Fourteen years later, my result is a entire chest of keepers who all have unique individual charcters.  You would think in fourteen years I would have found thousands of books with a character who had a disability, overweight, wore glasses, etc.  SOMETHING to set them apart from the glossed over image I quickly grew tired of experiencing.  Some called me biased in my reading pleasure.  I have heard comments that I want to find a character with a flaw so I can fix it -- untrue what I seek is true to life romance.  Give me characters who I can relate to and understand.  I am pleased I have the honor of presenting you Rida Allen.  Ms. Allen's latest book "Great Love" is the character I have been searching for all these years.  She just happens to overweight.  Instead of doing my normal question answer session, I decided to ask one question and let her expand on her answer.  The answer she gave is one woman all across the world can understand -

Rida Allen has been writing for a lot of years, both stories and poetry. As a child, she wrote stories to take her away from her life. She wouldn’t tell you that she had an overly traumatic childhood, because basically it was a childhood like any other overweight child’s. She was picked on in school, during the summer at the neighborhood pool, and even at home by her brothers because of her weight. So she spent a lot of her time reading romance novels. And when she couldn’t get to the library to get her stack of 20 or 30 romance novels, she would write her own stories.

Rida wrote stories of how she wanted to live and who she wanted to be. She wanted to be thin, beautiful and popular... just like every other young girl. She has tons of stories put away in a notebook about how she would act if she were thin and pretty. She acted out what she thought was her best life in those stories. When she tired of being depressed, she wrote about other people... people she just made up in her head. Even then, the people turned out to be beautiful and thin. She wrote a lot, but didn’t finish most of them. She had no experience, no idea how things were supposed to turn out. So she would start the stories, get to a certain point and then put them away. She goes back occasionally to see what she wrote about. A lot of the stories start out the same and then go in different directions, as if she were trying to decide how her life should go by testing out different options. But obviously, the girls in the stories were not her.

At some point, Rida’s reason for writing changed. When she got a little older and began to experience more things about life, beyond being picked on because of her weight, the stories changed. She was still writing about the person she wished she could become, thin and beautiful, but all the sudden there were men who meant something. Instead of the boys being sideline characters without much substance, there were men who were the epitome of what she wanted in a “boyfriend”. She designed them from scratch, over and over again... tall, short, blond, dark-haired... blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes... it didn’t matter. They were her heroes... even though she knew she could never have them.

All this time, Rida was still reading, avidly, every romance novel she could find in two specific Silhouette series... Intimate Moments and Special Editions. She was driven to read them! She loved them, even though not one book spoke to her intimately. One day she realized that even though she loved getting lost in the fantasy, she could never picture herself as one of those heroines. So she looked around, trying to find a heroine that spoke to her, that she could identify with. She was at a loss. She didn’t want some dramatic piece of fiction that rambled on about getting beyond your weight and living your best life. She wanted romance! She wanted to be pulled into a fantastic contemporary romance where she would think, “Oh yeah, that could be me!” Since she couldn’t find it, she thought, “Hell, I’ll write it. I’ve written all my life, why can’t I write this?”

When Rida started writing “Great Love”, she knew it would be good. Not just because her writing had gotten better over the years, but because she had lived it. “Great Love” is in no way an autobiography, but it did come from her heart. “I’ve lived bits and pieces of the heroine’s life... feeling unhappy in my body, thinking no one else could love a body like mine, being embarrassed about buying clothes or shopping with someone who was not overweight. I’d walked through offices and been sure that the people there were snickering about the way I looked. I knew what it was like to live that way and I wrote from the heart.” When she finished writing the book, she submitted it with great enthusiasm, to Harlequin/Silhouette, for one of their series. They took almost two years to respond with a short note in return to say, “No one will ever publish this.”

Rida was extremely upset because this one... this was from her soul. So she put the book away and went about her life. “I was terribly disappointed and couldn’t get past the fact that the publisher that I’d been reading all my life had turned me away, and with such a devastating rejection.” Then, just last fall, she got sick. When she was finally able to read without getting dizzy enough to fall out of bed, she pulled out her book. It was three years since she’d last read it, so she decided to read it again. Then she started editing it a little. Then she started fixing it up here and there... adding a little of this and a little of that. It started to really come back together. She searched around and found some literary agents to submit the book to. One came back and said they knew of a publisher who might be interested and Rida could deal directly with them, no agent needed. So she thought, “What the hell... only costs me postage to send them the query letter.” She queried them... they requested sample chapters. She sent them... they requested the whole manuscript. She sent it... they offered her a contract. She fell out of her chair.

Since she signed the publishing contract, people have been asking why she wrote about a full-figured heroine. Rida says she wrote about Samantha because she needed to be created. “Too many women put down a book thinking, ‘Gee, that’s nice... but it ain’t gonna happen to me.’ YES, we want the romance... YES, we want the fantasy... but HELL YES, we want to be able to think to ourselves, ‘This could happen to me someday!’ No matter how fantastic the story, we want to be able to believe that it could happen to us. How can we do that when our dress size is at least double the dress size of the heroine!” So instead of writing about who she wanted to be, or at least who she thought she wanted to be, she now writes about who she is. She’s a fabulous full-figured woman who did get to live the romance of her life.

Rida is happy to say that she is still writing. She’s written a second book, is almost done with a third and is posting a fourth on a website in semi-monthly installments (http://www.venusimaging.com/Central/romance.htm). She wants to continue to write about full-figured heroines. “Great Love” dealt very deeply with being a full-figured woman... as it should have. But she’s hoping that she’ll be able to move forward from there and keep the great heroines but lessen the emphasis on how hard it is to be full-figured. “Being full-figured plays a big part in our lives, but it doesn’t have to take over them.” She is writing romances that will continue to sweep you away, but  where you can still identify with the full-figured heroines.

If you are searching for a great heroine to identify with, Rida hopes you go pick up “Great Love”. You can also visit her website to read more about “Great Love”. Http://www.warmaster.net/Great_Love
 
 

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SUMMARY:

It's hard to be different in the eyes of society. For Samantha Velmar, it was always difficult to be a full-figured woman. But Sam prided herself on her strength and independence... so with her dog as her faithful companion, she was content with her life, if a little bored. She had almost convinced herself that it was okay to be single... until she met Jon.
 

Jonathan Edwards was happy immersing himself in his father's self-made business. Surrounded by corporate affairs, he was comfortable with his life... until his father died and left a will regarding Jonathan's future. He needed to be married before his fast-approaching thirtieth birthday and begin a family within a year of the marriage, or he would lose the business.
 

It was really Sam's mutt who brought them together when she tackled Jonathan in the park. Was it fate or divine (doggie) intervention?