137. My first exposure to romance

Friday, August 19, 2005

Growing up, my mother used to be an avid soap opera watcher. She watched the ones on daytime televison, mostly on CBS, and she also watched the Spanish language soaps at night. I remember starting to watch them as a young child. Each and every day I would join my mother in front of the television while the stories of the people's lives played on screen. Each day brought forth new challenges, new problems, and on-going stories of love and romance. For years, some soaps have been running. Guiding Light has been playing for over fifty years. Watching these soaps became a daily part of my life, and they were my first exposure to the world of romance and story telling. Yes, they can be a bit over dramatic at times, and things are forever changing. One week, a woman can be with one guy and the next she can end up in the bed of someone else.

However, with soaps you also have the long standing power couples. The ones that are together for years, and even if they do end up breaking up, they somehow always find their way back to each other. the dail soap tells the story of their love throughout the years that pass. I still watch soaps from time to time. Not daily as I used to. time just isn't in the cards to watch a soap every single day. At one point, I was reading the daily recaps over at Soapdom, but it isn't as fun reading a brief synopsis than it is watching. I try to keep up with them as much as I can, and the soaps make it easy because they don't move at all that quick a pace, so you can check in once or twice a week. Earlier this week, I noticed Guiding Light was hyping up the wedding of one of those super power couples that have been together for years, fought obstacle after obstacle, but still hadn't officially tied the knot and found their own version of happily ever after. So this week, I turned on the soap and watched.

Soaps are still cheesy and over dramatic, but when it comes to romance they do know what they are doing. Unless they want things to be horrible, they can tell the story of a love just as well as a book does, and watching soaps exposed to the world of love and romance. It made me want to sit down at my computer or with a pad of paper and write so that I can create that own little version of happily ever after for some couple.

Last night, I wasn't able to get much done story wise. I did type in the pages I wrote the night before, but I didn't write anything new this morning before bed as I had been doing the last few nights. One of my writing partners came online and I spent the night working on an interactive story line, her and I have add going on eighteen months the beginning of next month. It wasn't related to anything I was writing, but i love the story line, and sometimes things that happen there have worked their way into my fiction as well. I'm off to blog hop, and I then I'm going to try to get some words down.

Have a great day everyone!