Why on earth are you creating a fake book series?

I can hear you asking this question as clear as day. Well, to answer your question, my new novel project is about a girl who becomes a little too obsessed with a cowboy romance book series and goes to Texas in search of her own cowboy. I started work on my outline last week and suddenly realized that if my gal is obsessed with these books … well, I kinda need a point of reference for them. I mean, she’s going to be reading them at certain points in the book, so I’m going to need to write excerpts from the series. In her travels she’s also going to be comparing the fiction of the books to the real town they take place in. So considering how important the fake series is going to be to the overall story, I had to take some time from my outline to step back and create a Fake Cowboy Romance Book Series.

It’s been kinda fun too. I mean, I basing them (very loosely) on a real book series that I love, but since I love to inject humor into my stories, I have to sort of ham it up a bit and do an exaggerated version of the series. Instead of a series that starts out about 6 brothers on a ranch, mine is about 8 brothers. I created a simple two-line background for each bother and how they fit into the family then created the woman who’d be the love of their life. If you’re not familiar with these kinds of books, Book One is about one brother. Book Two is about another brother, and so on, and so on, and so on. I think in the real series, I’m up to like Book 18. No, there aren’t 18 brothers, eventually they start to branch out to other people in the town, but it all takes place in the same town and the characters all know each other.

Now the thing is … with all these sexy cowboys, it always seems like the women that drop into their lives have something wrong with them.  In the series I’m using as a template, the women have the following issues:  One is deaf, one is in remission from Leukemia, one has a hair lip, one has one leg that is shorter than the other, one killed a man, one was accidentally given the wrong sperm at a sperm bank and of course it was one of the brothers swimmers that she got, One was molested as a child, one was born in a leaper colony to leaper parents …. I could go on because there are 18 books and 18 such women.  But of course, they all have a heart of gold and win their cowboy in the end.  🙂  I know, I’m a sucker for a happy ending.  So in my fake book series, I’m trying to come up with some such ridiculous things to have happened to the women.

Needless to say, I’ve been having fun coming up with some outlandish stories for a bunch of books I’m never going to write.  Kinda odd, but real fun.

-Jennifer