Monthly Archives: March 2012

My Lady Untamed blurb

I’m in the red pen stage, and will soon be in the beta stage, after which I’ll need a damn good query letter, to make sure agents want to see my manuscript. I will love and adore you all if you give me some feedback on the blurb I’m putting together for My Lady Untamed.

Any reactions you have are great: did you want to read the story? Was any of it confusing? Was there too little of my heroine in it? (Actually I can probably answer that now with a yes. This is a very hero-centric blurb!)

As it stands:

The Duke of Darlington is playing a dangerous political game in league with Liverpool. When he trades his own reputation to further the game, it’s critical that he doesn’t lose focus. Only he’s been having trouble breathing of late, and he fears he’s become a danger to himself.

For distraction he spies on his lover’s sister – the rough-mannered girl from the country who thinks she can warn a duke away. What he doesn’t expect is a girl who sees him clearly, and says awful, true things to his face. He follows her back to the country, determined to be cured by the sharp edge of her tongue.

Too late he realises his mistake: in the country he’s no longer in his world – he’s in hers. He hasn’t reckoned on having to face the darkness in himself before he can banish it. Or of meeting the one girl who’s strong enough to take him on.

The place-holder blurb I have here (copied below) showcases very different elements of the story. It’s not in the structure of a blurb, but are there any elements from it that you would like to see brought into the blurb?

Roscoe is a brilliant, troubled duke who follows Bea to the countryside dressed as a woman. He’s very particular about his wardrobe and his pet pig. Bea has agreed to help him sort himself out if he’ll stay away from her sister.

He’s extreme. She’s strong enough to take anything he can throw at her. Love ensues.

sexual attraction doth not our enmity unmake

There is a notion about female sexuality, that sex is (or should be) about intimacy. Before I go into whether it’s true or not, I first want to add that this ambiguous little gem applies equally to men, they’re simply less quick to claim it. Most of the time. We watched 50/50 the other night, and the two friends have a conversation that I think perfectly sums up what my post today is about:

ADAM: The relationship I have with Rachel is – it’s about more than sex.

KYLE *facetious*: What is it about, Adam?

ADAM: It’s about – each other, you know, we care about each other, we talk to each other. It’s great.

KYLE: Uh-huh. Yeah. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that and then bang the hell out of each other afterwards?

ADAM: Ideally, yes, but it’s not a perfect world, okay?

Cecilia Grant’s debut, A Lady Awakened, has been causing a lot of buzz in the romance world since it was published last year – and I finally got around to reading it. Because I’m going to be drawing heavily on the themes explored in it, here’s a quick rundown:

Martha’s husband dies, and she has to get herself pregnant within the month if she wants to keep the estate out of the hands of the Evil Heir. She pays a young man, Theo, who’s been exiled to the country for bad behaviour, to have sex with her once a day. He assumes he will be as a sex god to her. She refuses to take any pleasure from the task. He discovers that her mind is much more susceptible to seduction than her body, and that she loves to talk Improvements. Much talk of agriculture ensues, as do love and orgasms, eventually.

Part of what has made this book so talked-about is the novel approach to sex. Martha isn’t frigid, and unlike most historical heroines she isn’t unaware of her own body’s pleasure. So she doesn’t refuse to respond out of naivety or ignorance. She sees her decision as the best of two bad choices, and doesn’t want to lose the last of her principles by taking pleasure in a necessary act.

But more interesting to me is the simple fact that she feels she can’t be intimate with someone who is a stranger to her. She can only give herself over to pleasure when she likes and admires him.

If she had been naive of pleasure, this would have seemed old-fashioned to me, or like a backward step in a contemporary discussion about sex. She makes her decision fully understanding what it means, however, which complicates things.

Conservative female sexuality, out of which the romance tradition grew, certainly holds that intimacy is more important than sex. The romance is consummated with a declaration of love, not with sex, which will likely be had well before the end of the book.

