Taking Time to Recharge #MFRWauthor 52-Week #Blog Challenge

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It’s Week 33 of the #MFRWauthor 52-Week Blog Challenge and this week’s prompt is What I Do To Recharge.

Since I no longer have a day job, I have the luxury of taking evenings off, most of the time. I’ve found that if I write (or think too much about my current WIP) that I don’t sleep well. Since I sometimes don’t sleep well anyway for no apparent reason, I prefer a relaxing evening in front of the boob tube. Since we already blogged earlier this year about binge watching, I won’t go into specifics, but I will admit to binge watching the last season of Once Upon a Time this summer, since I managed to miss it during the year. I still love that show.

Lately I’ve been taking little breaks from my computer sessions to use the exercise wind bike my mother-in-law left me. A little exercise gets the heart going and shakes out the kinks a bit. It’s really not good to sit for too long at a time.

And once a month I get to sit for a pedicure and get my feet and lower legs massaged. Aaahhh, so relaxing. For the next month my toenails will be periwinkle blue.

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What do you do to recharge?

Linda

As always, click on the linky list below for more posts in the #MFRWauthor 52-Week Blog Challenge.

Alpha Male or Nice Guy? #MFRWAuthor Blog Challenge, Week 19

mfrw blog challenge badgeIt’s Week 19 of the MFRW 52 Week Blog Challenge, and this week’s prompt is “The Ideal Romance Hero” which leads me to ask Alpha Male or Nice Guy?

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Stephen Chaplin, my lawyer hero from Lady Elinor’s Escape looks like this.

I’m sure all of you have your own ideas about this question, but I think there’s room for different kinds of heroes. Like a lot of things in life, one size doesn’t fit all, and not every romance plot calls for an alpha male.

In the Complete Writer’s Guide to Heroes and Heroines: Sixteen Master Archetypes by Tami D. Cowden, Caro LaFeber, and Sue Viders, the authors analyze eight hero and eight heroine archetypes and how they interact with each other. This is one of my favorite writing tool to help with character development.

The eight male archetypes are the Chief, the Bad Boy, the Best Friend, the Lost Soul, the Charmer, the Professor, the Swashbuckler and the Warrior. The Chief and the Warrior are definitely alpha males, and the Best Friend is a beta. The others, I’m not sure, but all seem to be valid hero archetypes.

Rogue's HostageThe Bad Boy is a fun archetype to write and fun to read about, though not always in real life. Can a bad boy be tamed outside romance novels? I think so. My dad was a bad boy until he grew up and married and had children. But in his youth, he was always in trouble, and he never took orders readily. He raised his only daughter to think for herself and stand up to unfairness, maybe because life is seldom fair for the bad boy. As a kid he was always the first one blamed if something happened in the neighborhood, and he was demoted twice in the Army! So I gotta love those bad boys, like Johnny in Dirty Dancing. Big sigh. And Jacques Corbeau, the bastard hero of my historical romance, Rogue’s Hostage.

Warriors can range from military men to crusaders for justice, as shown by the Sir Rolf, the werewolf knight of Ilona’s Wolf, and Stephen Chaplin, the crusading barrister of Lady Elinor’s Escape. Both are honorable men but fight in very different ways.

Lily and the GamblerThe Charmer is another fun archetype to write. King Calloway of Lily and the Gambler was largely inspired by Bret Maverick as played by James Garner. King can charm his way out of nearly any situation, but has a commitment problem. A recent review described him as “enticingly rakish.”

In short, for me there’s no one ideal hero. What do you think?

Linda

 

Click on the linky list below for more ideal hero posts in the #MFRWauthor 52-Week Blog Challenge.

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