She: “Sweetheart?”
He: “Yes, m’love?”
She: “I need a story!”
He: “And where do you think we’re going to put one?”
She: “Um …”
He: “C’mon. You remember how this place shook during the last earthquake. It’s got all the stories it can handle now. Besides, the money. And I don’t even wish to know how much it’s going to cost to go through the process of getting construction permits so we can add a story to this house. As if we owned it. So you’re going to have to scale back your sewing room pla …”
She: “Not that kind of story! If we get one of those, you’re vacuuming it! I mean the writing kind of story.”
He: “Hm. That sounds like a lofty aspiration. But I suppose we’d both be happier with that, than if you were trying to put wronging kinds of stories out there.”
She: “Not with you as my role model, my dear. You’re my knight erring.”
He: “Errant.”
She: “You heard me.”
He: “Seriously? You need stories? When all you need to do is go to sleep?”
She: “And how do you suppose I’m supposed to do that, when you haven’t found it yet?!?”
He: “You seem to find it perfectly well without my help. And come back with tales of feeding eggs Benedict to South American bandito gorillas, or chasing fanged toddlers up curtains, or getting Asian grandmother robots to chase after me with murder in their circuit breakers! Something wrong with these stories? Other than the ones that are trying to kill me, of course. Are you trying to tell me …”
She: “They’re not cool!”
He: “Neither am I after running all over town to get out of their way!”
She: “They’re not romantic comedies. Romantic comedies are all the rage, and the book companies are selling all that they can get printed.”
He: “I … see. You hope to write something that will last as long as the fashion.”
She: “And if I get paid for writing it, this will irritate you how?”
He: “OK, OK. I’ll do what I can. Shouldn’t be all that hard. You know that Lyme disease isn’t restricted to the USA?”
She: “No …”
He: “It’s common, alas, in Italy as well. Same as the US disease, or different? That’s what medical researcher Tracie Richards sets out to discover – that, and to try to get away from the Really Bad Boyfriend back in Avery Point, Connecticut.
“Well, she’s trying to get her work done, and get her groove back, which isn’t very easy ’cause she knows basically nothing about Italy or Italian, plus she never quite knows when the RBB is going to deliver on his threats to show up and really mess up what’s left of her life …
“… and in the process she stumbles (literally) over Trevor Downes, a handsome and charming, but really scatterbrained, professor of modern languages at one of the smaller Scottish universities, who has retreated to a villa in the Italian countryside to try to collect his thoughts, and finally get his disruptive book on the conventions and stupidities of English punctuation written, and maybe even published.
“Of course, he gets in her way, and she gets in his. He is fascinated by her use of language, and, naturally, tries to use her as a living laboratory for his theories. She has no interest in being experimented upon (“I will do the experimenting around here, thank you very much!”), but she needs him because he knows (barely) enough about the surroundings to keep the locals from killing her and, eventually, getting them to help actually get some of her studies accomplished. And then he comes down with the Lyme disease, and she’s tending him (and, yeah, falling for him) when the RBB barges in, and …”
She: “Hm. I don’t know about this, love …”
He: “Hm yourself. Do you wish an idea for a Roman tick comma die, or not?”
You write this, beloved. It will become the number 1 runaway (from) best seller.