This week I'm pleased to introduce Carol Rose as our Friday author. I'm excited about her post. Hope you are too.
HEART-GRABBING
ROMANCE HEROES
It always helps
that the heroes in most romances are muscular and hot, but we all know that not
every buff guy is worth spending time on. For your heart to be grabbed, you
need to care about the hero beyond whether he has broad shoulders.
In my book, Mr. Personality, Max is smart,
successful and studly, but Max has a secret about which he feels terrible and
can’t forgive himself. This one incredible mistake has led a terrific guy to
snarling near-isolation. One of the things he finds most intriguing about our
heroine, Nicole, is that she’s not afraid of him and stands up to his ugliness.
But Nicole is also the woman who helps Max forgive himself.
Why does Nicole
care about snarling, annoying Max? Yes, he’s hot and smart, but our heroine
also sees his suffering. This is why we care for certain heroes. We warm up to
guys when we see not only their good points, but their flaws, too. We need to
see their struggles in order to like them. It’s a well-known reality that
heroes with dogs and kids—even those with kitties!—are attractive, seeming like
good guys. How can a hot guy with a baby not
be a decent man? Right?
Flaws make us
sympathetic about a man, but guy flaws can be scary. We’ve all met some pretty
messed up dudes in our lives and romance heroes that have a chance to grab our
hearts have to be redeemable. But that means they have challenges they must
meet and nothing is more guaranteed to tug at the heart than a man who is
changed for the better by the love of a good woman. This leaves us with an
equation—guy needs to be changed for the better, which means he needs to start
out with a problem.
Perfect looks good
in a photo, but to be a hero, he’s got to start less than perfect.
Heroes need to be
redeemable, though. Flawed, struggling and less than perfect, heroes need
hearts. As readers, we want to root for him, to believe in him as the heroine
comes to believe in him. Even though he doesn’t believe in himself all the
time.
In this 3rd of the Holiday Romance Series, event coordinator Cheryl decides to abandon her safe life and learn to take risks. She first gets a fake boyfriend to deal with being dumped after surviving breast cancer, but Mark turns out to be the man she's always wanted and he's anything, but fake. The end of Mark's longtime marriage years back left him convinced that he's not relationship material and it takes loving Cheryl to change his mind.
Carol Rose is an award-winning author of contemporary romances. She has written twenty books, including Always and Forgotten Father. Her books have won numerous awards, including a final in the prestigious Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Award.
Carol is an active member of the North Texas Romance Writers, the Dallas Area Romance Writers and the Yellow Rose chapter. A frequent speaker at writers' groups and conferences, she has taught workshops on characterization and, creating and resolving conflict. She works full time as a therapist.
Her husband and she married when she was only nineteen and he was barely twenty-one, proving that early marriage can make it, but only if you're really lucky and persistent. They went through college and grad school together. She not only loves him still, all these years later, she still likes him--which she says is sometimes harder. They have two funny, intelligent and highly accomplished daughters. Carol loves writing and hopes you enjoy reading her work.
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