Re: How to delay a moving van?

In article <ddfr-B9C854.14465106012008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David Friedman <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <Ju8s43.Iz3@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:

And I am particularly
annoyed the hell out of by romance stories which depend on both
characters behaving like idiots because the idiot author can
think of no better way of keeping them apart until Chapter Last.

The central couple is _Salamander_ are kept part until Chapter last+1 by
the fact that they are somewhat shy, and used to thinking of their lives
in terms other than "search for a mate."

That works. What doesn't work, and is so often attempted, is the
female thinking "Oh, he doesn't like me, I mustn't show I like
him," and the male thinking the converse, for {number of chapters
minus one} chapters.

Where "apart" isn't inconsistent with sharing a haystack for the
night--chastely, so far as I know.

Particularly if chastely. Though Jean Auel, IIRC, repeatedly
asked us to believe in her characters sharing a cave or tent
non-chastely and THEN going through "he/she doesn't like me" for
800 pages at a stretch.

Granted that the two principals must be kept apart by something,
some barrier either emotional or physical. I can see each of
them, smarting from a recent breakup, being unwilling to trust
any member of the opposite sex, and slowly getting comfortable
with the idea of the other as a human being before anything else.
But you'd have to show it happening over the length of the book,
if you expected me to read it.

Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx
.

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