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I keep wondering how things work. That’s curiosity, which—if
it doesn’t kill you—is not a bad thing. Trouble is, my curiosity was never a
very marketable skill…until I started writing.
My first contemporary romance, Love in Reality, is out this week. It’s the story of a law student,
Libby, who ends up on a fictional reality TV show, The Fishbowl, pretending to be her identical twin, who’s a
bartender. What really triggered it was my curiosity about shows like Big Brother, where contestants are
locked in a house with lots of cameras and microphones. Each contestant has to
talk to a camera about how the game’s going. Those “journal entries” end up on
each episode of the show.
Only you know they’re not spontaneous, right? Someone has to
ask the right questions to get the player to talk about the aspects of the game
the executive producer most cares about. Turns out, those people—the one’s
asking the questions—are producers.
So I had in my mind a rather intimate relationship between
the producer—a man—and the contestant, who’s female. What if their
conversations—after the camera was turned off—got personal? What if the
producer was attracted to the contestant? What if they fell in love?
Here’s the thing about writing: It’s all problem solving.
Every idea I have generates scads of problems I then have to solve. How did a
law student end up on a show that would never cast a law student? Why’s she
pretending to be her twin sister? Why is the producer attracted to her so much
that he’s willing to break the rules to spend time with her?
And, because of my background as a lawyer, I asked really
arcane questions no one else would even think of, like whether the heroine has committed
“fraud in the inducement”? (Short answer: no.)
Well, it took a few incarnations before I was confident I
had a workable plot. (Mind you, by that time I’d written the entire book
two-and-a-half times. But that’s a whole different blog post!)
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Here, then, are the answers to the questions: Libby (our law
student heroine) is working as her twin, Lissa, at the South
Philadelphia bar because of a family friend’s cancer. The
producer, Rand, wants “Lissa-the-bartender” on
the show because he hates his boss, Marcy, who’d never cast anyone that
confident. He doesn’t realize it’s really Libby he wants to go on the show. And
she would never have accepted if her summer law job hadn’t fallen through.
Oh, and she thinks he’s cute. Which is okay, because he’s really
attracted to her too. But she’s not being honest to him, and he’s not being
honest with himself, and reality TV is a really screwy environment in which to
fall in love, so…let’s just say, they have a lot of work to do before their
happy-ever-after.
And all of that started with the image of a man asking a
woman questions.
Magdalen is a 2012 Golden Heart® Finalist
You can find out more about her at her website: http://MagdalenBraden.comJoin Magdalen on Facebook
You can find out more about her at her website: http://MagdalenBraden.comJoin Magdalen on Facebook
The Love in Reality page at Harmony Road Press: http://harmonyroad.com/books/love-in-reality
