Hey Guys and Gals! It's Monday! BOO! But to make your Monday better, I have a special treat for you: A guest post by my newest favourite author (and Twitter pal), Elisa Lorello! I've read three of her novels, Faking It, Ordinary World, and Adulation, and think that she's pretty much the bomb so I'm super psyched to have her here today (virtually, anyway, she's not in my basement or anything creepy like that).
Sp please, let's all make her feel welcome!
*sets out plate of cookies and cushy pillows*
First up: Thanks, Jennie, for allowing me to be a guest on
your blog. I’m also very grateful for your kind (and entertaining) reviews of
my novels.
So allow me to fill in some details of how I came to write
this post.
How Jennie and I met: via #chicklitchat on Twitter.
What is Chick Lit Chat, you ask? A fun hour on Thursday
evenings (8p.m. EST) for readers and writers to get together and discuss all
things chick lit—favorite characters, stories, writing advice, you name it.
Occasionally the conversation gets derailed to Colin Firth. No one seems to
mind.
How Jennie and I bonded: Mostly through tweets about
glitter.
We also have other things in common, like writing commercial
women’s fiction, living in the north (although I’m currently residing in New
England, and I don’t say “wicked” or “eh”), and wishing for winter to finally
be over. (Yeah, I know technically it is. I want the temperatures to match.) In
short, she’s someone I would share my pop tarts with. (No, that’s not a
euphemism.)
Topic of this post: literary crushes.
Jennie’s idea, and it’s a great one. Really made me think,
too. I mean, I can rattle off a number of fictional characters for whom I’m
jonesin’—Sam Seaborn, Neil Caffrey, and Patrick Jane, to name a few—but you’ll
notice they’re all characters from television, not books. So I went to my
bookshelf, and as I perused the spines, my eyes fell on one, and it all came
back to me.
Mark Darcy.
((le sigh))
Let me say for the record that I fell in love with Mark
Darcy long before I saw the film adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary. (Meaning I read the book first.) And while I
concede that he was well cast, Mark Darcy and Colin Firth are two separate
crushes. Let me also say that had I read BJD
during my twenties, I likely would’ve been Team Daniel. But that’s the price to
pay for being stupid when you’re twenty-something. (In my teens, I’m sorry to
say, it probably would’ve been Tom.) Fortunately I read BJD at the perfect time in my life (mid-late 30s…I know, what took
me so long?) and thus fell in love with the perfect man. (Well, almost perfect.
He does have that slight flaw of being fictional.)
So what makes Mark Darcy so lovable? Let’s start with his
name: Mark. Darcy. Forget the allusion to Pride
and Prejudice. It just rolls off the tongue so well. It’s precise. It makes
you feel like what you see is what you get. And that’s exactly Mark Darcy—he
doesn’t pretend to be anyone or anything other than who or what he is. He may
make apologies, but he never compromises himself. Even when caught wearing the
ugliest sweater on the planet. He’s humble to the end, despite Bridget
believing the contrary. We see his potential way before she does, which makes
rooting for him more fun.
What also makes Mark Darcy so appealing to me is that he’s
not impossibly gorgeous (not that I’ve never had a crush on impossibly gorgeous
characters—hell, I’ve written them: see
Devin in Faking It), but he’s attractive
all the same. Awkward and attractive and intelligent and a nice guy. And at my
age, I find those qualities so much more appealing than the alpha male, both in
fiction and in real life.
I remember reading an excerpt of Faking It to my students, before the novel was published. Not even
halfway through, one of my female students blurted, “Oh yeah. I’m in love with
him.” And upon reading a scene drafted by my Why I Love Singlehood co-author, I immediately emailed her and
said, “You totally made me fall in love with Kenny, dammit.” Literary crushes
are fun. They’re fun to have as a reader, and they’re even more fun to create
as a writer. But ultimately, what makes us long for him to be real is the connection they feel with him. And those
are the best characters, crushes or not. Their humanity is so real you forget
they’re not. The magic is not only that you believe in their realness, but in
the hope that some form of them actually exists.
And they do. You only need to know where to look.