It’s interesting that in the period when this view of sexuality prevailed, so did the quasi-rape variety of sex, which the heroine only realised she was enjoying once it had been forced on her. I tend to agree with the theory that this was a way for women to express the desire for sex without owning up to desire. A woman couldn’t initiate, but once it was forced on her – once she’d made every feminine objection – she could enjoy it.

This, to me, is not sex that depends on intimacy. It is sex for its own sake.

Then on the other end of the scale there’s Erica Jong’s ideal fantasy: the zipless fuck. She imagines seeing a man across from her on the train, and their desire is immediate, and fulfilled so perfectly that the fantasy isn’t broken for even the space of time it would take to unzip your trousers, and be brought back into reality.

She writes:

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

Once romance began to admit to the kind of female fantasy Jong describes – or at least to the idea that women are sexual beings, and can enjoy pleasure for its own sake – heroines no longer needed to justify their desires to themselves.

This creates a kind of sexuality where sex is what gives rise to intimacy, and leads to love, rather than the other way round.

In which context, you can understand why A Lady Awakened felt like something new. Not a lady denying her own pleasure, but also not a lady willing to find intimacy through the act of sex.

I’ll admit, I found her uncomfortable to read. It made me realise how rarely people voice this need, now, without any irony or shame attached: to know and admire someone before they can feel pleasure with them.

Martha is a particularly upright, reserved character, so I don’t think her needs reflect a common female need in its entirety. But talking about it with some friends the other night, I was reminded that there is a kind of loneliness in unattached pleasure – an eventual desire for some emotional fulfilment.

And of course, that emotional fulfilment is what romance is all about. It’s just difficult to find out exactly what relationship it has to sex.

I find this interesting on a personal level, but also as a writer. In romance, sex – and sexual attraction even more so – becomes a short-hand for intimacy. And that’s just lazy writing. Theo had to work for Martha’s admiration, and a writer should have to do the same.

I was struck by similar thoughts reading a Harry Potter fic called Bond. (This is Harry/Draco – you may read ahead if that’s not your thing.) Harry and Draco have been bonded to each other against their will. The bond forces them into close proximity and after a while creates sexual attraction. They need to consummate, but Harry can’t bear being so intimate with a boy he distrusts and dislikes.

It made me realise that normally, in that kind of fic – and in romance in general – once a character feels sexual attraction any objections to the person they feel it for begin to erode at that moment.

I liked that Harry’s attraction only made him less inclined to go near Draco, because it made him that much more vulnerable to him. Draco, like Theo, had to win him over before he would come near.

All that being said, though, sex has a power like few other things to force intimacy. I also think a person is completely different when they’re so physically close, and they’re less words than skin and sound and smell. So for me admiration, fully dressed, doesn’t necessarily equate to intimacy in the bedroom.

But it’s a fair reminder not to use sex, where conversation is needed. (That’s a truism for fiction, but it probably washes in real life, too.)

my finished draft in printed form (an illustrated squee)

Last year when I finished the first draft of Red Robin, I printed out a copy so that special k could read it. This was very exciting to me – considering that the longest conversation we’d ever had about my romance novel at that time went something like:

ME: So there’s this duke.

HIM: Hold on. Do you know how many dukes actually exist in the world? Isn’t that a little farfetched?

ME: So there’s this duke, and his name’s Roscoe.

HIM: Roscoe. Why did you call him Roscoe? I don’t think that was even a name back then.

ME: Never mind.

But Red Robin was an action! adventure! story, though sadly with no laser guns, no matter how often special k brings it up. So I printed off a copy, excited and a little nervous, and not sure he would actually get through the whole thing.

Special k reads slowly (he can take actual months to read a book. I don’t even know how that’s possible), so I knew that even if he did get through it, there was no way a sheaf of 90-odd loose pages would survive that long.

Because I was getting it printed at Officeworks it was the work of a moment to say, “Oh, hey, and can you bind it?” No fancy front or back, just a spine to hold the thing together. Funny thing though – when I held the bound draft in my hands it made me feel differently about it. The success of writing a story to the end was more tangible. I could flick through it and get a plastic sense of the story’s pace and arcs.

