how important that is, and c) they don’t get out much and are therefore grateful for any female company that comes their way. Therefore there’s no need for all that expensive primping and corsetry that’s normally needed for dating, just brush your hair and wipe the cat fur off your jeans and, for a geek-guy, you’re good to go.

And that, my dears, is why my heroes tend to be of the indoor-living, short-sighted, long-haired, socially inept kind. Because this means that, however..um... individual shall we say the heroine is, he won’t step over her on his way to the nearest over-breasted, squeaky-voiced bimbette. In fact, in Reversing Over Liberace, one of my male leads is afflicted with cerebral palsy – so far from the archetypal hero that he’s approaching it from the other side. But he manages to be sweet and sexy and he's very, very intelligent.

And I think we’ll all agree, won’t we, that an intelligent man is the sexiest thing of all? After chocolate, obviously. And really good shoes. And that gorgeous red dress that Sarah-Jessica Parker was wearing. And a Prada bag. Oh, all right, intelligent men might not be the sexiest thing, but they’re certainly on the list. In the top ten. Way, way ahead of the waxed-chested, honed-to-perfection hunks with their spray-tans and their hard-to-maintain biceps, anyway.

But for now, slide on your slippers, close the curtains and dry off the dog, for the weekend is here, in all its Chardonnay-fuddled glory. Let us await the morrow!