Damn, Brynn. Sounds as though he jumped before you did, and boxed you up with guilt.

IP Freely. Rocknroll note: John Entwistle of the Who used to check into hotels under the name Sir John Pitzperfectly.

Which could be fun, if you dumped the "Sir" bit.

I need brainstorming help on character motivation:

I'm writing scenes where our heroine, Lucy, has known our hero, James, for, oh, two weeks or so. And they've now been married for three days, and are doing pretty well, all things considered, for near strangers who get married. The sex is good, James is good company, and he's given her a really, really nice horse for a wedding present.

So, I need some conflict, and at this point it needs to be internal to the couple. Actually, most of the conflict is like that. I'm not big on contrived kidnappings and such. So I want Lucy to have some doubts, guilty feelings, and the like. As I'm writing it now, I've got her a bit confused by how much she's enjoying The Sex, because she's still a little bit in love with someone else, and she thinks it makes her a bit of a wanton, even though logically she knows it's better that she enjoys what she has with her husband than moons over someone else.

And in addition to the horse, James gives her an expensive but gaudy and over-the-top diamond set. Lucy hates it, but being as she's only known James two weeks, and he's the one who basically rescued her and all her family from dire poverty by offering marriage, she feels she has to fake liking it. This is the first time she's lied within the marriage, and small as the lie is, it's a distancing factor. Also, something about the diamonds make her feel bought and paid for, almost like it's a gift you'd give to a mistress more than a wife. So she goes back to pondering something that's been puzzling her all along--namely why James would be so extravagant as to offer marriage to a woman he hardly knows, no matter how desperate her situation. And she deduces, correctly as it happens, that he married her in large part to get a convenient sexual partner. (Because of an incident he witnessed while a very young man, he decided he'd never resort to prostitutes or keep a mistress--as a result, he'd been NGA for about a year, after his older widowed lover broke it off with him, and, well, he's young and horny.*)

Anyway. Does it make sense that Lucy (who's quite young and inexperienced, but practical and intelligent) would balk a bit at discovering her own capacity for sensuality, and be a bit squicked to realize James married her more for sex than for disinterested kindness or love (not that she thought he loved her before)? Or is that too Victorian for 1810?

*I wrote him deciding not to pay for sex because I get a little squicked over Duke of Slut heroes in historicals, knowing the prevalence and untreatability of STD's back in the day. I wanted to keep James's previous partners to a small enough number that I could believe he wouldn't be giving poor Lucy syphilis. But I liked what it did to his character and motivations, anyway.

Perhaps an older female relative of now-impeccable-reputation but with actually a by-current-standards-licentious background (those Georgians were loose even by our standards) might pay her a call to dispense some reassuring words of wisdom?

Oh, I've already figured out how to get her out of this mental loop--I just need to make sure it's plausible that she feels that way in the first place.

Does it make sense that Lucy (who's quite young and inexperienced, but practical and intelligent) would balk a bit at discovering her own capacity for sensuality,

I don't know if this is at all helpful, but I'm reading a book set in the 1940s right now where the young inexperienced wife has to convince herself that she's not a nympho for wanting to sleep with her husband, even after he loses his legs.

Susan, I think you've set Lucy up as a character who does wonder about this sort of stuff. Also, she's a) in a new set of circumstances, and b) likely to be slightly overwhelmed. I think the loop is plausible.

Susan, I think you've set Lucy up as a character who does wonder about this sort of stuff. Also, she's a) in a new set of circumstances, and b) likely to be slightly overwhelmed. I think the loop is plausible.

Cool. I confess to borrowing certain aspects of my own personality for her, among them a tendency to overthink and overanalyze everything, but I didn't know if what seemed a logical motivation to me would make sense to readers in general.

Thanks everyone for the advice. I think I will just write the one article I have left and then bow out gracefully.. I'm quite sure an honours English courseload combined with german, french and creative writing will be adequate ammunition for a convincing refusal of future assignments.

On a side note... I'm still pretty proud of that haiku experiment.. Anyone know any small poetry reviews that I might submit to?

Brynn, you ought to be proud of it. They were excellent haikus.

Eek!

I just registered for my first writers' conference, hosted by the Greater Seattle Romance Writers of America the first weekend of October. With, like, real authors, editors, and agents! I spent pretty much all my spare cash for September on the registration fee, which means I have to take this seriously and be all professional and shit. And I don't know what I'm doing! And I'm already stressing about what I'll do if I get stuck with my last choice of editor for the one-on-ones--my first choice was from Harper, my second from Pocket, and third and last from Harlequin--because I hate Harlequin's MO and I don't want my booook, my precioussssss, to go to them unless I've exhausted every other legit publisher in the business, including the tiny little lines who mostly only sell to libraries.

t runs around in imitation of chicken with head chopped off