My romantic suspense, Charade was only the third time I’d ventured into penning a sizzling scene but I was apparently getting rather good at it. So good, in fact, that my editor at HarperCollins – a naive and bespectacled young woman whom I suspected at the time had never set foot outside the comfort zone of her own borough – requested that I “turn down the heat”.
This surprised me because my focus in the romantic suspense genre has always been more on the mystery/sleuthing aspects of the plot than whether the lead characters engage in the pursuit of carnal pleasures. In truth, it was only thrown in to pacify some vague directive about ensuring that every book I wrote for them contained a little mind-dizzying passion followed by sensual drags on a shared cigarette.
“Turn down the heat”? All right, I suppose I may have gotten caught up in the moment. As I began to edit the sinful chapter, however, it struck me that the scene was just too good to end up in sorry little snippets on the cutting room floor. Taking a page from comedians who simply recycle their jokes from one venue to the next, I figured that it would only be a matter of time that I’d be writing another steamy encounter for someone and that I may as well just save it as a separate file on my hard drive.
Little did I know that it would be resurrected for the very same publisher two books later.
This one was called Knight Dreams (and no, I claim absolutely no authorship of any of these drekky titles). It was set in the Scottish Highlands and – in the true tradition of romantic suspense – involved a plucky heroine who began to suspect that – cue the scary music - the handsome hunk she was attracted to might not be entirely truthful. On a dark and stormy night, the two of them find themselves sharing a cozy room at an inn. Eyes lock, hearts race, temperatures rise, and clothing begins to drop to the floor.
As Fate would have it, I was racing against a deadline to finish this book since I already had another project waiting in the wings. Much as I personally would have preferred to given Laurel and Gavin some privacy that tempestuous evening and show them blissfully enjoying tea and scones across a breakfast table the next morning, I knew my editor would ask me where the big sex scene was.
A light bulb came on in my head. “Wait a minute,” I remembered. “I think I’ve got something that will not only work but also save me a whole lot of time.”
Isn’t “search-and-replace” a wonderful function on our computers? In roughly the same amount of time it has taken you to read this anecdote, I had replaced Maggie and Derek with Laurel and Gavin and seamlessly changed the locale from Seattle to Scotland. Since it was raining heavily in both settings, I didn’t even have to tweak with the weather.
Snickering wickedly at my cleverness, I shipped the completed manuscript off to my editor. And waited. And waited.
When she finally got back to me, I was surprised to see that the steamy chapter was void of any editorial corrections or comments. This leads me to several amusing speculations. The first is that she was just as harried as I was and skimmed through the book so quickly that she didn’t even notice what I had done. The second is that she actually did read it and, thinking it sounded familiar, signed off on it because it must have been consistent with other books she had already approved. Door No. 3 (my personal favorite) relates to the interesting timing that - between the writing of Charade and Knight Dreams - she became engaged, got married, and learned something scintillating she could apply to her honeymoon.