Secrets of The Heart

Haha. Yes, dear reader. I was once a trying-hard pseudo-novelist. No, not the Leo Tolstoy type of wannabe. Not even the JD Salinger or Sue Monk Kidd type. I was leaning more toward a different genre: Popular romance. No, not Harlequin, for crying out loud. More like… Sweet Dreams… or Love Stories.

Girlfriends of the 90s, remember these titles? “More Than Friends.” “Hot Summer Nights.” “Sharing Sam.” There was also that cutesy yarn about a ménage-à-trois that smacked of a well-meaning "re-telling" of Sabrina, which I think is just one of the most fab movies ever.

I don’t remember any of the titles from the Sweet Dreams line, but man, they were some good reads! Aside from going on three-hour phone marathons with girlfriends, getting brainwashed round-the-clock on MTV, and occasionally browsing through the encyclopedia set in the living room (coz these were pre-Internet times), this was my pastime. Reading was my childhood thing. This was what I would rush home for twice a week (my average reading rate then) after a quick browse through the school library. This was my almost-undoing, my late-night partying, my underage drinking. It should be quite obvious now, I had no life. (Probably still don’t.) But you can hardly call me a nerd at this point, as reading rom novels isn’t exactly the same thing as trying to finish “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking (which I have yet to read, btw) during summer break.

So getting back to the almost-novel, the eventual conclusion of a lifetime of gorging on books… As you might have inferred, the characters were based on people I knew back in school. Okay, so it was my crew versus some other group. Although for the life of me, I now can’t figure out who RY and CA were supposed to be.

Get a load of this: the popular but biatchy versus the only-sorta-popular but not quite as biatchy. Har har. Plus, dig this: the heroine doesn’t know who to pick--the cute longtime friend that she bumped into again after so long? Or his bestfriend, the popular hunk who saw her first (in a romantic sense) AND who’s actually really super nice? Haha! Toxic formula for a runaway bestseller, I know. Well, common sense –smarts did kick in after a few chapters and this wannabe writer realized she just had to pull the plug on this secret project that’s now not so secret anymore.

Hahaha. I still can’t get over the whole thing, though. It was a major kick digging this up from my prehistoric files. Cracks me up like anything I’ve ever seen.

“Secrets of The Heart?”
“Montpelier Mammoths Cheering Squad?”
“James Madison High’s Star Circle?”
My. “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now.”

Ha-friggin’-ha. Them dorkdom days of old. God, how I miss the times.