Valentines Day – inspiration or constipation

Bella Osborne

By Bella Osborne.

So it’s Valentine’s Day this month. You know this by the sharp hike in the cost of wilting flowers and the sea of pink hearts that assaults your eye balls when you enter a card shop. Love it or hate it, it usually incites a reaction in most people. I have to say I’m a bit ambivalent to it, well I thought I was…

When I was at school I used to find Valentine’s Day hugely entertaining as a few cheap cards delivered to key individuals could cause all sorts of havoc. I suspect poor old Mr Midgely always wondered why the attractive new Chemistry lab assistant had pledged her undying devotion to his home knitted tank tops and why the spottiest boy in class got the most valentines much to the chagrin of his better looking contemporaries.

I, of course sent my long-suffering husband a card on Valentine’s Day but that was all. We have tried going out for a meal to mark the occasion but it is usually a bit of a disappointment as the restaurant is full to the gunwales and the food often suffers because of it. I once managed to pour hot soup over my fingers when out for a Valentine’s meal and spent the whole meal in pain. No don’t laugh, I had a massive blister thanks to the volcanic soup that quickly adhered itself to my skin.

The cards situation has got out of hand too. There are cards for all the usual associations of ‘Someone Special’, ‘Wife’, ‘Fiancé’ etc but these have now been extended to ‘Daddy’ and ‘From the Cat’ – seriously you have to wonder what is happening in the world!

But despite all that you can’t help being suckered in by it just a little bit (go on admit it). If you were in a quiz and were asked to name the most romantic day of the year you wouldn’t miss a beat before answering and because of that, as a Romance writer you know it has to mean something. Do we swoon just a little bit more if the hero does something special for Valentine’s? Do we feel for our heroine just a little bit more because she is alone on Valentine’s? Most likely we do. Would we feel the same about Halloween? Most likely we wouldn’t.

So Valentine’s Day has to be a winner for a Romance Writer, doesn’t it? I’m not convinced I think it would attract as many people as it would deter and it is just one day of the year so you would have to be a full on advocate to centre a book around it. Now a short story, is a whole different thing and I think that works very well.

There will be, I’m sure a flood of books onto the virtual shelves in the anticipation of the pinkest of pink days and I hope for the sake of their authors that they all sell well. In the meantime I’m going to try to avoid centring any plots around Valentine’s Day as I think I’m not quite far enough over on the advocate side to do it justice.

by

Bella Osborne

Bella’s first novel, It Started at Sunset Cottage was released by Harper Impulse. She was a runner-up for the New Talent Award at the 2013 Festival of Romance and a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.