Let’s all recall how I’ve said before that I’m married to a real life human who is totally not imaginary or Canadian. Okay? Are you remembering that?  Good. It’s confession time.

OKAY, fine, you caught me. Here is my Canadian boyfriend.

I am not good on a natural, instinctive level, at writing about the bizarre waltz that is the human courtship.  Indeed, I believe I can’t write about ship like that, period.

You’d think, being a human myself, and married, as I’ve said, to another human, with memories of how that  all went down, I’d be able to reconstruct something honest.  But I am just so unsure how people do this to themselves again and again, and also it was a long time ago I had to worry about things like whether when he said “see ya” it meant “goodbye, colloquially” or “I am planning with all my heart to see your face again.”

Let’s blame how long ago it was for why I suck at this.

I can name all the chemicals that create lust and love (they are different!) but I am out of words for that feeling in your palms, and the butterflies that alternate from just below your stomach to just underneath your heart, and the slow progression of finding someone  to be pretty, to finding them interesting, to finding them wonderful.

Okay, that wasn’t so bad. But you can’t be like “Here’s this character! Now the main character’s palms ache! And now she likes his laugh! And now she’s impressed with his mental fortitude! NOW she wants to put her face on his face!”

That actually may  be better than my first draft.*

I am fortunate to have a family of chemists who don’t actually see a problem with using phenylethylamine in a work of fiction about two people who like each other, and also professional romance authors for friends  who, for whatever reason, think I’m funny and not an ongoing disaster.  I think between these two attitudes, I’ll be able to wrangle something that sounds like a thing that happens onto a page.

If not, I’ll just talk about what actually happens, and we’ll all learn so much about hormones and neural receptors! Doesn’t that sound…cozy?

Does it um, does it look like something else to you? It’ll come to me eventually.

PS: Remember that there’s still time to get a free copy of Sacrifice! But not much. The wagons are circling!

*Sacrifice isn’t a romance, but neither of my characters happen to be completely a-romantic, either, and there are some fine lookin’ people out in the world, with things like radio voices, and golden retrievers. These things happen.