Me, Myself and Barbara Cartland

I am a voracious reader and I have been since I was a tween. I remember getting my hot little hands on quite a few of historical romance author Barbara Cartland's iconic romance stories when I was about 10 years old. I recall my mother getting so mad that someone (I do not remember who now) had given me a few of the small Harlequin Romance novels. She would always take it away from me if she caught me with one, telling me that reading these stories would give me a very skewed outlook on life and love. That real life did not work that way.

Those types of books are noblob:https://vocal.media/c31694c9-cfdd-482c-9ec6-44ae84233e44w very old fashioned to almost everyone and they aren't not read much...instead, being kept as precious mementos that might have been passed down from an older generation to someone younger. And if that someone younger loved to read, then these would have been treated like gold to that person.

Once I cracked the spine of the first one, I was completely enraptured with the world that opened in my mind's eye. The sweeping grandeur of Ms. Cartland's very vivid descriptions pulled me into the many glamorous worlds in many historical periods including Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian, the stories filled with beautiful people, grand mansions, gorgeous, very high-class couture and a couple who would go through many trials and tribulations before falling in love forever. Each book followed the same structure and they all ended in Happy Ever Afters.

The author was extremely prolific, writing a total of 723 fictional romance novels and many non-fictional books as well.

I loved everything about this world I had stumbled upon. Because I hated the world I really lived in, I immersed myself into this pretend one as often as I could.

Of course, I snuck around and eventually ended up reading over 100 of them before I finished all that my fellow romance admirer had in their library.

And that was the beginning of my fascination for all things romantic.

My mother was correct about her warning, however. I did have an unrealistic view of life and love. I lived through a terrible example, as my mother and father were horrible together. He was an emotionally unavailable alcoholic abuser. I desperately needed him to love me and to be able to love him, but I was so terribly afraid of him at the same time. And that mess lasted until I was 15 and they divorced.

But I loved those stories so much that reading them had embedded within me a subconscious expectation of how marriage would be. That certainly turned out to be false and caused me a lot of unnecessary pain and heartache due to the weird fact that I had married my dad.

By saying that, I mean that the man I married was a lot like my father in that he was completely unreachable emotionally. He did not physically abuse me, but he did abuse me by the way that he refused to make sure that I knew that he really loved me and never praised me for anything I did well, instead saving his reactions to me for when I screwed up.

I have always heard that as a general rule, a woman will subconsciously gravitate towards men who have traits that remind her of her father. After all, her father is the first male that she loves and he is the one who helps her create the love map that will direct her heart for the rest of her life, sometimes well and sometimes not so well.

That was certainly true for me. It affected me very negatively as well. And that followed me, even once I separated from my husband of almost 18 years. I continuously reached out to men (when I was dating after the separation) who ended up being almost a carbon copy of my husband and my father in the worst ways, so, of course none ever worked long term.

But in the end, my fascination with fictional romance stood me in good stead. When I was about 26 years old, I eventually purchased an electric typewriter (hey, don't judge, this was WAAAAY before personal computers were available for less than $4,500) . I rushed to WalMart and got my greedy little mitts on a pack of typewriter paper, all 500 sheets of it! I was so excited, I caught myself pretty much floating home.

I set it up, sat down in front of it and then I............

Then I did...................

Nothing.

That is what I did.

A whole fat banana bunch of......Nothing.

After sitting there for about 20 minutes, a stray thought crawled to the forefront of my mind:

'Wow......writing is harder than I thought.'

Yep, you guessed it. I had decided that by reading all the romance novels I could collect since I was 10 years old and then spending $50 on my nifty little typewriter, that I would just be able to sit down in front of it and entire libraries of amazing stories would just flow into my mind and out of my fingertips with very little real work required on my part.

Yeah, well, THAT did not happen.

Dammit. *sigh*

Eventually I got over my first case of writer's block, not that I knew what the hell that was at the time. I had never heard of it, but I got over it, never fear.

Once the story began to take a little shape in my mind, I started to type, so enormously proud of the small stack of papers that slowly grew before my huge, amazed eyes.

The only problem was, once I had typed my way through several chapters of this grand novel I was creating, I could feel that something was not right. I thought hard about it, trying to figure out just what was wrong. I began to get a bit worried when I could not put my finger on the issue.

So, I stopped typing and stepped away from my little writer's niche in order to give myself a break. I stepped into the kitchen to get a drink, all the while wondering what in the hell was wrong with me.

After a few minutes, I found myself standing in front of my miniscule desk again, staring at the machine that helped me create that stack of papers, trying to will an explanation for that weird feeling that was sitting right at the base of my neck.

Suddenly, I had an epiphany. And not a good one, either.

Can an epiphany be both good and bad?

Ok, now I was letting my mind get out of hand......

Or something like that.

At any rate, the break apparently did me some good, because suddenly the thing that I was trying to think of just popped into my head.

I was........bored.

The story that I had been working on so industriously was now boring me.

What the hell?

Was this phenomenon something that ALL writers struggled with?

This was utter bullshit, right here.

I sat back down in front of the typewriter, determined to beat this boredom crap. I fed a fresh piece of paper into the machine and flipped the power switch back to ON.

Oh, didn't I mention that it was an electric typewriter?

Yep, nothing but the finest for this future best-selling author.

So anyway, back to the novel. That amazingly interesting literary blockbuster just waiting to have the words THE END placed at the bottom of the last page before it raced up the ranks to the very TOP of the NY Times Best Seller list. Where it would stay for weeks on end, until every single one of the books in the first printing were completely sold out and they were clamoring for another round to be printed and packed to be sent to the stores..

Oh the glory of it all. I could just see it now.

All of the book signings, all the fame, all the accolades

Yep, that shit was for ME.

I rubbed my face, coming out of the daydream, and had to wipe my mouth, as I realized that I had begun to drool a bit at the thought. I told myself sternly that I had to finish the amazing book before all that other great shit could happen.

But, what to do about the damned boredom?

I racked my brain, trying to come up with a quick solution to this problem that I had never, ever had before. ESPECIALLY when it came to a book. To a story about true love winning in the end. To me, that shit was like cat nip to a cat.

So why was I stuck? Why could I not just put my hands to the keys and pick up where I had left off, pounding away like I had been for the previous 3 hours?

After a bit of time where I floundered around, not knowing what to do, I finally huffed and yelled:

"Oh, to hell with it!"

And then I went to the cabinet, pulled out some brown envelopes and took the stack of papers from beside the typewriter and stuffed them in the top one. I picked up a pen and quickly scribbled "Rhiannon and Luke" across the front of the envelope and then placed it into the cabinet, shutting the door on the first quarter of my first novel.

Yep, that's right. I just put it away without finishing that fantastic novel that was going to catapult me into the limelight and make me millions of dollars.

Just like that.

OK, that's a slingshot, but who the hell cares?

You get my point, I'm sure.

Anyway, I sat back down at the typewriter and stared at the pristine sheet just sitting there on the spool, waiting for my inspired prose to start up once more.

And suddenly, a new idea came to me. I rushed to start on the next great novel that was going to rush to the top of the NY Times Best Seller list, catapult me to fame and make me millions of dollars.

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is how I collected 11....count 'em.....11 novels, all a quarter or half finished.

And I am confident, super confident, that each and every damned one of those unfinished novels are gonna rush to the top of the NY Times Best Seller list, catapult me to fame and make me millions of dollars.

They are! They will!

If only I can finish them.