No bodices were ripped in the process of writing this essay.
In 2014, a man in Bell, Florida, shot and killed his six grandchildren when they came home from school. Then he murdered his daughter, and as police drove up, he turned the gun on himself.
I’m a reporter with The Associated Press, and I covered that story. As night fell, I chatted with a gentleman near his dented truck in the parking lot of a too-bright convenience store about how the family had a legacy of poverty, drugs and abuse.
Later that evening, I went to my nearby hotel room and a cockroach was belly up on the stained rug, inches from the bed.
(And you thought this article was going to be all bout romance novels, the sunshine and rainbows and unicorns of the literary world.)
I didn’t cry once during that assignment.
What I did do, however, was vow to write a story that ended happily. One where the final scene wasn’t in a prison, a cemetery or the morgue.
I decided to write a romance novel.
I love this essay.
