What Do You Mean, Only One Hero?

Only one hero? You've got to be kidding! We all know heroes are what romance is all about.

It's kind of a paradox, though, that the heroine in a romance is expected (yeah I know, times are changing) to have only One True Love. Maybe she's been married before, is a widow, had an adolescent fantasy. But we all know it wasn't her One True Love because finding the OTL is the reason for this very book we're reading. There can be only One True Love, right?

But wait a minute. When we finish that book, with our heroine having successfully achieved her goal (whether she understood it was her goal or not), what do we do? We go hunting for another book and repeat our experience of being the heroine, sharing in her quest. Maybe she only gets one OTL, but not us, the readers. Too bad for her. More for us.

Even more so, the romance author indulges in this search for the Perfect Hero, over and over, as she generates new stories. So many heroes, so little time. Yet we treat each one as if he is the One and Only. Serial hero worship? And as much as I, the reader or writer, fall in love with the hero, the moment I reach "The End" he becomes a memory, and I'm off looking for the next One True Love (a.k.a. One True Hero, One and Only).

What does that make me? Dear Mama in Heaven, cover your ears. I'm about to use one of those words again. Never mind, bowing to the certain knowledge that Mama-Up-There hears every word I utter, let's just say I'm profligate. According to dictionary.com:
profligate adj. utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated.

Or maybe wanton is a better term:
adj. sexually lawless or unrestrained; loose; lascivious; lewd: wanton behavior.

Yep. Seems to fit, at least as far as Hero Searching is concerned.

I don't care what we call it, I love it. The search for the hero is as important as his story, perhaps even more so. There are thousands of factors in finding the perfect hero for any given story, and as often as not, once the hero is found, he re-writes what I thought the story would be. It is, after all, his story, not mine.

So there are thousands of topics to explore In Search of Heroes. Everything from who he is, who is his heroine, what makes him heroic, to what is his story and how is it written. There are the actual Searches, which could mean travel, to wonderful places like Bath and Haddon Hall, Italy's Pompeii and Rome, Hawaii's Kaua'i, the Mayan ruins of the Yucatan. It could mean deep research in books, where we could extract little known facts on which to build stories. Maybe specific heroes who deserve noting. And since I also love to paint my hero's picture on book covers and elsewhere, I'll show you lots of my artwork and provide you lots of links to favorite heroes and their lives.

This blog is for fun. Because we love heroes. And, being women of the 21st Century, we love them with brazen openness. Here's where we can celebrate our quest for the One True Hero.