Doll City

I keep trying to write romance novels. It shouldn't be that difficult, right? They're positively formulaic: girl meets boy, hatred and antipathy and rafts of misunderstanding, every good deed misinterpreted, blah blah, until she finally notices he's really good with kittens and he admits that it isn't just her ability to flip a grilled cheese sandwich that has drawn him to her, something about that cute little booty in a microskirt too, and then they cozy up and it's on to the epilogue where she's pregnant or they're gushing over their little tax exemption. If it's a more pretentiously literary bodice ripper, maybe one or the other of them goes back to a previous partner. And gender isn't a complicating factor. Girl can meet girl and go through the same patterns.
I've read lots of romance. Maybe too much. I've even read Luanne Rice and Jayne Ann Krentz, from which you don't want to know. I've avoided nurse/doctor protagonists, so far, but I'm afraid they loom in my future. Because I still want to write one.
Three or so years ago, I actually came to the end of my most ambitious attempt. Didn't "finish" - it really needed some amplification in some areas and fine tuning in others. It was about a friend of mine who was adopted by a sadistic madwoman, who sent her to school with bruises and slashes on her arms. Maybe not romantic enough? I did invent this utterly gruff and charming private dick, to help with her search for her birth mother and fall in love with her, so what could be wrong? Harlequin Books didn't like it, even for their emerging middle-aged-broads-daring-to-love-again market.
I've let that one sit ever since it bounced back with its form rejection.
It's probably time to pull out the first two incomplete manuscripts again. One is about a (what else?) middle-aged dollmaker in the Santa Cruz area, slowly coming back to life after a nasty and unexpected divorce. She was fun to write about, living in her little old farm house up a canyon road, lots of fabric and yarn and vases of flowers, a wood stove for her teakettle. She falls in love with a furniture maker. There are many complications
Earlier this summer, I was wandering through the crafts part of the Saturday Market, in Eugene. We were loaded down with blueberries and blue flowers and various tasty Middle Eastern dips, but a short run by the artisans seemed harmless. I moseyed down an aisle full of long, soft capes, toe rings and salad bowls. At the end of the row were shelves of whimsical dolls - quizzical, painted faces, all sorts of outlandish outfits, including tutus and wings. And lots of red hair. Pretty much exactly what I was picturing when I wrote my romance. I asked the woman in charge whether they were her creations and, if so, whether they were modeled on anyone she knew. She chuckled.
"That's my mother," she said, pointing to a pudgy doll with a sliding bun of hair and a tiny vodka bottle in her hand.
And yesterday the Blog of Note was by a dollmaker down in the bayou somewhere, whose dolls look like the Geico Gecko.
I'm not making this up.