Writers will often print off scenes, because you see things differently in different media. This whole bound-draft thing was that – levelled up. It allowed me to see the draft as a coherent whole, which is vital when you’re doing structural edits.

Thus a tradition was born. When a draft is finished, I print and bind it. I love the idea of building up a library of drafts.

That makes it sound like I’ve done this many times over, which I haven’t. Turns out, writing a book takes a long time! Last week I finally got to print out a draft of My Lady Untamed:

and just in case you can’t get a proper sense for JUST HOW MUCH WRITING THIS IS:

The copy of the Robin was for Ken to read, so I never had the satisfaction of taking a red pen to it. This manuscript is all red pen. For example:

It’s a teensy weensy bit daunting, because it’s almost three hundred pages full of red pen. However, the scenes I’ve worked on so far are already so improved, that I’m feeling quite hopeful about this process.

For any writer out there listening, I thoroughly recommend the print-and-bind method.

Also – I FINISHED MY DRAFT!! I was so convinced this was never going to happen that my sole goal going into this year was: Finish The Book. And it’s only March. Whatever will I do with the rest of the year?

language is power

I wanna be upfront about something before I begin: Writers are masters at manipulation. It’s all about using language to make people feel what we want them to feel, want what we want them to want, believe what we want them to believe.

So really, it only makes sense to learn the language of manipulation – or powerful self-expression, depending how you look at it. I’m going to look at one specific example.

I was told once that the sentence structure “X but Y” is less powerful than “X and Y”. I could say to you, “I feel for you, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” Or I can say, “I feel for you, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

It’s a subtle difference, but the two statements are worlds apart. When you use “but”, one clause becomes the negation of the other: only one can exist, and by choosing one sentiment over the other, you’re declaring what’s important to you. When you use “and” you allow both sentiments to exist equally: you allow the ambiguous nature of human emotion to be expressed.

It’s a pretty powerful thing in real life conversation – give it a go.

But I’ve also found myself using it in my writing, to good effect. It could certainly be used to create complex, nuanced dialogue, but I use it more often when I’m narrating a character’s internal world.

A simple example of this would be taking something standard, like, “He drove her crazy, but she loved him,” and turning it into, “He drove her crazy, and she loved him.”

Isn’t the second option so much richer than the first? To me, the first evokes that most annoying kind of heroine who understands herself badly. She finds herself drawn to the hero despite his bad qualities. The second evokes a heroine who sees herself and her hero clearly.

It allows for contradictory emotions to exist side-by-side, and you don’t get much more human than that.

on female body hair

I made the decision a little while ago that my heroine has underarm hair. Then I spent a couple of months thinking I’d probably change my mind; there’s such a strong aesthetic against body hair, that I feared it would be off-putting to readers.

The first time in my life that I saw underarm hair as not only acceptable but sexy as all hell was when I was eighteen years old and working on a farm in Germany. (I should at this point note: the misconception that German women are hirsute is a hangover from the 20s and not at all accurate.) These two twenty-something-year-old women who worked on the farm were taking a break by the side of a tractor shed. They were tanned, grimy and muscular, and their arms were flung casually out. They had armpit hair and it looked strong. It made them animal and vital. I thought, “Oh, so I don’t have to hide it.”

Ever since then I’ve been happy to have underarm hair, so yes, some of my decision to give my heroine the same is me writing myself, as writers do.

But what does that mean, writing myself? In this case, there’s an aesthetic standard I don’t agree with. I express my disagreement in life, and I express it in fiction.

This brings me to a question I’ve been avoiding for a while: Do my politics belong in my writing? And possibly more to the point: Do I have an obligation to express my politics in my writing?

As soon as I think it in those terms, “politics”, my reaction is a violent No. I’m not writing issues books. I don’t want characters parading through my books trying to teach my readers important life lessons, or giving long speeches about how things should be.

