By popular request: a 20th century photo of young Coach Robinson and his wife. Note the unfortunate plaid pants. He hasn’t lost his wedding ring yet pitching to kids at batting practice.

My husband once said when he met me I didn’t know the difference between a canoe paddle and a ping-pong paddle. What he meant was that I pretty much suck at sports. I didn’t find out I needed glasses until my ego was already deflated by being picked last for every dodgeball, softball or kickball team. Even when I could see, I was still pretty convinced I couldn’t catch or hit anything. I was right.

I got new roller skates and a bicycle for my seventh birthday. Were my parents trying to kill me? I completely destroyed the Sullivan twins’ hedge five houses down trying to control all those wheels and to this day still bear the physical and mental scars.

Four years of high school gym and stupid blue bloomers. My first high school date took me bowling. After I broke all my pearl-polished fingernails and hit nothing but gutter, I decided this guy and I would never suit.

Two years of phys ed in college, with the requirement that every student pass a swimming test to graduate! I took the test when I had undiagnosed mono and almost drowned…but I passed and I graduated.

What was my husband doing while I was bandaged and flunking stickball, hopscotch and hula hoop 101? Going to Y and Boy Scout camps and winning every medal. Captaining the basketball and football teams, playing baseball and rugby in high school. Playing college football. Attending a variety of sporting events (We went to a greyhound race on our honeymoon). He once drove to Muhammad Ali’s estate in Cherry Hill, New Jersey after a bout and got in since he had Maine plates on his car. Little did the security people knew he’d only driven from Rutgers.

After we married, he coached several sports and played tennis, racquetball and golf. I bought sneakers because they were cute, not functional, and got pregnant with our son because it rained too hard to have football practice one September afternoon.

He’ll watch any sport on TV. I’d rather poke an eye out, so keep the cue stick away from me. Which you should do in any case, because I might poke your eye out.

I am content to let my family represent me on the playing field. Fortunately my husband’s sports genes and not mine were passed on to our kids. They wrestled, played football, soccer, basketball, softball, tennis, track and field, ran cross-country, and cheered. Go Team Robinson.

Historical romance heroes are universally fit and athletic, whether they’re boxing at Gentleman Jackson’s or fencing at Angelo’s. A lady may enjoy archery and riding. I did ride a mule down into the Grand Canyon, but I did not smell like a proper heroine afterward. And you can only imagine how dangerous I’d be with a bow and arrow.

Who’s your favorite “sport” in fiction and movies? I like SEP’s Heath Champion and Keira Knightly in Bend It Like Beckham. What do you like to play? If I say Scrabble, does that count?

Love is playing every game as if it’s your last. ~Michael Jordan

Come back Friday, March 23 when I post the first MRMR contest—Too True To Life. No heavy thinking or athletic skill required! You’ll have the weekend to enter. The randomly-selected winner will be announced on Monday, March 26.

Last Thursday would have been my parents’ wedding anniversary. They only made it to their 32nd, still a remarkable stretch considering their inauspicious beginnings. I’m going to be sentimental, but it’s only natural—I’m half-Viennese.

My mother Margarete was both a war widow and a war bride. She grew up in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of a watchmaker and a plump little hausfrau. Her older brother died in a climbing accident, knocked off the mountain as he was changing his shoes by the sliding carcass of a frozen mountain goat (Really. Who could make such a story up?). She worked for a couturier (and once, just like Scarlett O’Hara, made dresses from my Great Aunt Helen’s drapes). Margarete married a tall, blond, handsome guy named Tony, who was immediately conscripted and died on the Russian front. He was not a Nazi but did wear the uniform.

My father David was short, dark and chubby, a decorated cook in the Rainbow Division of the U.S. Army. Yes, he single-handedly won a Bronze star for accepting the surrender of a small group of young German soldiers as he was reconnoitering a town for the best place to set up his kitchen and any stray bottles of wine. He had been somewhat unsettled as a young man, the only child of two “society” people. They sent him to boarding school when he was nine so they could get divorced. A disappointment to them and a prep school drop-out, he followed the horse racing circuit up and down the east coast before he was drafted.

Towards the end of World War II, my parents met in the Vienna Woods, long a trysting place for lovers. My dad was with a buddy, my mom with a girlfriend. My dad spoke no German but fractured French and so did my mother’s friend, so he got stuck talking to her when he really wanted to hit on my mother. Eventually, he learned fractured German, my mother learned fractured English, and they carved their initials on a tree where they first met. The war ended, they married, moved back to America, and had me. A happily ever after.

