Cathy Lamb on strong-willed women, manly men and lipstick

Cathy Lamb, author of What I Remember Most and the upcoming My Very Best Friend (August), shares why she loves writing the romance scenes in her women's fiction books.

Cathy: It's not about the sex, it's about the stud.

That sounds a bit crude.

But there's truth to it. I have read many romance novels, and the love scenes, to me, aren't about the rollicking sex, they're about the man the woman's rollicking around with.

I started reading romance novels when I was a teenager. You would have been hard-pressed to find a more gawky, awkward girl. My hair frizzed like I had a small light socket implanted in my head, I was bony thin, rather skeletal, and was generally baffled about life and why I was here.

But in the romance novels I read, there were true men. They were manly. Smart. Protective. Chivalrous.

Surely I'd find a man like that one day? My young heart pitter-pattered.

I later took my love of category romance novels and tried to write them. Rejection, rejection, rejection. For years. After a particularly brutal rejection, I gave up and changed tracks.

I wrote a novel titled Julia's Chocolates. It was about a woman named Julia who, in the first scene, threw her poofy wedding dress into a dead tree on a deserted street in North Dakota. She swore and cried. It came down on her head.

Julia had an Aunt Lydia who painted her home on a farm in Oregon pink, like a certain body part, and the door black to ward off seedy men. Lydia had five-foot-tall cement pigs in her front yard, each named after a man she didn't like. Lara, another character, a minister's wife, was a closet artist, who felt that her life was smothering her. Katie was a mother and married to an alcoholic.

I wrote about real problems that real women deal with in that book. But, I added a stud. A respectful, interesting, smokin' hot gentleman.

It was women's fiction, with a twist of romance. It sold. I've been writing women's fiction ever since and am now writing my 10th novel.

In my novels I've addressed all kinds of issues: Abuse. Schizophrenia. Addictions. Loneliness. Despair. Stalker boyfriends. An insane asylum.

I've also written about a woman who ran naked along a river to get rid of her anger, another who turned a garden hose on in her cheating ex-husband's Corvette, and a third who secretly made gigantic, colorful chairs in her garage with wings and feet. One of my characters spied on a man with night-vision goggles and laughed so hard she wet her pants.

Heartbreak and laughter, all mixed up. My characters may be broken, but they're independent, strong-willed, like their lipstick, and they're going to, eventually, come up swinging.

Romance has danced through most of their story lines. The truth is, I love to write the romance scenes, the tension, the conflict, the hee haw. It simmers and sparkles. Sometimes the woman is ready to jump into the man's arms and ride off on a motorcycle, hands waving in the air. Other times she's too troubled to get involved with anyone and she has to work through that troublesome part.

Like real life. Sometimes we can jump, sometimes we want to run. Why? Because we know that romance does not come perfect. In fact, often we have to wander around in the dark and the fog, shooting Cupid's arrows, before we hit the right person and find the right, forever romance.

I've been married for 22 years. If I were to say that every day was bliss, you would know that I was lying like a son of a gun or had been slugging straight shots. I'm not lying and I don't do straight shots.

There have been beautiful times, and there have been times that had my husband said he wanted to go and study penguins in Antarctica, I would have packed his bag and suggested he try snorkeling while there.

Romance, for us, simmers on high now and then, and it sparkles now and then, but mostly it's being together. It's movie night. Or a drive to the river. Omelets.

It's holding each other's hand when all four of our parents became terminally ill. It's holding each other's hand as their coffins were lowered into the ground. It's weathering job losses and being poor when we were younger, and raising teenagers, who aren't known for being easy.

It's worrying together and crying together and laughing with gusto.

It's enduring. It's a mess. It's faithful. It's hard. It's funny, loving, true.

Now that's sexy.

And romantic.

And worth writing about.

Find out more about Cathy and her books at cathylamb.org.