But when I take the word politics out of it, and when I think of it as entering a discussion about femalehood, my reaction is a pretty clear Yes.

Special k and I got into a great discussion the other night (while, irony of ironies, I was doing the dishes and he was standing about not helping) about the way pop culture reflects cultural values, and to what extent pop culture has a responsibility to engage with cultural critique.

Or to put it less obliquely: We were disagreeing about the extent to which people should criticise Beyonce for wearing no clothes and high heels in her amazing “All the single ladies” video. (By the way, some absolutely brilliant trivia: one of those dancers is her male choreographer. My cross-dressing duke approves.)

I started to talk about the cultural responsibility of romance writers, and it brought home to me again what a powerful genre I write in. When I started reading romance I felt empowered by the portrayal of female sexuality as a purely positive thing. I cautiously opened myself to the idea that sex should be all about pleasure, with no shame attached. It allowed me to think about my sexuality in purely heterosexual terms, without attaching shame to that either.

When I read heroines who learn to deal with conflict, I feel encouraged to learn to deal with conflict. When I see heroines who learn to ask for what they want even when it feels uncomfortable, that becomes a possibility to me.

Romance speaks powerfully to women about what it means to be a woman.

So when I wrote the first sex scene between my hero and heroine I thought very carefully about what I believe about sex – and about the ways I would like to see women empowered.

I’m only just beginning to understand all the ways our sexuality is constructed for us, our whole lives. It’s impossible to get the whole picture, because we’re trying to make visible the invisible structure through which we view the world.

One specific idea I’ve been talking and thinking about (and, if I’m honest, confronted by)  is the idea that women are taught to be the object of desire, not the person who desires. (See Beyonce and her high heels.) Men are taught to see us this way, and we’re taught to see ourselves this way. Good sex = turning a man on because we succeed at striking the right poses and making the right noises. It’s not about feeling and chasing pleasure, or desiring and taking what we desire.

Of course, I have put this in hopelessly simple terms, so please forgive me that.

When my heroine and my hero first have sex, he is described in the language of desire, not she, and she pushes for what she wants from him. It’s still a very “female” want; she demands emotion, as well as sex. But she doesn’t ever doubt that she knows herself and her desires, and she doesn’t doubt her entitlement to feeling them.

I hope that women will read it and think, I can do that too.

So when it comes to body hair – and is there anything worse than that word “pube” – I didn’t want to back down either. I didn’t want to assume that women have bought so fully into the no-hair aesthetic that it wouldn’t intrigue them to see a hero stroke his thumbs up into the dark, warm fur and for it to be right, and without commentary.

I recently watched a documentary about the great French brothels of the 1920s, which was rather creepily told through the memories of a bunch of old men. One of them spoke about how the prostitutes would grow their body hair, and they would only have to raise an arm for the men to go animal, wild. (Have I just contradicted myself by turning body hair into another object of desire? Er. Hold on.)

Here’s a good place to stress that I’m not saying we should all go about hairy. I’m not even saying you’re betraying your womanhood if you shave. God, no. But I do think the no-hair aesthetic is learnt, and that there’s room to transform it.

Because my body grows hair, and every time I hate my body for it – stare helplessly at myself and think I did something wrong – it’s exhausting.

I’ve never really become comfortable with leg hair. It makes me feel like a footballer, or, I dunno, a lumberjack. But recently I really can’t be bothered getting my legs waxed. And because of that, I’ve been noticing a lot of women walking about with hairy legs: The girl in front of the state library; the schoolgirl on the tram, standing with her friends; the waitress at my local cafe.

Every time I see another woman walking around with hair on her legs as though it just doesn’t matter, it matters to me less.

My heroine is poor and she works all day long. When it comes to pure, historical fact, she wouldn’t have had the time or resources to shave (or whatever they did back then – I’ve been having trouble getting any solid info, so if you know anything about 19th century depilatory habits, please speak up!).