My parents did not share a culture, language or religion. In fact they had very little in common. But they did have romance. And that was enough for a while.

How did you/your parents fall in love? How did you get your characters to meet? We had friends who tried to fix us up for years. When my husband finally met me, he thought I cursed too much, and I thought he was too handsome. But we got married nine months later anyway.

You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince. Just how many? In a 2004 ABC Prime Time Live telephone poll, women reported an average of six sex partners in their lifetimes; men, 20. I’m always wary of statistics. To quote another aphorism: Figures lie and liars figure. But I’m willing to believe men are more sexually adventurous than women. Or liars.

The same poll says 57 percent of respondents have had sex out of doors or in a public place. Bonus for all those frisky scenes we talked about a while back as romance readers and writers—I guess they’re somewhat true to life. But a whopping 29 percent have had sex on the first date. Oops. Now that doesn’t usually happen in romance novels. We don’t seem to mind sex before marriage so much, but marriage is always implied.

And what about porn, handled so cutely in many a historical where the innocent heroine finds a naughty volume in the paneled library? Men are three times more likely to look at sexually explicit sites online than women, and 11 percent of them have participated in sex chat rooms. Guys don’t see a problem with this; gals view it as “cheating.”

According to this poll, only three percent of adult Americans are still virgins. We’ve come a long way, baby.

But here’s the big kicker. 75 percent of the men say that always have an orgasm. Only 30 percent of the women can say the same.

So, what do you think? Is sex just perceived differently for men and women? Still okay for the hero to be experienced and not so much for the heroine? What about porn? Is it “cheating?”

March 5-11 is World Folk Tales and Fables Week, so be on the lookout for those frogs. You never know. Someday your prince will come. Maybe you will, too.

As you know, I work in a high school library. Among my duties, I am responsible for book displays and generally adding a note of cheer wherever I can. I do the latter by visiting online sites that list peculiar holidays, and I make mini-posters for the library to “celebrate.” For example, March 5-11 is National Procrastination Week, but I haven’t made the poster yet. I won’t worry about that until Panic Day, which is March 9.

Today, March 2, is Read Across America Day, and also officially marks The Cat in the Hat’s 50th birthday. I am somewhat ashamed to say I found Dr. Seuss books extremely annoying when my kids were little, but I’ve since seen their value. And you must give Theodore Geisel credit, when he said writing is “like being lost with a witch in a tunnel of love.” So, happy birthday, Cat, and happy birthday, Dr. Seuss! I’ll be reading And Then He Kissed Her by Laura Lee Guhrke in their honor. What will you be reading?

Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power. It is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits.
~Baron Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), German chemist

Despite the learned professor’s advice, I confess I prefer vanilla. Maybe that’s why my book isn’t finished yet. As a child living around the corner from a candy store with a soda fountain, I was the one kid with the vanilla sugar cone while my friends ordered chocolate.Does that make me boring? I contend it just makes me different.

Everybody likes chocolate. Even grumpy Lucy from the Peanuts cartoon says, “All I really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt!” As if that would sweeten her up. Some people think chocolate possesses miracle powers. Chocolate is cheaper than therapy and you don’t need an appointment. Sorry, I’ve eaten my fair share and I’m still kind of crazy.

Don’t get me wrong. My Viennese mother taught me to eat fresh fruit with chocolate, alternating bites. Pass the chocolate-covered strawberries and orange peels too, please. I won’t turn away that Valentine’s box of chocolate, either. But I love vanilla ice cream, without the hot fudge sauce. It’s delicious just as it is.

I will not work for chocolate. I don’t think, Forget love — I’d rather fall in chocolate. I don’t begrudge anybody their chocolate fix, but it just doesn’t do it for me.

But what does do it for me is finding a book that is unique and an author who is addictive. So I highly recommend Barbara Metzger’s The Hourglass. She has combined a sprinkle of paranormal, a dollop of gremlin humor, generous helpings of duty, honor and luscious romance and mixed them up into a very satisfying read. Grab yourself a Hershey bar if you must and go read it. The hero is drop-dead gorgeous.

Chocolate or vanilla? What have you read lately that’s deliciously different?

Most of us have a special place we think of when we long to escape the real world. My husband likes any frigid and fishy lake in Maine, a holdover from his Boy Scout days. But I’m a beach baby. And how I wish I could escape this Maine winter right now. Give me some sand in my bathing suit and peanut butter sandwich, the smell of Coppertone and I’ll be a girl again, hanging out with my parents in the dunes.

