MORE MEDICAL ROMANCE

I am guest-blogging today at Everybody Needs a Little Romance, talking about why I love to write - and read - love stories set in the life and death world of a hospital (I'm a science geek who watches soaps, the intersection was pretty inevitable).

Enjoy an excerpt below...

I love biology, physiology, anatomy. In college, I seriously considered majoring in genetics, but, alas, the lure of the writing life was too strong. (I realize now I probably could have combined both… but that simply didn’t occur to me then.)

I also love the intrinsic drama of a hospital. (This, I presume comes from a childhood – and okay, adulthood – spent watching… General Hospital.)  When I read a hospital-set romance, I love reading about the characters and the progression of their relationship, sure. But, I also love digging into the nitty-gritty medical details.  Exotic diseases, make-shift treatments, heroic sacrifices, fancy Latin terms… who doesn’t love fancy Latin terms?

I love the precision teamwork of a well-oiled Emergency Room machine in action as well as the idiosyncratic brilliance of each individual within it. (Yes, I do enjoy House. But, my otherwise very obliging husband won’t watch it with me, because he says it’s no fun when I figure out the mystery diagnosis halfway through.)

I read nonfiction books set in hospitals, too.  And, I admit, I’ve been known to… borrow a particularly dramatic case or procedure for my fictional work.  My 2000 Dell romance, When a Man Loves Woman, asked the question: Can men and women ever really be just friends? (Since it’s a romance novel, I’ll let you guess the answer to that one.) But, it also took place in a hospital, with the hero an Emergency Room specialist and the heroine a pediatric neurosurgeon.  Sometimes, affairs of the heart had to take a backseat to affairs of the… heart - literally. I tried to weave the medical procedures into the story so that they weren’t merely something for the characters to do in between kisses, but so that what happened inside the hospital and interactions with their patients actually affected the eventual outcome.

And stop by to read the entire piece... and leave a comment... at: http://everybodyneedsalittleromance.com/?p=14367