Intimacy, making it real

Hi y'all! I'm just thrilled to my girly bits to have been invited to join the wildness that is Writers Gone Wild.

But we have some contest winners to announce *rubs hands with glee* so I won't keep you in suspense any longer.

The winner of our very own Mr. Wild and Wonderful contest is...drumroll please...

Me! I'm the only commenter who nominated my own lovely husband. Riiiiiight. Like the other Wild Women would let me get away with that one. Worth a shot, though, I thought. But since I'm not allowed to win all that lovely swag from RT#09, we've chosen some other far more deserving commenters.

The real winner is:
Christine Moorhouse, who just couldn't decide who to choose and said what we were all secretly thinking, "They're all too yummy for words!" We do so like to reward our fellow females for that supposedly annoying trait of not being able to make up our minds ;-)

And our Writers Gone Wild commenter-extraordinaire this time up is:
JJ, who's been visiting us regularly for a while now to show us some love. (Air kisses...mwah!)

Christine and JJ, please drop Liane a line (starmuser at aol dot com) and put "I'm a Wild and Wonderful winner!" in the subject line.

So first up, I thought I'd better kick off this post with a few things you should know about me. Yanno, so you don't get the wrong idea.

1. I'm a Kiwi
2. I live in New Zealand
3. I sometimes say things like, "Well, that just sucked the big kumara!"
   

Why is this important to know?

Well, as you can see from 3. as much as I try my best to write "American" occasionally I slip up. So feel free to call me on it and post a "What the heck are you going on about?" comment, and I'll make it my personal mission to enlighten you. Next up is the time zone difference. When I'm tweeting and Facebooking and emailing my US friends, I'm often completely out of whack with the time zones. So if you do drop me a line and I don't respond for a bit, I'm not ignoring you...promise! It might just take a few hours before my time and your time are in synch.

Now ever since Liane dropped me in it--I mean, "invited" me to be a Wild Woman--I've been wracking my brains trying to come up with a topic to post. Got all sorts of "Serious Writer" stuff I could talk about, just to prove I can actually be serious when the occasion warrants. (Those who know me well, you can stop ROFL now.) I even have some amaaaaazing photos of really hot guys in really sexy underwear that I was thinking about posting about on this blog. But hey, we've just had a hot guy fix with the Mr. Romance 09 photos, so I wouldn't want to have you walking round with unattractively sagging jaws. Guess I'll save that till we're all hanging out for another manly fix.

But before you despair, I've got some other really hot photos to show you. And for me, as a romance writer, these are hot in an entirely different, far more intimate way than studly half-naked men. BTW, huge "thank you!" to my Ceroc Dance friends, Julian and Hannah, for being brave enough to let me use their photos and talk about them!

Here, Julian and Hannah are waiting for the music to begin. It's a tense time, wondering just what the music will be and whether they've heard it before, what the judges' will think of their dancing, whether the audience will appreciate their routine, whether they'll stuff up....

For me, this is a magic photo, because I go to Ceroc classes and dance with all sorts of different guys and I know just how damn hard it is to look deep into someone's eyes without flinching or giggling or looking away. There's no flinching with these two. They're really making it work, making everyone who looks at them believe they have a connection...an intimate connection.

Amazingly, they've achieved this with no music, no audience participation as yet, no judges' feedback as yet, in a completely silent hall. And hey, you'd never know how hard that pose is to hold from the looks on their faces, would you?


Here, he's thrown her back, off-balance (and nearly upside down!) in a really challenging pose and yet....

Hannah knows Julian will take care of her and make this move work. She knows he won't play to the crowd and ogle her cleavage and make some "Phwoar!" guy-face which might tip a sensual move over into a sleazy move. She's thrown herself into the move, completely abandoned herself to it--and to him--and she has complete trust that he won't let her down.

And he will protect her, make sure she doesn't hurt her back or whack her head on the floor. He won't drop her. He trusts her to know this, and believe in him, so that she can put everything she has into making the move work without worrying about being safe.

The mutual trust shows in this photo and for me, it's what makes it so damn sexy!


I asked Hannah what she was thinking about in this photo. I won't reveal what she said 'cuz that would spoil the fun ;-) and besides, this is my post, so y'all have to put up with my take on it.

What I see in this photo is how much these two love dancing together. Yeah, they're dancing in a competition, yeah, it's freaking stressfull as hell, but they're cutting loose and having fun with it. They're loving this! And you can bet the audience is loving watching them, too.

No surprises they win heaps of competitions, huh?

What has any of this got to do with writing? 'Cuz, yanno, being a "Serious Writer" and all, my ramblings are always relevant to the writing process and.... Ahhhh, crap! Wrong blog. This is supposed to be the one where I'm a Wild Woman, isn't it? Bugger! (Slipping in a bit of Kiwi slang, there--'specially for the Kiwis who're gonna be checking out the blog when they hear about Hannah and Julian's photos.)

So are Hannah and Julian "intimate" or in Facebook terms, "in a relationship"?

That would be telling ;-). Regardless, in these photos they make us believe they are, in truly glorious, glossy detail. As a writer, you have to find the perfect words or phrases and craft them in such a way that your readers will buy in to the kind of emotion that Hannah and Julian are showing us. And if you do it well, if you make it truly real for your readers, they'll crave to know more and they'll turn the page to discover what your characters are wanting and needing from each other--and how they're gonna go about getting what they want and need from each other.

And IMHO, if what you write is anything like these photos, it'll be freaking hot! (Le sigh.)

:-)

Maree