While reading a cruddy vampire romance filled with blood and verbal bilge that stuck to my fingers, I realized that if someone could write, market, sell, and fill their pockets on this stuff, I ought to also seize this cash cow and ship my mind off to the mental void of formula writing. I could make up sexy names like Thor Of The Wrongfully Ostracized and Camilla The Unblemished Rose and have them bite one another for a few hundred pages.

They will fall inseparably in love by page 127 despite his dark underworld of vampiric curses and aversion to light, and her desire for true love and relentless devotion, which means sunny picnics by the sea with little babies stuffed into bonnets, and candy. Lots of candy.

They’ll kiss once in the early pages and she’ll regret it, and he will burn through chapters chasing his manly manhood like a divining rod until he crashes into Camilla again. How could she resist? How will their lives ever work? What will her family say? Oh, screw it, he is just so hot!

We’ll need a tad more plot just for those readers maintaining some scholarly self-image they construct carefully in their minds with a glance in the mirror. They catch themselves flipping through some unabridged dictionary looking up Thor's origins. They are feigning research and it looks great. Great. Soon the scandalous flop's readers will ascribe to themselves a deep intellectual bent. From these fictional characters comes inspiration and a well of insight and fortitude. This Thor and Camilla are huge. They represent all that is wrong and all that is right in the world. They loom in their actions. They are god-like mentors and show us a path to happiness. They are fantasy. They are beautiful. Readers love them.

I have to get this down on paper and off to a publisher. I am also beginning to love Thor. Camilla’s hair is wrong and often gets caught in her flimsy bodice, but Thor is learning to French braid and by the end of the book he is her lover, protector, provider, friend, and hairdresser.

Explaining this yack to Lily is useless, but she encouraged me. I laughed at the crap going on in this bite me romance and she looked up at me, so I told her…