Remembrance Read online

  Now that I’m an adult and know all about adult things (uh-huh, sure) I know that my parents were not creative and I was. If they bought something that needed assembly, they read the box and put it together in the way the manufacturer wanted them to. If I bought something, I felt that reading the instructions was cheating. And if I couldn’t put it together easily, it was quite ordinary for me to jump up and down on the box and say all the dirty words I knew—which, thankfully, weren’t many.

  My punishment for box jumping or any infraction of the peace rules was to be talked to “for my own good.” Never in my life have I understood that phrase. When someone says this is “for your own good” it always, always, always means that someone is trying to make you openly acknowledge his or her superior power.

  So, anyway, how did I survive these spirit killers? How did I survive being dragged to the preacher so he could talk to me because I was “different”? How did I survive hearing my mother ask my relatives if they had any idea what she could “do” with me?

  I did the best I could by escaping into a land of stories.

  I read incessantly. When my mother made me vacuum the bedroom I shared with my sister, she was more concerned with the length of time I spent vacuuming than with how clean the floor was after I was finished. All she ever checked was to see that the light bulbs were spotless, so I learned to clean the bulbs, then I’d get in the closet with a book, a flashlight, and the vacuum and sit down for a forty-five-minute read. Since my mother had the ears of a bat, I had to make sure the suction was going on and off, so I sat there putting various parts of my face to the hose, sucking and reading, sucking and reading. I did learn that one must make sure the hose end is clean or one’s face gets awfully dirty, then one’s mother makes one actually clean the room. Gag!

  So, anyway, I learned to get round the work, work, work, clean, clean, clean ethic of my mother’s house and make time for the books I loved so much. I read nonfiction even then. I read about heroes, about men and women who had done things and accomplished things in their lives.

  There was Daniel Boone and Jackie Cochran and, oh sigh, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. There was the most magnificent queen who ever lived, Elizabeth I, and there were girls who dressed as boys and became spies. Oh, but the list was endless.

  I didn’t realize it then but what I was doing was researching. Yes, that’s right, researching. Now I receive reader letters saying in awe, How do you ever do all the research necessary to write historical novels? Okay, let’s have a reality check here. This woman has written me that she has a full-time job and three children under the age of five and she wants to know how I research a romantic novel. I want to ask her how she survives each day.

  I guess I’m explaining so much about my life to make you, my readers, think I’m a normal, sane person because something happened to me that isn’t normal and maybe not even sane.

  You see, I fell in love with one of my fictional characters.

  Up until I started writing a book titled Forever, I liked to think I was a perfectly well-adjusted person. Maybe I did have a lot of stories running through my head, but to me, the people who don’t have these stories are missing something.

  Anyway, I like to think I was happy and relatively well adjusted. I was thirty-seven years old, had a great career, had friends, and best of all, I had met a wonderful man named Steven.

  Steve was a dream come true: smart, funny, talented, caring. If I’d made him up he couldn’t have been better. And he adored me. He laughed at all my jokes, thought I was beautiful, smart. You name it, everything was perfect between us. There was no question that finally, at last, I wanted to get married. When he asked me to marry him, while riding in a hansom cab through Central Park, I threw my arms around his neck and said, “Yes, yes, yes!” with such enthusiasm that I embarrassed Steve.

  But that night, actually, early Sunday morning, I awoke at 3 A.M. with an IDEA. That’s unusual for me. When I first started to write I was plagued with Ideas, and I was so afraid that I’d forget them when I awoke that I got out of bed and wrote all night. But after I’d written about ten books, I’d wake up with an Idea, then fall back asleep.

  But that night of my marriage proposal, with my left hand weighted down by Steven’s ring, I had an IDEA. It was so big that I couldn’t relax against Steve’s warm body and go back to sleep.

  So, tiptoeing, I got out of bed and went to my computer to write down my thoughts. What I was really thinking about wasn’t so much a story but a character. Well, okay, a man. A wonderful man, a man unlike any I’d ever written about before. A man who was more real to me than any other man I’d created.

  In my books, I write about one family, the Tavistocks. When I first started writing, every time I finished a book I’d get depressed because I knew that I’d never again see the characters in my book. So one day I had the brilliant idea of writing four books about four brothers in one family. However, I had not taken into consideration that when I finished the series I would be quadruply depressed. When I reached this point, the only way I could figure how to recover was to write more books about the same family.

  At the time I didn’t realize what I was getting into. As the number of books about this family increased, the mail brought me thousands of requests for family trees. And people kept pointing out that I’d have a man and woman with a little boy in one book and in the next book their child would be a girl. I had to buy professional genealogy software to keep up with all of my people, since within a few years I had over four hundred characters, all related to one another.

  Over the years I had come to love my Tavistocks and their cousins, and they had become very real to me. So on the night of my engagement it wasn’t unusual for me to start writing about a man named Tavistock.

  I named him James Tavistock, to be called Jamie, and he was a great big gorgeous sixteenth-century Scotsman running around in the Tavistock plaid, and the heroine was a modern woman of today who travels back in time to meet him.

  When Steve awoke the next morning I was still at my computer, trying to get down dialogue and notes for the book. He’d never seen me like this because over the years I had learned to treat writing like a nine-to-five job. I took off weekends and holidays just like everyone else. I found that this worked better for me than the lunacy of “waiting for inspiration.” The rent I pay each month for my apartment is all the inspiration I need.

  Steve was very understanding. He’s an investment banker (no, I do not allow him to handle my money; I said I was in love, not insane) and was a bit fascinated by the creative process. So he ordered his own breakfast from the delicatessen (in the real world the woman fries eggs for her man; in New York we dial the telephone for our men), and I kept typing.

  After a while he got bored with hearing the keys of my computer, so he tried to get me to go out with him to see a movie or walk in the park. But I wouldn’t go. I couldn’t seem to stop writing about Jamie.

  Steve said he understood, then decided to leave me to my work; he’d see me the next day.

  But I didn’t see him the next day, or the next. In fact I didn’t see him for nearly two weeks. I didn’t want to see anyone; I just wanted to write about Jamie.

  I read books on Scotland until the wee hours of the morning and everything gave me an idea about Jamie. I thought about him, dreamed about him. I could see his dark eyes, his dark hair. I could hear his laugh. I knew what was good about him and what was bad. He was brave and honest; his honor was such that it was a life force. He was proud to the point that it hindered him. But for all his many virtues he was also vain and at times as lazy as a cat. All he wanted was me—I mean, the heroine—to wait on him.

  After two weeks I went out with Steve; I don’t know what it was, but it was as though I couldn’t really see him. It was as though I was seeing all the world through a Vaseline-coated lens. Nothing seemed real to me. All I could seem to hear and see was Jamie.

  Over the next months my obsession with this man only