The scenes we never see in romance

Does he spray toothpaste on the mirror when he spits?

When I first began writing romance novels, back in 2009 (note: you will never, EVER see the books that began my career. Nowadays, you get the good stuff and not the “first pancake” LOL), one of the conventions I was forced to face was reality.

As in, avoiding it.

I started out writing historical romance. Where, you ask, are these historical romances, Julia?

No. Absolutely NO! You’ll never read them.

I was a history professor for twenty years, so I naturally assumed (Mistake #1) that I would be an outstanding historical romance author.

Research was my thing! I could manage historiography pressures on original research and tease out the truth! Readers would absolutely adore my depictions of what “real life” was like in the Regency period.

Going to the opera and need to pee? (Mistake #2)

Don’t rinse your hair with this!

I’ve got a bourdaloue and underwear (or lack of…) configuration for that, nicely laid out with authentic description about how the lady’s maid just slid the pot under her dress while she stayed in her seat in the box at the opera and —

::insert record scratch::

What? Readers don’t want to read about women peeing in public (and I do mean in public)? But it’s part of the authentic record! They can’t just want the swoon romance part and reject reality, can they?

Yes, it turns out.

MISTAKE NUMBER INFINITY.

Dear readers, this is not a slag on historical romance, or those readers (I am one of them). Gimme some Loretta Chase, Stephanie Laurens, Sarah McLean, Gaelen Foley, and Darcy Burke (gimme gimme gimme). I am certainly not ripping on historical romance authors.

I am 100% slagging on me.

On my thoughts on being a history expert. On my breathtakingly confident assumption that I knew how to do it better.

On my internalized structure that assumed historical romance should have its needle moved closer to historical fiction because it would make a better book.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Now, I do want to say this: sometimes, an extremely, viscerally real scene has to happen in a romance novel for the authenticity of the story to allow the characters to go on their journey. Whether it’s a birthing scene or a a hangover scene, or someone with IBS or a physical issue, writing the “gross” details can be an opportunity for empathy.

And hilarity.

Finding balance is the hard part, as an author. Where do you draw the line?

What if my line is a wee bit different from where your line might live?

Two people move in together and share a bathroom for the first time. They live in a 1-bedroom apartment, and she’s in the middle of using the toilet when he needs to go, too. Like, really really needs to go, but she’s engaged in, let’s say, a slowly moving situation, while he’s desperate and needs a fast solution.

Does he pee in the sink? The bathtub? The kitchen sink? Out the window?

On her prized ficus plant?

Does a reader need to read a scene like the above?

What if she’s trapped on the toilet because her knees lock, and she literally can’t get up? (Yes, I’m invoking some Grace & Frankie here). And what if he desperately needs to pee, finds her stuck, offers to help but… needs to tap the line first?

I’m grasping at straws a bit (and heading into gross territory, sure), but 1) these are moments writers (okay, moments I) encounter when writing from imagination, and 2) when you start writing these “scenes we never see in romance” you let something else be seen:

• Authenticity.

• Realness.

• Human fallibility.

• Imperfection.

The goal of any good romance novel is not to create a fantasy.

Yes, I just BLASPHEMED.

If it were, we’d be writing fantasy novels. Nothing against fantasy (or romantasy!).

But romance novels are rooted in a singular concept: getting Person A and Person B from Point A to Happily Ever After.

(If you’re writing menage or reverse harem, getting Persons A, B, C, D, E, etc…)

(And to be inclusive, aliens and shifters and doors and balloon toys are persons!)

Enemies-to-lovers and fish-out-of-water books lend themselves toward these sorts of embarrassing scenes, because the trope itself is all about making everything between the couple awkward. Readers love cringe-worthy moments that either pop an ego or set up a reluctant rescue.

And I adore writing every word of those scenes.

So… where do I draw the line? I don’t really know. In many ways, I just feel my way through it. When I wrote the (in)famous sugar-free gummy bear scene in Random Acts of LA, I asked Clark if I’d gone too far.

Here’s an excerpt from that scene:

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I was not going to have my bowels open up like this. Talk about vulnerability. Some kind of evil settled into my gut and was painstakingly turning a firehose against the lining of my intestines.

I hadn’t experienced anything like this since I was thirteen and Dad got a bunch of bad canned chicken from the food pantry two blocks over. We’d been wiped out for three days.

This was worse.

Pockets of gas moved around inside me like Tetris pieces. Worse: we could both hear them, like groans from the sarlacc pit.

Keeping a poker face through this was as hard as controlling the, uh... output.

If I just breathed in through my nose, and out through my mouth, I’d—

The sarlacc spoke.

“God, Tyler, I think you’ve got some kind of stomach bug and—”

Then Mordor spoke back.

Maggie looked down at her own belly in disbelief. “What? I don’t—” Her words cut off with a facial expression I knew all too well.

She pressed down hard on the accelerator.

How many miles before that next rest stop?

I didn’t think that anything could make this drive worse. I should have known better. In my life, just when you think nothing more can happen—it can. And does.

And it’s always worse than you’d imagined.

We dispensed with decorum and both rolled our windows down all the way. The stench was intense.

She farted. Loudly.

