Ah, Valentine's Day. Pink heart-shaped chocolate lollipops, rose bouquets with effusive notes written by hand, sunsets melting over a perfect bottle of wine...
Swoon. Or perhaps more like fall over a bit nauseated.
If you haven't fallen over or deleted this eLetter yet, you can breathe a sigh of relief. That's all the sappy commercialism you'll get from me. I've even decided not to do a Valentine's campaign this year for my chocolate novel. But please don't let that stop you from having lots of the stuff today, and every day. Just be sure it's dark chocolate, and free of palm oil, artificial colors, TBHQ, PGPR, all that unnecessary, bad-for-your-body stuff.
But let me wax romantic a bit about life in general.
Romance. What does it mean to you? For me, a lot. A lot of different and perhaps unexpected things. I wrote
a blog post about it a few years back, that still rings true. (Insider tip: the photo of the roses on that post... that's my wedding bouquet.)
Here's another
blog post on romance, this time all human-to-human, written by someone I literally do not know, but whose writing made me chuckle more than once.
The word
roman actually means "novel" in French, as it does, curiously, in Czech. Originally, a romance was a medieval European tale that told of chivalric adventures, and only later incorporated the idea of love. In Old French, the word
romanz meant "a historical work written in the vernacular." As in, not Latin.
We've come a long way since then, literature and otherwise. Of course there's the chocolate & caramel-covered romance, too. Nothing wrong with it. I've dipped a toe or two in it before, and am glad I did. I still haven't written a romance novel, and have no specific plans to. But if I ever do, it won't be like any others you've ever read.
Have a decidedly, full-on 360-degree romance with every aspect of your life. Happy romance day!
~ Birgitte
