Broad shoulders on a strong heavenly handsome guy, heaving bosoms on a bewitchingly beautiful gal. Smoldering eyes, love reigned in, and passions unleashed just at the right time, after the protagonists have fought or butted heads, of course. The typical romance reader expects all these.

Regardless of what you think about formulas, this scenario sells. Some formulas just work well-for a certain group, at least-the niche market, as internet savvy and publicity people label it.

But we can't all write like that.

I'm a realist in my writing, as well as my art. I don't have as much imagination as many other writers-a handicap (or strength) that comes from my training (Ph. D., University of Illinois) and experience as a mental health researcher/evaluator and program developer. I'm also a flâneuse-a female observer-wanderer. So, I watch, and observe. And listen. That's where the meat of my writing comes from.

But I'm also a sucker for happy endings. I find enough that depresses me about real life, but seek no catharsis by writing about it. I want escape, entertainment. I don't strive to enlighten. Not consciously, anyway, but because my previous training has given me a bias, I'm interested in the inner lives of characters, including the passages they go through.

As an author of love stories, I'm inspired by Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell and their awesome feminist heroines. So, I tend not to rely on broad shoulders and heaving bosoms. Instead, I go into protagonists' thoughts and emotions, their conflicts and their joy, their struggles to reach balance and grow. My novels deal with insecurities and disappointments, love/hate relationships with parents, characters who seem to behave out-of-character, and even life events not typically included in romantic fiction.