I made the decision not to change the facts just to suit a modern aesthetic that I don’t agree with anyway.

emotional wisdom

As a writer I mostly focus on telling the best story I can. What are the story elements, and how can I better my craft to better express them, etc. But there’s a part of writing I often overlook – something that cannot be taught, but that is essential to writing something compelling, memorable, moving.

The best writers have emotional wisdom.

It’s there in every story, at a basic level. To have a character react a certain way to events you have to understand the transition of emotions. In its most basic form, this would be a kind of equation: heroine + getting fired = desperate heroine. The emotion is a direct and obvious sum of events.

There’s a more sophisticated level of emotion where, say, a boy’s best friend tells him he’s dying of cancer, and the boy’s first reaction is to laugh. In the glaring lack between cause and reaction, there’s something almost unbearably human.

Then there’s the kind of emotional intelligence that UNDERSTANDS MY SOUL BETTER THAN I DO. Ahem. This is the part of writing that’s alchemical. It’s an understanding that comes from the individual brain of this one person, who has experienced and thought and drawn conclusions. And then applied what they know to their characters.

My favourite writer of Harry Potter fanfic is Maya (who’s published now as Sarah Rees Brennan). What sets her fics apart, for me, is the charming, resounding emotional truthfulness of her characters. One passage I particularly love is this:

Harry looked over at him and saw him trying to think his way out of this, jaw sharp and tight with concentration. The expression was so familiar it sent a fierce irrational pang through Harry, not sadness but the furious feeling that he was being robbed. He knew it was stupid and terrible of him to feel such a right to Malfoy, as if just because he had him memorised that meant he could keep him.

She recently posted some links on her tumblr to posts where she talks about girls being in competition with each other. Right at the end of the list, almost like a throwaway comment, she wrote: And certainly no lady is in competition for a dude, because dudes (like ladies) are not winnable objects but people who make their own decisions.

I read it and a light bulb went off in my chest (whoever first depicted the light bulb above the head was wrong; it’s so much more visceral than that). Firstly it pinged because it feels true. But lots of things are true, so that in itself isn’t such a big deal, maybe. I think it’s the combination of true and startling. Something true that I hadn’t articulated to myself before. Reading it I actually experienced my selfhood and the selfhood of my husband.

I also began to realise that the wisdom I love so much in her work stems from this one idea – people belong to themselves. In the fic I quoted from above, Harry is irresistibly gorgeous (and hates it), but Draco seems to be immune to him. When he accidentally discovers that Draco is actually doing his best to fight the attraction, Harry says to him, “I don’t care. I want you too much to care.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic romance line. That’s the alpha who finally has his object of desire within his sights, and whose passion has slipped free of his control. It’s great. Lots of zing.

But then Maya does this amazing thing. Draco leaves so that they can both cool off, and Harry thinks. And he realises that it’s not okay for him to use the magical attraction against Draco, if it’s not what Draco wants. He realises that it’s not okay for him to say, “I don’t care.”

It goes against everything that alpha moment has taught me to expect as a reader, and the wisdom in it touches me.

This is another perfect example of what I’m talking about:

Just because having Malfoy touch him seemed necessary as air didn’t mean it was: it didn’t mean that Harry could demand to have him as a right.

I think probably this aspect of writing isn’t talked about so often because it really isn’t something you can teach. It’s the part of writing where writers are thinkers, and you bring something of yourself to the table. Your characters aren’t standing between you and your reader; you are imparting direct wisdom. It’s like being bold enough to say, “I know something worth saying.”

It makes me realise all over again how rarely we really stop and think, and decide what we believe, and look for wisdom inside what we know.

the anatomy of purring

According to Wikipedia, the mechanism by which cats purr is elusive, because there’s no part of their anatomy strictly responsible for the sound. I admit I found this a little surprising, because I was looking more for some concrete proof that it is physically impossible for humans to purr.

My failed research aside, though, humans do not purr. Go ahead and give it a go. No, really, take as long as you like.

