This article from the Guardian is about how to write Mills and Boons: Click here!
Here is the recipe:
1 Woman
Sharon Kendrick, who has written 75 mills and boons, says heroines “are not always beautiful, and like most women are plagued by insecurities. I’m not very good at writing high-powered career women. It could be because I haven’t had a high-powered career myself. But if she’s a barrister or a newspaper editor, it wouldn’t really be feasible – I want her to be spending time with the hero. She tends to have to be flexible. And if she’s a chambermaid, if she’s sacked it’s not the end of the world.”
Penny Jordan, (170 books), usually makes her heroine either a virgin, or inexperienced. “I think of it as a shorthand for me,” she says. “It’s always by choice. When my heroine meets the hero, she wants to go to bed with him. For the reader, that’s the mark of the effect he has on her. Because you’ve only got so many pages, it would be very difficult for me to create a heroine who’s had lots of partners and immediately knew there was something different about this one.”
1 Man
“Sheikhs are popular, Jordan and Kendrick say, as are Italian billionaires, Greek tycoons and princes. The sheikh, Kendrick says, “represents the ultimate female fantasy – dark, autocratic, completely powerful, outrageously chauvinistic”.
For Jordan, the hero also has to have a charitable side. “He’s obviously got to be sexy and high powered because they go together. And they always like them to be well off. But for me he has to have some interest in charity, to do something for the good,” she says. “Often when my heroines discover that, their animosity is melted. I don’t like a hero without a softer side. He’s often damaged by something that’s happened in his life, often to do with money. He will be more outrageous to the heroine, and harder on her. He realises he is beginning to feel, he has to resolve that conflict.”
Mix them up a little, put in a few obstacles and steamy sex scenes, Et Voila! Your very own Mills and Boon…
Luckily: “In the 70s and 80s the Mills & Boon hero was putting it about, then with the advent of Aids we had to make slowly sliding on a condom part of the love play.” So all is not yet lost.