7 Day Blog Challenge, Manifesto

A Romance Novelist’s Manifesto

Hi gang! This week might be a bit different here in blogville as I’m doing Jeff Goin’s 7 day blogging challenge. I loved his book, The Art of Work, and am looking forward to completing these challenges this week. BTW, it’s not too late to join on the fun. Go here or click on the picture.

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Our first assignment was to create a manifesto. I suspect this will be a living document but here’s my first crack at it. Would love to hear thoughts and feedback. Thanks!

I believe in happily-ever-after. I believe in soulmates. I believe that love is the most important force in the world. I believe in love that stands the test of time, through death, into eternity. I believe that the single most important choice we will ever make is the person we choose to spend our one wild and precious life with.

Since the dawn of time, humanity has fallen in love, over and over, in endless variations. Every one of those love stories is as unique, beautiful, and wondrous as a snowflake. What a miracle for two people to find each other in this seething mass of humanity sharing this blue planet spinning through the cosmos.

Romance novels delve into that short period in a person’s life where they meet their soulmate, struggle to make it work and fall in love. What could be more exciting, more thrilling, more joyful than a couple falling in love?
Many people are dismissive of romance novels. Everyone’s heard the criticism. They’re formulaic. They all end the same. They are porn for women. They raise unrealistic expectations of love and relationships. They cloud women’s minds so they can’t tell fact from fiction.

Those critics are not my readers.

My readers are the people who believe in love, the people who want to travel with a couple on their unique journey to their own happily-ever-after whether that journey occurs on a sleek spaceship or at a medieval joust or in a contemporary city.

I want to take my readers on that magical journey that falling in love is. Let them experience the excitement, the fear, the desire as the hero and heroine find each other, challenge each other, and finally, love each other. I want to my readers to be able to immerse themselves in my story world, to laugh, to cry, and to cheer my hero and heroine on their path to their happily-ever-after.

And, if my words can provide a much needed break for a stay-at-home mom, a harried career woman, a lonely widow, a hopeful student, or a mom sitting at the bedside of a sick child, than so much the better. Maybe I made their lives better for a few hours, gave them hope or a laugh or just a respite from their busy, overstuffed modern lives. If so, I will consider my life well spent.

Just as I cannot remember a time before I could read, I can’t remember a time that I didn’t want to write down the infinite stories, the varied characters inside me. Just as I have always been a writer, I will always be a writer. It’s up to me to sling the ink, to spin the yarn, to craft the tale. My readers bring their imaginations and their perspectives and together we create a story.

And find our own happily-ever-afters.

I made a poster in Canva for it too. I think I’m going to frame it for my office.

Manifesto