I started giggling. Haven’t giggled since I was eleven.

Her face was as red as parts of her hair.

“I—uh—”

And then I farted, too.

“Oh, God,” she muttered.

You lose all pretense of social norms when you start farting uncontrollably in front of someone. It’s the kind of thing politeness can’t even cover up. It’s like my drunk Dad at a big family gathering. Everyone can ignore old Titus over there, but after a while you have to acknowledge that he pissed in your spider plant, stole your bottle of Percocets from the medicine chest in the back bathroom and left empty beer bottles in random bushes outside your house before passing out on your front lawn and waking up to the automatic sprinklers.

Farts in a small car are just like that.

“Sorry.”

“Quit giggling.”

“Can’t—” Gasp. Fart. “Help it.”

“Are we sick? What happened?” She began white knuckling it as her belly made a series of sounds like coal cars creaking along on train tracks so rusted they needed to be sand blasted.

“I don’t know.”

“Now we both have it.”

“You sure you have it?” I asked, snickering.

Her stomach answered for her, and then she broke out in a sweat.

“Sweet mother of God, what is this?” She hit eighty-two miles per hour and moved into the fast lane.

Pretty soon she was doing the meditative breathing, too.

Ten minutes later she pulled over and we both sprinted for our respective bathrooms. My butt cheeks opened up and the gates of Mordor were unleashed. I felt like I was sending hundreds of dwarves and hobbits to their deaths. I had the uncomfortable feeling that my ass was the Eye of Sauron for a few moments there.

The evil my body poured forth into that poor, innocent toilet was just cruel.

Wave after wave, cramp after cramp, and as I sat there, a prisoner to my bowels, I realized that there wasn’t exactly a wall of self-consciousness between us anymore.

We both wandered back to the car, shuffling like something out of a zombie movie. Maggie’s head was down, tapping away on her phone.

“You calling Lena?” I asked.

“Why would I call Lena?”

“Maybe her cookies did this?”

Maggie looked offended at the thought.

“I’ve eaten Lena’s cookies loads of times and they were fine.”

My stomach rawr-ed in answer, the sound like thunder fading off in the distance. I sprinted back to the bathroom and left her hanging.

By the time I came back, she was leaning against the car, sucking on a bottle of water like a baby cow calf. She downed that bottle in seconds, then wiped her mouth, tossing the empty in a recycling bin.

“Lena says she ate more cookies than the two of us put together and she’s fine.”

“Huh.”

She glared at me. “So what could it be?”

“Can’t be the coffee. Or the cream. All I’ve eaten since then is cookies and those gummy bears.”

She frowned. “I’ve had coffee, cookies, gummy bears, eggs, and—”

“Let’s check out the gummy bears.”

Her stomach yawped like Mrs. Wilmer’s Labradoodle.

“Go,” I said with a wave, trying not to laugh.

She took off for the bathroom and I grabbed the bag of gummy bears. Nothing weird. They were just a five pound bags of—

Sugar free gummy bears.

Huh.

Maggie’s smartphone was in a drink holder. I grabbed it and did a quick search on Google. Came to a product page with—

Hold on.

One thousand, three hundred and ninety two reviews? For gummy bears?

I opened the page.

By the time Maggie came back, I had solved the mystery of our rotgut.

“I know why we’re sh!tting water,” I said.

“So eloquent, Tyler. Really. You know how to sweet talk a girl.”

“Facts are facts. Sorry to offend your sensitive sensibilities.”

“I live in a dorm with hundreds of eighteen and nineteen year olds, Tyler. You can’t offend me.”

“It’s the gummy bears.”

“The what?”

“The gummy bears. Evil little sweet gooey, sugar-free messengers of doom.”

“How do you...?”

I waved her smartphone. “Process of elimination.”

“Very funny.”

I frowned, caught off guard. What did she mean?

Then I got my accidental pun and smiled at her.

“Jesus,” I sighed.

“Yeah, I prayed to him a few times, too, back on the toilet.”

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Now, that scene was NOT meant to be romantic, in any way, shape, or form. What it is meant to accomplish is bond the two main characters through a shared ordeal. In that book, Maggie and Frown are trauma survivors (different horrific pasts), and each is fighting to find ways to trust other people.

Is toilet humor the perfect way to show how these two get closer as a result of shared torment at the hands of sugar alcohols gone wrong? I don’t know. That’s your call. You’re the reader.

I’m just the writer.

Did I cross the line?

It’s like asking readers why they like certain kinds of romance novels. You can give some specifics, but the bottom line:

You know it when you see it.

For me, I know it when I write it. :)

Can you think of some scenes that are super real, from romance novels you’ve read? I’d love some recommendations!

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Shopping for a Billionaire’s Baby - New Cover

We’re at book 9, out of 13, in my new illustrated cover series for the Shopping for a Billionaire series. As the reveals go for these covers, I’m getting more reader feedback, and people are LOVING the new look!

I am, too!

When I wrote Shopping for a Billionaire’s Baby, I knew the book needed to be extra special. Not that any of my books are not special - they all deserve my full effort - but I knew readers were expecting something big. Emotional. Intense.

