Thanks, ma'am! Just channeling my inner teen today, I suppose.

I obviously had no social life as a teenager, because I never heard of this closet game till a couple of years ago.

I'd never heard of it until today, but at seventeen, I was, er, doing other things.

Seven Minutes in Heaven, baby!

And we were, uh, a lot younger than seventeen when we were playing it...

I was about to say that, AmyLiz. I don't think I played after 12 or 13.

I was barely sentient at age 12, much less thinking of anything to do with boys.

I knew about it, but never played it, being sort of a pseudo-outcast kid until very late in high school.

(Which, just to be clear, I've gotten over--it just means I identify with Early Willow an awful lot. Now that I'm in my mid-30's, I'm working on getting over my 20's.)

Anyone feel like beta-ing my column for Romancing the Blog next week? I'm having a harder and harder time coming up with ideas, since I don't read romance as extensively as some of our readers (I have a few favorite authors, and story types, and I tend to stick to them), and I don't know if what I came up with makes any sense or not.

I can post it here, if anyone's interested. It's under a thousand words.

I can look at it after I get back from the errands I'm about to go run. Posting here or emailing to profile addy are both good.

Okay, here 'tis.

“The Girl Needs Some Monster in Her Man”

In honor of Halloween, which is just days away, I’ve been thinking about monsters. And about ghosts, and way cool old haunted houses, and costumes, and chocolate, but mainly about monsters. And when it comes to creatures like that, I’m definitely one of the girls the title applies to. (And yes, for you clever readers, it’s a Buffy quote.) Maybe I don’t need some monster in my man, but boy, is it ever hard for me to resist one.

Trouble is, I like true monsters, and they’re hard to find. They’re real anti-heroes, I suppose. A kind reader who commented on one of my previous posts mentioned that Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an anti-hero, and he and Angel are the kind of monsters I love.

No, no, I won’t go on at (too much) length about TV characters, but I think it’s a valid point. Vampires grabbed the public imagination by the throat (heh heh) at least a century ago, but the vampires we get in today’s romances have, in my opinion, lost their bite, pun entirely intended.

Christine Feehan, Amanda Ashley, MaryJanice Davidson, and Katie Macalister, among others, have all created their own unique versions of vampires. And the best thing about cultural myths like the ones surrounding the undead is that they’re just that—myths. They can be elaborated on, tweaked, and adapted to suit any and every author. But, for me at least, they’re not….scary.

A vampire who doesn’t bite? For me, he becomes a big woobie, an object of pity who simply gets to keep his sexy fangs and his immortality in a true case of having your cake and eating it, too. He looks like the ultimate bad boy, but he’s a tame kitty at heart.

Not that there are easy answers to the issue of making fictional monsters more monster-like. The paranormal twist to a vampire (or a werewolf or a shapeshifter) story is usually shorthand for a deeper issue. Being an outsider, or being an addict or an alcoholic come to mind. Many critics have said that the character of Angel on Buffy, and his own show, worked well as a metaphor for a recovering alcoholic. The demon was always in him, even if his soul prevented him from loosing it on the world; an alcoholic’s temptation to drink might always remain, requiring a lot of determination to keep from drinking again.

Of course, Angel didn’t kill people anymore, when we got to know him on Buffy (except for a brief, and thrilling, foray when his demon took charge), and after a while even Spike was defanged thanks to a handy government chip. Of course, it’s hard to love a man, anti-hero or not, who kills viciously, at random, and with glee. So I get why romance vampires don’t bite, at least most of the time. Or why they bite only those who “deserve” it, using criminals and psychos as dinner instead of everyday folks.

But the thing that drew me to Angel especially was his need for redemption. He’d been called the Scourge of Europe, he’d killed so many innocent victims over the years. He needed to reclaim his humanity by helping the helpless. And viewers (not to mention Buffy) didn’t hold his past crimes against him, maybe partly because he wasn’t considered truly responsible for his massacres, since the demon inside him was the one who’d committed all those atrocities.

It would be tough to create a fictional vampire who still indulged his fangs, and make him sympathetic. Maybe what I’m really looking for is more metaphor in my man. Undead heroes with no fright factor are cool when you want the sexy, eternal, brooding vibe, but what I really want is that deep-down scare – a guy who’s faced down evil, maybe unsuccessfully, a guy who’s looked into the dark depths of his own soul, a guy who has to fight hard to be a card-carrying member of the human race.

The line between love and hate can be thin. The distinction between a monster and a man, as we see all too often in the news, can be even thinner. And as scary as that can be, for me the payoff is enormous. Maybe there’s a bit of “taming the beast” mythology mixed into my own reading (continued...)