That’s right. My parents. Bet you thought I’d talk about my old boyfriend the lifeguard. But the fact is, every weekend when I was growing up, I went to Jones Beach with my parents at the crack of dawn. My father was big on “beating the crowd.” Consequently we had the Atlantic Ocean to ourselves, because sensible people were still in bed. My father would mix up a huge jug of grapefruit juice and vodka for breakfast (none for me), set up an umbrella and chair for himself and a chaise lounge in the sun for my mother. He brought binoculars, not to watch the seagulls. When I got a little older I was permitted to move my blanket down toward the water, and he kept an eagle eye on me and my friends so we wouldn’t drown or, worse, get picked up by pimply boys.

There is something about the pull of the waves. Who can forget the infamous sex-on-the-beach scene in From Here to Eternity with Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster? I’ve used the sea scenario myself in a novella that might be a novel someday. My characters, Neil McInnis and Abigail Anthony, are swimming in Scotland somewhere around 1850.

“Race you,” she said, looking behind her and laughing.

This was madness.

Questions and Culture:

So, where’s your special place to escape the madness? I’ll be at the shore—with plenty of sunblock.

When you write, do you put your lovers in a feather bed, or are they apt to be found on the library floor?

Reveal a favorite love scene that you’ve read that isn’t all under the covers.

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,—
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!
- Emily Dickinson

The painting is Psamathe by Lord Frederick Leighton, c. 1880. My lucky daughter did an internship at the Leighton House Museum in London in the summer of 2004.

“Pas devant les domestiques (not in front of the servants),” said Lord Louche, so that Lady Louche wouldn’t confront him with his numerous indiscretions at the dinner table. I bet the staff could translate that particular phrase, and knew exactly what their lord had done, too.

Books are filled with loyal retainers. Scarlett has Mammy. Bertie has Jeeves. Bruce Wayne has Alfred. We won’t talk about devious Mrs. Danvers because she’s an aberration, although she was loyal to Rebecca. In historicals the footman is always underfoot accompanying the ladies while they shop and the maid is always lacing maniacally. The butlers are all-knowing, cooks always kind and bosomy, unless they are temperamental French chefs written for comic relief.

Alas, I, like most modern women, get my knowledge of such domestic arrangements from Upstairs, Downstairs, The Remains of the Day, Gosford Park and other period pieces, all rather bittersweet if not downright sour. On occasion, I have had cleaning women, but they terrified me so totally I cleaned up before they came.

It’s impossible to write a historical romance without a nod to the servant class. While Lord and Lady Louche had certain responsibilities in running their household and estate, their hands rarely got dirty. From the 1837 diary of a footman, William Taylor, comes this eloquent passage:

The life of a gentleman’s servant is something that of a bird shut up in a cage. The bird is well housed and well fed but is deprived of liberty, and liberty is the dearest and sweetest object of all Englishmen. Therefore I would rather be like a sparrow or a lark, have less housing and feeding and rather more liberty. A servant is shut up like a bird in a cage, deprived of the benefit of the air to the very great injury of the constitution.

And it took a great many shut-up birds to keep a household running smoothly. Consequently, Lord and Lady Louche were rarely alone. Perhaps their cage was gilded and had more amenities, but they were prisoners of society nevertheless. No wonder Lord Louche left to frolic with an opera dancer and Lady Louche dipped into the laudanum with far too much frequency. But I’ll save infidelity and drug addiction for another post.

So, how about it? Would you like to travel back in time so you could fill your empty days embroidering, playing the pianoforte, reading gothick novels, gossiping and waiting around for Lord Right? And you’d have to change your outfit up to six times a day, too. If so, who would you be, in fact or fiction?

Or do you think you’d wind up as the housemaid, cleaning the grate and lighting the fire for your mistress each morning, with never a moment of your own? I feel a little like Cinderella myself.

My name is Maggie and I’m an addict.

Reading is my drug of choice. I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t a reader. My dad used to go to the Salvation Army and come home loaded down with ancient musty cast-offs: adventures illustrated by N.C. Wyeth and Arthur Rackham, the Bobbsey Twins out of order, and Judy Bolton books (Judy was a lesser Nancy Drew but I liked her so much better). I was the geeky little girl who always finished first in the library’s summer reading program. And there was a “candy store” around the corner from my house, with an old-fashioned soda fountain, greeting cards, comic books (before they were called graphic novels) and hardcover books for 59 cents. I bought Black Beauty and Little Women there and cried. I discovered Mad Magazine there and laughed, once I got over the shock.

