On Love, Research, and Rabbit Holes

Yesterday was February 14th…Valentine’s Day.
I love Valentine’s Day, I truly do. It is the one day when we get to celebrate Love in all its forms. As a romance writer, this is our holiday!

If you’ve been following me, you know that I love Love. From the racing heartbeat of New Love, to the heated embrace of Passionate Love, to the bone deep sense in knowing another’s soul of True Love. It is Love that keeps my characters going when they want to quit, Love that pushes them to be better than they thought they could be–not because someone wants to change them, but because they want to change for someone. Love is what shows them that no matter their darkest hour, there is still hope for a brighter future. Together.
I have spent all day the past two days trying to think of a fun, witty blog post to write about the day. I didn’t want to get into the history of Valentine’s Day, as there are already so many posts and websites dedicated to it. What I really wanted to do was go into the significance of Valentine’s Day in Regency England. But, as it usually happens, as I go looking for the information I need, I stumbled down the rabbit hole of research and lost track of myself and the day.
How did I lose myself, you ask?
Well, it started with looking up information on the historical significance of Valentine’s Day in Georgian England, which led to the origin of paper Valentine’s, which led to other symbols of Valentine’s day like hearts, chocolates, and flowers. That led me to roses, and because pink bridal roses play a not-insignificant part in Seduction, I wanted to know what the meaning of the different colored roses is, so I looked up the language of flowers. But most of my resources were for Victorian times (which is when floriography had its heyday), though it had been around in England since the 1770s, so I had to find an older source, which I did, and found out that the pale pink bridal rose stands for grace, joy, and happiness. That, in turn, made me sad because pink roses do not have that happy association in the story.
Since I didn’t want to end my day of research on a bad note, I had to look up something fun and lighthearted. So I looked up romantic comedy movies and rediscovered You’ve Got Mail. That led me to search for the plot structure because I have been toying with a Regency set story that loosely follows along those lines and I wanted to see how it plays out. So I bought the movie on Amazon to watch on the iPad.
And since I was on Amazon, I browsed the history books to see if there was anything that I could find on Georgian or Regency holiday celebrations since I still have that Christmas story I’m planning on writing for this year, and since it was Valentine’s Day and You’ve Got Mail was floating around in my mind, I decided to make my story based off the movie a Valentine’s Day story for next year.
Whew!
That is the rabbit hole of research. One thing leads to another and another and another until you end up right back where you started from.
This, my friends, is what it’s like in the mind of a writer.

💗Happy (belated) Valentine’s Day!💗