Okay, now how about a snarl? And how about this for a research gem – a snarl is a facial expression, not a sound. Gums raised, teeth bared, nostrils dilated. The noise has become synonymous with the expression, but it was an expression first.

That little gem disproves the point I’m trying to make, because technically humans can snarl. Except that when I read “he snarled” I always imagine that terrifying low growly sound lions and such make.

I imagine the human range of expressed, primal emotion is more like the noises gorillas make. Huffs, growls, yells. All of those I could make right now, if I wasn’t sitting beside my husband in the morning quiet and it would make him think, you know, that I’d gone mental.

My point is this: Characters purr and snarl, I see it all the time. And aside from the times it makes me think, “Er, how exactly?” I like it.

A cat is such an alien, indifferent sort of an animal, but when they purr there is this moment of deep contentment and pleasure. So when a character purrs – and it’s most often used in an intimate moment, when they have opened up or come close – it evokes that same sense of contentment and pleasure. There’s almost a sense that home is achieved.

A snarl, despite the new evidence my amazing research has brought to light, evokes for me a wolf at bay. There’s something of a lifted lip, and teeth, and the low, continuous warning. It’s a sound that says, “Right now I’m making noise. If you don’t pay very close attention, I will stop making this noise and start using my teeth.” When a character snarls it most often shows possessiveness – a human reverting back to the animal to protect what is theirs.

Once I started looking directly at these traits fictional people have that I don’t, I started seeing other things.

Characters – especially in romance – are often described as graceful. So graceful their movements are mesmerising. This is such a rare quality in humans; I almost never use the word to describe someone. A friend of mine once told me that she loved how exact her boyfriend was physically. If he reached for a cup, his hand closed without fuss exactly around the cup. He never knocked things over. I found it such a strange – and strangely compelling – thing to notice about someone.

Crooked and lop-sided grins have a definite counter-part in reality, but I can’t help feeling they have come to mean something particular in fiction. When I read a crooked grin, there’s this extra dimension to the character’s face – this extra, curvy place a mouth can go to.

There’s the photoshopped perfection of skin, when it’s described as alabaster (which now applies so specifically to skin that I’ve done some more research: It is the material or calcite of two distinct minerals) and the brain is not obliged to add a single blemish.

Everyone reads differently. Just the other day Cat and I had a long, incredulous conversation, as I tried to wrap my brain around the idea that she doesn’t see pictures at all when she reads. She reads by accumulating facts.

I see pictures – but I put faces and places together imperfectly. My stock of character faces are possibly more similar to computer-generated characters. The planes of the face are sharper, eyes more saturated in colour, skin less complex. Limbs are easy, graceful, hair is all sorts of crazy things that can still be soft, because there’s no need for gel. The direction of hair, by the way, confuses the hell out of me. I think I see mirror image when I’m watching a character, then right way round when I’m in a character.

But that’s beside the point.

The point is: Fictional characters are not human. They are of a different species altogether – something alien and flexible, that takes on some internal point we’re trying to fix and express.

It’s good to get the details just right so that they can evoke something true. But I suspect it’s equally good to be aware that you’re describing the expression of something human that is itself a little inhuman.

here’s my inner pain, bitches!

I was reading some so-so fanfic the other day, and I recognised this particular juvenile, immature quality in the writing that I still battle with in my own writing. It looks like this: Characters are in conflict with each other and then they have an emotional scene where they SAY ALL THE EMOTIONS TO EACH OTHER. ALL! THE! EMOTIONS!

Then Cat pointed out to me exactly what’s going on in a scene like that: The characters are vocalising all their inner pain. ALL their inner pain.

The whole point of inner pain – ahem – is that it is not made outer.

Obviously the inner pain has to become external at some point – or there have to be at least enough clues for the reader to begin to understand the pain a character is carrying around with them – or else what’s the point of having it at all?