Okay, enough of the Wonder Years.

I read a lot, mostly historical romances, but I’m pretty open. For a while I was an awful snot and wouldn’t read bestsellers. I’m over that. I want to see what captures the cash and interest of the reading public. I am often disappointed.

I’m also a blogaholic. Besides reading the delightful and diverting women to the left, I visit several other sites almost daily. There’s always a new twist on an old truth under discussion that makes me think.

One constant theme: favorite “usual suspects” in a romance novel. You know, the rake and the bluestocking, the billionaire boss and Betty Sue. Every hero is supposed to be rich and handsome, every heroine a virgin. If she’s been married before, she’s a psychological virgin if not a physical one. We all assume there are unwritten rules that must be obeyed. “They” want a certain type of book, be they editors or readers. But I’ve read some compelling fiction that bends these rules, with unconventional heroes and heroines.

It takes all kinds.

There’s a lid for every pot.

Whatever floats your boat.

Whatever gets you through the night, ’salright.

I watched the movie Casanova recently. How delightful it was when Francesca’s mother stopped in her tracks when she saw the porcine pork king of Genoa. Played with fearless insouciance and a disregard for his dignity by Oliver Platt, he made a most unlikely hero, but it was liberating love at first sight for both of them. And Heath Ledger as Casanova was pretty cute, too.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, when everyone deserves their happy ending, what distinctive characters would you like to see/write/recommend? Are you looking for a heavy heroine whose honey happily hugs every inch? A vixen who is not vilified for her lack of virtue? An author who avoids alliteration at all costs?

I’m thinking experienced woman, younger man, like the characters in Jennifer Crusie’s Anyone But You. They don’t call me Mrs. Robinson for nothing.

Naming characters causes considerable consternation (not to mention alliteration). For Regency-era writers, if we are to be absolutely true to the first part of the 19th century, every heroine born around 1800 would be Mary and her hero would be John. Boring.

I am reminded of a trip to Scotland my husband John (who’s not boring) and I took with a friend, also named John. We met up with several Scottish couples in an Edinburgh pub. We began as strangers, but after a few pints we were all fast friends. Every man was named John, every woman named Margaret. Scary.

So, it’s been fun to name my characters something a bit less plebeian than Mary (or Margaret) and John, still keeping true to the times (no Heathers or Ambers or Tiffanies allowed).

In By Midnight: Cynthia and Harry
In Waking Beauty: Penelope and Dominick
In Third-Rate Romance: Eleanor and Lionel (Regency)
Eliza and Link (Western)
Ella and Liam (Chick Lit)
Evangeline and Lucien (Vampire)…anybody see a pattern here?…
and Kelly and Paul (the hapless author and her real-life honey)

That’s right. I’m juggling five romances in one book. I’m crazier than Kelly.

How about you? What have you named your fictional babies?

And now, for pure fun, and because it’s not romantic at all…

Your Ten Names

1. YOUR REAL NAME:
Margaret (Maggie) Robinson.

2. YOUR GANGSTA NAME: (first three letters of your name, plus izzle)
Magizzle..or Marizzle if we’re being formal.

3. YOUR “FLY GUY/GIRL” NAME: (first initial of first name, first three of your last)
M-Rob

4. YOUR DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite color and favorite animal)
Pink Seal (I’m not dead from a kiss from a rose)

5. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, street you live on):
Maniero Vineyard (yum, buy your cheap red wine right here)

6. YOUR STAR WARS NAME: (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name, first 3 letters of mother’s maiden name)
Robmaman (looks kind of French to me)

7. SUPERHERO NAME: (favorite color, favorite drink)
Pink Champagne (Hah! My super power: I still act like a lady no matter how much I’ve had to drink)

8. YOUR IRAQI NAME: (2nd letter of your first name, 3rd letter of your last name, any letter of your middle name, 2nd letter of your mother’s maiden name, 3rd letter of your father’s middle name, 1st letter of a sibling’s first name, last letter of your mother’s middle name…have you given up yet?)
Abnauna (but I refuse to wear the burqa)

9. YOUR STRIPPER NAME: (the name of your favorite perfume)
Chanel (and I’m #1)

10. YOUR WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (mother and father’s middle name)
Franziska Trumbull (that just seems cranky)

Have a great week, whatever you call yourself. And Chapter One of Third-Rate Romance continues under Maggie’s Manuscripts for your reading pleasure.