Reality offers enough places a person can look if they want to be jolted or upset. When I read, I want to be entertained, and, by the last page of a book, I want to feel uplifted. When I write, I want to create a vision of what might be possible. They're goals, things to reach for, to work toward. People who say women read romances for escape and fantasy are over-simplifying.
All fiction is fantasy and, in a sense, escape.
Critics pick on romance as being especially fantastical, saying that love is never that perfect or no man could be that wonderful. It's important to me that my characters, their relationships and their problems, be as real as I can make them, because I don't believe romance readers really want to read about something they have absolutely no hope of ever having. I think women want to believe they can have their life and their relationships be as good as those in the pages of the best romance novels. I can't believe I'm that different from other women. Mary and her husband have been married twenty-two years, and they have two sons.