A great example of inner pain: Severus Snape. He’s absolutely awful (his inner pain doesn’t stop that from being true), but when Harry ends up naming his son after him, we cheer. Why? Because it turns out that Snape had to bear the burden of Dumbledore’s death, and looked out for the son of a man he couldn’t stand, all for the love of Harry’s mum. If we hadn’t found out his inner pain he would just have remained awful – not to mention, we would probably have still thought he was evil.

So: revelation of inner pain = good.

However, imagine if Snape had run around yelling I have inner pain, feel my inner pain, THESE ARE MY FEELINGS AND MY INNER PAIN!

It would soon have become a bit awkward – not to mention boring – and it wouldn’t have mattered so desperately what side he was really on. It’s also the emotional-moral-highground equivalent of whinging. After a while you just feel like yelling, “Get over yourself and do something already!”

Which brings me to the quandary I find myself in now.

I’m approaching the final chapters of my novel (*incredulous imminent celebration*) and I have all these outstanding emotions that need to be resolved between characters. But as per this whole rant so far, I don’t want those characters to just speak their emotions at each other and resolve through sheer volume of emotive statements.

One thing I try to keep in mind is this: Having full-on emotional conversations – the kind that are truthful and confronting enough to actually cause change or resolution within a relationship – are not easy, or nice, and quite often afterwards it’s more difficult to see that person than less.

And sometimes saying all your feelings can actually do much more harm than good. It can be a hurtful, messy thing, and there’s no objective marker to tell you when you’ve said too much, or to remind you that saying all the things isn’t necessarily the way to move a relationship forward.

So often in fiction a good emotional bout solves everything. And I simply find that hard to swallow.

I’m trying to remember, as I navigate these scenes, that it’s often the difficult things to hear that make the difference – not the verbal/emotional diarrhea. It’s when you say the simple thing that is harder to say than spewing out your pain. It’s the observations you make for yourself, when you decide to look around and reevaluate your world.

And yes, hopefully there are fewer bodily fluids involved.

I just don’t know if I can take another damn iceberg

Shipping Barney and Robin used to be a pleasure. Until season five, when the Titanic could have learned a thing or two. But How I Met Your Mother won me over again by committing themselves to turning Barney into a grown-up, which was not only gutsy but the only way to keep the show moving forward, when it looked like they had panicked and hit the reset button.

I could give up on Robin and Barney, because frankly, after that debacle they were better apart. And then, season 7 opener, we get the dance scene. I am a writer folks, but I don’t know if you could write chemistry as clearly as they dance it:

And as a writer my reaction is this: they let Barney and Robin slide for almost two seasons. There’s only one reason they’re bringing them back with such a punch – in the season where we know Barney gets married. And there’s only one reason I want them to get together so badly: because that’s what the writers want me to want.

All of which adds up, in my head, to: Robin and Barney are getting married.

The romance does develop over season 7 – and then comes episode 10 “Tick, tick, tick”. That episode seriously broke my heart – but in all the best ways. Finally, finally, we were getting the emotional pay-off season five so spectacularly crapped all over.

But then came episode 12, “Symphony of illumination”. I won’t spoil it here, but for those who follow the show, I was in the “that totally screwed with me” camp. It was evidence, for me, that Robin and Barney were actually never going to be together. It undid my faith that I shipped them because the writers wanted me to ship them – that after sailing seven years of stormy seas, the writers were going to bring the relationship to dock in some very gay harbour where the sun is always setting… Oh wait, that’s Jean Genet.

It made me a little angry. But more than that, it effectively snipped my obsession with the show in half. Not a conscious decision – it simply stopped featuring in my week. A few episodes slipped by and I could hardly be bothered catching up.

Now, out of nowhere, Ted has revived the idea that Robin and Barney are in love. And I want to punch something.

It was pitch-perfect. It was finally fulfilling Victoria’s prediction that Ted wouldn’t find love until he dealt with his feelings for Robin. Barney’s reaction showed us how much he’s grown up – when all we’ve been seeing lately is his old slap-stick face.

But I just don’t know if I can invest in them again – and to me that’s bad writing.