I’m surprised by parents decided to have anymore children after me. I had colic the first year of my life and cried all the time. Why and how they managed to have another child, I don’t know. I think it is one of those short-hands that at this point in my romance reading career just makes me irritated. I really like epilogues (I think I might be one of the few people who like both the epilogue in Harry Potter and Crime and Punishment), but I don’t like short hand. I want the children to have characters. And more importantly, I think I want to see characters able to be happy when nothing is perfect or when things are irritating.

And I totally agree with you on the excess of babies in epilogues. Having children is no guarantee of greater, or even equal, happiness. And I know for sure my neighbor’s marriage would have survived had they had half the number of children they did.

I love hearing about people’s real life love stories. It’s one of my favorite things, truly. In answer to the question on your blog about who is your hero—well, I think my hero is Intellectual Libertine. He’s dashing, he’s handsome and he’s witty. I also I like paradox and find it particular attractive when embodied.

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Oh, and he was my first British, Oxbridge-educated, cryptic-crossword-solving, genius husband. (I have a type.) Both of them are thinner than I (by a wide margin, no pun intended), better looking than I am, and both love me because of who I am. My brain has a lot to do with that. (Enough about me; the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would have said, is here: http://narrowend.blogspot.com/2009/10/whos-your-hero.html)

But while I enjoy reading about smart heroines (you can add Sheila Simonson’s Lady Celia’s Comet to your list), I have a problem with books where a character is fat. Not because I’ll only believe a thin woman can fall in love or be loved, but because too often the fat gets its own character-arc and backstory. One of Kathleen O’Reilly’s contemporary (Harlequin Blaze) heroines was a bit too self-conscious about her avoiddupois — and it wasn’t that much. A muffin top, perhaps, or an extra dress size. But Catherine’s awareness of her less-than-perfect figure got a bit distracting for me.

Reminding the reader of the heroine’s size is like getting too specific about what’s she’s wearing — we don’t actually need to know everything down to the last accessory. Get `em dressed for the occasion and then let them get on with the story. If they’re self-conscious about their size, well, use that character element sparingly because it’s a bit like the leaky toilet: it exists in real life, but we don’t read romances to be reminded of that fact.

The not-eating under stress thing is pretty common in fiction, if not in real life. I think its demonstrative of everyone’s obsession with being thin. I mean, it would not be good if the heroine got all fat and stuff because her cortisol levels went up when she was stressed. Its not its lack of realism that bothers me more what it signifies about eating in our culture or gaining weight.

Also, I must say that there are those of us who truly do stop eating when stressed. I’ve lost 15 pounds in one month of work crisis and had the paramedics called when I passed out from not eating for several days when I just existed on adrenaline. Needless to say this is as unhealthy, if not more, than overeating. So I don’t think it’s as common, but there are folks out there who stop eating when under stress.

Sometimes an author you love, just doesn’t always do it for you. I have the same issue with Diana Wynne Jones.

(Am a big LK fan, just not an equally big fan of all her books.)