Deciding to have a baby is a huge deal for any relationship, but for Shannon and Declan - who up until this point in the series, had gone through more than enough calamity and weirdness in an effort to just, you know, be in love - needed a baby story that was more than “he put it in her and hit the target, wheeeeee.”

(I’m so romantic, huh?)

This book has one of my favorite lines, when Shannon is 1,355 weeks pregnant and they are trying to help labor along. Here’s an excerpt:

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Yesterday, I went to the hospital for a non-stress test. All the results were fine, other than the fact that every doctor there was a completely useless idiot who couldn’t explain why my body is stuck at three centimeters and won’t expand enough to get this turkey out of me.

I think they were too polite to tell me to my face that the baby has figured out I’ll be a horrible mother.

But one little tidbit the nurse added: s3x could help bring the baby out. “What put the baby in there helps bring the baby out.” Her long explanation of progesterone in sem3n and biochemical blah blah blah was nice and all, but what I heard was:

Declan has to mount Mount Shannon if I want to go into labor.

You ever have s3x when you’re 1,213 weeks pregnant? Do I really need one more big thing shoved inside me? Pretty sure a fire marshal would declare my body over capacity and in violation of several zoning codes if Dec and I did the deed.

And yet… doctor’s orders and all…

I sigh and reach for his junk with about as much enthusiasm as he musters for having dinner with my mother. “Want to do it?”

“What?”

I sigh again. “You know. S3x? Remember s3x? That thing we used to do when I was h0rny in the second trimester?”

His eyes go unfocused. Wistful, even. “I remember.”

“So?” I demand, slumping forward, Mount Shannon resting on the turkey like my breasts are trying to hatch it.

“I am at your service. Reporting for stud duty,” he says, his words muted as his lips trace the long line of my collarbone.

I wiggle away, and by “wiggle” I mean I groan, stand up, and climb on the bed. I get on hands and knees.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting into position. Can you help me take off my p@nties?” This is about as romantic as a root canal.

I can feel him just standing there, silent. His breath is light, in and out as he takes his time. Why isn’t he moving? Saying something?

Maybe I’m too far away. I lift one knee, then the other, and back up. As I start moving, I chirp, “Beep beep beep.”

“Why are you saying that?”

“When something this big moves backwards, you need a warning sound. OSHA regulations say so.”

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Now, when Clark first read this, he died laughing, then got serious and said, “This is getting too autobiographical.”

While I didn’t come up with that OSHA line while 1,764 weeks pregnant, I should have.

Initial sketches for the cover for Shopping for a Billionaire’s Baby were awesome, as always:

In the book, Shannon and Declan go to a fancy charity ball at the very end of her pregnancy, so we highlight this scene on the cover. I wanted to show how absolutely radiant she is, and how protective and appreciative Declan is of her, while showcasing some glamor in their lives.

We went from that initial sketch to this:

If you haven’t read Shopping for a Billionaire’s Baby yet, please go get it right now and read it. This is one of my FAVORITE books in the series (I know I shouldn’t have favorites, but I’m human!).

Spoiler: Declan delivers his own baby. In an elevator. One he has to break into.

With a scene like THAT, how can you NOT read it?

You can find all the links at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Kobo, and Apple Books here:

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I Really Am Shannon

It finally happened.

Clark makes fun of me because I walk around like this all the time.

I wear a lot of V-neck sweaters and the design is perfect for shoving my glasses in there.

I also lose my glasses constantly. When they're hanging out between the girls, it's easier to find them. When I explained this to Clark, he said, “You lose me all the time. Maybe I should hang out there, too?”

Anyhow…

Sometimes, I bend down and my glasses fall on the ground, so they're getting scratched. This is much like me and keyboards. Even when the H key is dying or broken, I don't change my behavior.

It's just... me.

Well, "Me" just learned a big old lesson because I bent over a toilet and...

Yep.

I AM SHANNON from Shopping for a Billionaire.

Except I had to fish my glasses out of a *just used toilet*. Fortunately, *I* was the one who just used the toilet.

Clark does not know this happened.

Clark will never know this happened.

Currently bleaching the world.

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Clark Said I Had to Share This

We don’t do a lot of grocery shopping in person these days, because our whole family is immunocompromised in some way, and my youngest has severe immune system issues. We’re still masking when we go out in public indoors, and we do curbside pickup for most groceries.

Every 6 weeks or so, I do go indoors for a huge shopping trip. I head out at 6:45am (before the crowds) and stick to Market Basket (a regional chain here in Massachusetts with rock-bottom prices), but I used to shop at Aldi all the time.

So I headed there during a quiet time the other day.

And bought 17 - not a typo! - different kinds of cheese. I’d forgotten how amazing their cheese selection is! I bought SO MUCH CHEESE that I literally broke the cheese drawer (also known as a produce drawer…) on our freezer. The weight was too much LOL.

But this is why Clark said I had to write about my trip:

Reminders of Darla, Trevor, and Joe; Lydia, Jeremy, and Mike; Laura, Mike, and Dylan.

If you haven’t read The Random Series, The Obedient Series, and The Her Billionaires Series, check them out. You’ll understand why that cheese needed to be purchased! ;)

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