LA JALOUSIE PLANTATION IN ST. LUCIA

Back in the early 1980s, I crashed the Romance Writers of America conference on a lark. It was being held that year in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C, just a few blocks south of the cramped basement apartment I then called home. I’d just graduated from college. I had a day job with my political science professor. I waitressed a few nights a week in a French café. I was burning with desire to become a writer. Literary, not romance, novels. I’d started several. One, Letters from Brazil, still strikes my fancy: A young woman decides to rob a bank with the idea of getting caught and write while serving out her prison term. Otherwise, she doesn’t see how she will be able to choose art, with its attendant discipline and isolation, over Life. “Life” with a capital “L.” Only she doesn’t get caught. After hiding out in New York for a week with her best friend, she decides to go to Brazil and try her hand at writing there. Then, big surprise, surprise, she continues struggle with the live-life/create-art conundrum there, too. She manages to bang out long letters to her best friend back in New York (I got this idea pre-email. I would set it in the early 1980s.) but no novel. Her letters to her best friend are my novel.

I thought writing romance novels might be good practice, like practicing your scales or jamming. Never mind that I had never read a romance novel, off to the conference I went. If memory serves me well, the editors on the panel I attended said that lead characters were getting stronger, more independent. I believe one editor said that they were letting them have good jobs. Imagine that! Of course, the sex was getting juicier, too. It all sounded very doable to me. On the way out of the ballroom, I grabbed as many romance novels as I could. I figured I’d read them, got a hang for the formula, and go to it.

I could not finish a single one. They read like soap operas on the page. No depth, no suspense and, a much greater sin, no humor. I threw them out in short order.

Fast forward two-plus decades. I still have no interest in writing a romance novel. I am interested in writing something longer, a novel or a nonfiction book. I have an agent, Lori Perkins. She was recently profiled on MediaBistro. But until I finish a proposal or a novel or my memoir, Lori is more a friend than an agent. Maybe I’m like the main character in Letters from Brazil. (Of course, I have never robbed a bank. If I did, I’d get caught.) Life, hectic, messy, glorious Life, keeps getting in the way.

All this is a rambling introduction to today’s sweeps, a romantic seven-night getaway to La Jalousie Plantation Hotel in St. Lucia sponsored by none other than the Harlequin Romance folks. To enter, you must send a 100-word-or-less “fantasy.” (The one I sent is simply too dreadful to share here.) I can’t resist remarking that the name of this hotel, Jealousy Plantation, could be the title of a racy romance novel.

To enter, click HERE. Enter by July 31.