Historical romance author Janet Mullany has to stop laughing at the idea of being a romance expert before she can talk about Valentine’s Days with her husband of 11 years, Steve.
“He’s bought me presents, or flowers? I really can’t remember,” she said. “He’ll be really insulted if he reads this,” admitted the Cheverly author of “Dedication,” a steamy novel about reunited lovers.
In her fictional world, romance ensues when the hero ties the heroine to her sofa with a scarf before licking her toes in an effort to blackmail her.
In reality, she says, “I don’t really have a lot of romance in my own life. I’m busy.”
While members of the Maryland Romance Writers’ group might write exotic fantasies for publication, their own romantic expectations are much more ordinary.
For Valentine’s Day, most have a sedate evening planned with their husbands. Yet, the writers all agree, sounding a lot like women everywhere, that while Valentine’s Day isn’t a huge event for them, year-round romantic intentions and unexpected gestures of love are encouraged.
“It’s one day a year, (but) it would be nice to keep things going all year round,” said Mullany. Her husband does understand her needs, she said, and sometimes even brings her flowers for no reason at all.
“I’ll go all silly about it,” she said.
“I have to confess that Janet is pretty easy to please,” Steve Mullany wrote in an e-mail.
“There have been times when I wanted to take her to some pricey restaurant or buy her something big and gaudy, but she would have none of it. Often, she just wants to stay home and cuddle up to watch a favorite Regency romance flick, a genre we both adore,” he wrote.
Erotic writer Emma Sinclair, of Greenbelt, also endorses everyday romance. “I think of romance as being more of an everyday thing, bringing home flowers for no reason — which I don’t get, by the way,” she said.
Sinclair, the author’s pseudonym, puts aside her own modest romance when writing her books, which leave nothing to the imagination.
“There’s no door closing,” she said. “There’s graphic sex scenes, but they further the plot.”
The heroine in Sinclair’s first novel, “A Walk on the Wild Side,” finds her love interest at a strip club, Lenny’s House of Tail, on amateur night. Her character, Shannon, wants to try out some moves she picked up in her cardio striptease class, and the protagonist, Nick, is there to evaluate her lessons.
Sinclair’s own love life is decidedly simpler. She and her husband dated while at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University, where she remembers they made each other valentines from computer paper and crayons.
Knowing your wife is imagining hanging out at Lenny’s House of Tail while you’re making her a crayon Valentine might intimidate some spouses, but these romance writer husbands not only encourage, but sometimes participate in the creative process.
Lauren Sharman, author of the upcoming “No Worries,” a romantic suspense novel detailing a love affair between characters named Rebel and Gypsy, uses her husband Joey’s wild youth for plot points.
“He is the inspiration for a lot of my novel. He is my ultimate hero,” Sharman, of Laurel, said. “He told me stories, adventures that they had dur