As for Black Silk, it is truly one of the most unconventional romances ever written. Can’t wait to hear what you think.

For me big misunderstandings only work when I’m in on the misunderstanding, too. I think you’re definitely right about heroes not believing heroines in older books, though–I seem to remember a Victoria Holt book that used that device. I thought that guy wasn’t worth keeping around….

Grading … yeah, I’m getting a huge pile of it tonight. I feel your pain.

In A Company of Swans, which is set in the period before WWI, the heroine does talk to the hero, although never enough. But in one conversation, she says she has always had a problem with Romeo & Juliet because why would Romeo believe Juliet was dead when he could have checked by using a chicken feather to see if she was still breathing. Later on, the hero — suffering from a bad case of the Big Misunderstanding himself — spots a chicken, remembers the R&J example, and travels halfway around the world to find the heroine. (It’s a fun book, and I’m not doing it justice.)

My problem with the Big Misunderstanding as a plot device is that it often comes with a sketchy relationship between the protags. Karen Higgins’ novels seem to suffer from this deficiency. I’m always left with a HEA that doesn’t seem earned, particularly when the protags didn’t spend very much time together.

In A Company of Swans, the protags spend a lot of time together, and I really believed they loved each other. Theirs was the other sort of Big Misunderstanding, namely the result of some evil meddling by a deus ex machina or two. I’m not wildly excited by that plot device either (I have pretty cynical views on the ability of most people to conspire successfully to ruin other people’s lives) but at least it acquits the protags of intentionally or negligently missing the obvious.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s stupid protags!

However, on second thought, I think YOU are the scurvy dog!!

Just like Duchamp’s urinal, this is your work now, and how are we supposed to know you don’t have sincerity in your heart when you made it? Perhaps privately, you think of yourself as uppity, and you dream of being pulled by your bodice strings, and being bedded by Jelly Bones Bud, (a name I am only now really appreciating!) but you don’t want your husband to know, so you have constructed this elaborate ruse, and unbeknownst to us, it’s really a cry of sorrow into the void of blogland for the unlikelihood that you and JBB will ever be united.

I am weeping! You are a total Tolstoy, dude!

(Anyway, she’s a heroine, therefore her eyes are emerald.)

And the hair – if she’s shy, it can be mousy brown. Otherwise we can do red, flaxen, or impossibly curly, but never brown. Sable if you must…