My Secret Life as a Writer of Romance

Posted on July 9, 2012 in Snippets | 8 comments

Well, it looks like I’ve been found out and my cover as a writer of romance novels has at last been blown. This morning I headed over to LibraryThing.com, where I saw the following:

Dixon’s Bluff, 1993 Sally Tyler Haynes

Now, my German is far from excellent, but if I were to translate Rüssel und Hase, the title on the cover in the picture, I would probably not translate it as “Dixon’s Bluff”. Instead, I would translate it as “Trunky and the Hare”; or, taking artistic license, I might decide that it should be translated as “The Snorgh and the Sailor.” I can’t help fearing that those hoping for intimate moments will find themselves disappointed by the tale of the seafaring Snorgh, in German.

Given that I was supposed to have written the book, however, I thought I would look up Dixon’s Bluff (which sounded to me from the name alone like a kind of low-budget remake of Dawson’s Creek) online. The book turns out to be a romance published back in 1993 (“Dixon MacCauley was a desperate man, playing a dangerous and deadly game, and suddenly, into the middle of it came a nanny named Liza Snow and an innocent little girl named Jill…”), written by Sally Tyler Hayes. As the cover of the original is so very fine, I thought it worth sharing here.

This is the second time in as many months that I have been given credit for books that I haven’t written. The last one was when there was a little accident in the children’s department of Waterstones’ that led to being credited, again in error, as the author of Princess Polly and Pirate Pete’s Potty Training Book.

As I wrote in a previous post, it is true that the things I write cover a fairly broad range—from children’s books to philosophy to literary fiction—but potty training and romance are domains into which I would not presume to move, areas of expertise which I am content to leave to others.