... and so this is research

at the moment i am reading a book called 'l.a. woman'. i picked it up at the city library the other week whilst on a 'research trip' - i have to read a lot of chick lit, i've decided, to get my head into the zone for the next novel. this book's blurb sounded interesting, though it has a weird cover that i feel teeters on the offensive - a fuzzy closeup of a very red lipstick just poking out of its silver case. i find myself wilfully covering up the cover when i read the book on public transport... i know, i'm a weirdo. anyhoo... i realised something else about it the other day that disturbed me even more than the cover art. it's published by a company called red dress ink... which makes it a harlequin mills & boon novel. not that there's anything wrong with that, right? rrrright.

i've known the good old mills & boon label for a long, long time - my mum, her mum, all my mum's sisters and all her sisters-in-law used to read them. my mum's the eldest of ten. when we were living in fiji, most of my mum's siblings were living there too. so between them, they had a pretty mean book-swap program happening. and when the titles were done, they'd be taken off to the book exchange and, well, exchanged for others. i can remember, before i was officially allwed to read carefully selected titles, sneaking paragraphs here and there. and i thought i was so clever. mills & boons novels were always around, as were these little romance comic-books - i haven't seen them for ages. the family had a huge stack of them, too. i remember getting in trouble for reading them once at my aunt's house - then my mum's youngest sisters jumped to my defence and it turned into a full scale argument in the lounge room - i felt a little guilty, but then i just turned the page and kept right on reading. and in the next room, they all carried on debating whether i was old enough to be reading those comics.

anyway. mills & boon. i read them for a bit then got bored with them. i think i went off them round about the same time i went off bollywood films. they are very similar plot-wise, and are all about romance and happy endings. mills & boons became an object of scorn for a while there, a secret shame even - something i wouldn't publicly admit to having enjoyed, or indulged in, ever. and yet here i was, with my nose buried in one of them on trams and trains to and from work. how ironical.

the other night on the way home, just as our packed tram was pulling away from the stop, mark looked at me and asked quite loudly, 'so, how's your mills & boon novel going?'. yes, he was being a smartarse, and yes, i was a tad annoyed. especially when he repeated the question louder in response to my snarky 'what??'. the answer? it's going pretty much as can be expected, really. and what would he know, anyway? he was reading science fiction. hard cover, even. how nerdy is that? anyway. i think i'll go run a bath now and read my mills & boon novel. all in the name of research, obvi.