The Meeting

I always find the "meeting" interesting. What meeting is that, you say? Well the meeting between the hero and heroine. How does the author engineer that first meeting?

Very rarely, the hero and heroine are longtime acquaintances. That used to be a popular scenario, but over the years the "girl next door" has fallen out of favor. Now, most couples meet in some interesting or even humorous way. So one of my favorite pastimes is collecting odd meetings.

My friend, Amarinda has the most inventive mind I know of. She engineers incredibly off the wall meetings for her hero/heroine. I believe my favorite is the story with the heroine jogging through the cemetery where she meets the hero (a vampire) and succumbs to his seduction against a headstone. There now. Didn't I say her meetings were unusual?

Another of my friends, Regina arranged for her heroine to meet the hero through a mirror. Her heroine looks in an antique mirror, sees a huge black wolf that changes into a naked man, and presto--they're together. Sort of like Alice through the looking glass, right?

My friend Cindy introduced her hero and heroine through the device of a rescue. The heroine is under attack in a park, the hero happens to hear her cries for help and ta-da, he's on the spot to rescue her. How could she fail to fall for the handsome hero?

I tend to be far more pedestrian with my meetings. When I was thinking about writing this post, I realized that most of the meetings in my past works were really very unexciting. The couples met through family or longtime friends. Nothing exciting was going one, at all. Then I remembered that Honeysuckle met her men in the bathtub in an inn. And in Winter Hearts, Quinn was drugged and bound to Unity with duct tape--half naked.

So maybe there's hope for me. I'll have to think of some more exciting and unusual meetings for my characters. I need something that is electrifying and unique. Somehow, I don't think that my meeting with my eventual husband would qualify. We met on a blind date. A blind date where we played cards with another couple and ate popcorn. I think I was home in bed by ten o'clock. Exciting stuff, I guess when you're a young seventeen.

How about you? What are your stories? How'd you meet? Or, what's your favorite meeting engineered in a book?

anny