March comes in . . .

Yesterday I was working on updates to my web site. It’s a new month, I have a new book out, I’m planning a new contest . . . So there were new pages to write, specially on the home page. And because it was March 1st, I wrote the familiar saying, ‘March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb.’ And that started me thinking.

Which month would you say is the hero’s month? I think a lot of people would say August – thinking of astrological signs and Leo and all that. But March - well let me illustrate this.

Here is a picture of my garden first thing this morning. Bleak, cold, unwelcoming, hostile territory even – and yet stunningly beautiful in its own way. Much like the hero when he first appears in a romance. I’d written a scene in which my current heroine Alannah thinks of her hero – Raul in just that way – ‘cold as a bleak morning in winter.’

But when I went out into my garden and investigated further, I found this - a bright little corner where the bright beauty of Spring was already breaking through. And in one of my other garden pots are some polyanthus – one of my favourite flowers. When I was in Ireland with Anne and her friend Nancy, I was stunned to find that they didn’t know about polyanthus – these wonderfully brave and bright little flowers that poke their heads out in the bleakest of temperatures and provide a brilliant splash of colour in all the grey and dark.

And they offer a promise of better things to come. Of the fact that even in the bleak midwinter, deep in the ground, seeds and bulbs are busy growing, pushing to the surface just waiting the emerge in a glorious display of warmth and colour in Spring.

And that’s my hero. He’s like March – he comes in like a lion - proud, powerful, fierce, determined, ruthless and perhaps seeming totally cold and ruthless – bleak and hostile like the winter garden. But underneath all that is a man who is capable of love and man who has such potential for love that it glows in little secret corners of his personality like those miniature daffodils and the polyanthus in their own spots in my garden.

This week, over on the PHS, I was asked to write an article on the Most Common Mistakes that new writers make when trying to write romance and this is one of them. The Alpha hero needs to be strong, he needs to seem cold and ruthless and hostile to the heroine – but he does not need to be a cold and ruthless and hostile man in total. Such a man would never learn to love, even when he meets up with the wonderful sparky heroine we create for him. So if a hero is ice cold and bleak and dark, all the way through the book, with no hint of the warmth of growth and love in his spirit at all then, frankly, I don’t believe in his sudden redemption at the end – the about turn to declaring ‘but I love you’ and having the heroine believe he means it for the rest of his life. So when we writers create a hero we need to create them with those moments of warmth, those signs of potential for love that can give the heroine - and the reader – hope for the future.




So the hero comes in like a lion and goes out – like a lamb? Well, yes if you don’t think of the silly fluffy lambkin children’s stories or the soft cuddly toys. In Ireland the fields were filled with new born lambs, all born into weather that was still chilly and damp – or downright wet. And they were out there, running and gambolling and playing – rejoicing in life as a hero who has found love will want to do. And never forget that a new born male lamb will only take a few short months to grow into a fully formed, fiercely protective, assertive ram.


All of which reminds me of one of my favourite songs ever – The Rose by Bette Midler
This song has these wonderful lines :

When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long,
and you think that love is only
for the lucky and the strong,
just remember in the winter
far beneath the winter snows
lies the seed that with the sun's love
in the spring becomes the rose.

If you get a chance to hear that song then grab it - my personal favourite version is by Michael Ball and it moves me to tears every time I hear it. That’s my hero. A man with the seed of love in him, just waiting for the warmth of his heroine to make it flower.

And now I'll go and play that song to get me into the right mood to write the next scene with Raul and Alannah.