Future Perfect adest!
The only same-field professor pairing in Degrees of Desire is out today
Not being an economist, but wanting to write about fictional economists, my hack is to never pair an economist MMC and FMC. Likewise, physics or psychology or any other field where I lack specialized knowledge. Most of the fields, it turns out. Their conversations would trip me up and bore readers to tears. In Future Perfect, I got to break the rules.
Robert and Maria are both classicists. Any Classics nerds out there on the greater internet? Are your careers in law and marketing going okay? To clarify, since I’ve been asked whether it’s “classics like Shakespeare or ‘57 Chevies,” Classics is the study of ancient Greece and Rome. Robert studies the Silver Age of Latin Literature (roughly 18 - 133 AD or CE). Maria specializes in Hellenistic history (323 - 30 BC or BCE).
As always, you don’t need to know or care about arcane academic subjects to understand the book. At its core, the book is the story of a very messy, flailing former academic hotshot (Maria) and the kindly stable nerd who’s adored her since grad school (Robert). If you love a wholesome good-girl heroine, Maria is… Probably not for you. She flames out of the UNESCO Young Professionals Program only to somehow wind up accidentally making out with a grad student at her new job. She gets wasted on cheap tequila. Until she and Robert start dating, she has a friend with benefits, Trevor, who’s kind of a jerk. (But watch for his redemption arc in When It Was Us, out July 27!)
She makes poor choices, in other words, but I love Maria. She actually does mean well. I also love sweet, socially clueless Robert. He’s not the socially awkward wreck Conrad is in Baby, Unexpected. He has a lot of guy friends. Talking to women just happens to be very much not his skill set. It lands him in A Situation, the poor man.
Once Robert and Maria finally get on the same page as far as mutual attraction, they decide to fully “nerd out.” This was one of my favorite exchanges to write, as I love nerdy banter. They reference the stories in their high school Latin book called fabellae, which is just Latin for ‘stories.’ These were basically little skits that used the vocabulary words.
In high school, ever the jokester and writer, I took the characters from the fabellae and placed them into less salubrious situations. The Latin dictionary bore fruit like ‘brothel,’ and thus “Quintus and Marcus Go to the Brothel” made its rounds through my amused study hall. No adults ever cottoned on to this underground Latin writing market, unlike Maria’s parents in the book. My friends and I merrily wrote PG-13 stories about Quintus and Marcus that we thought were absolute filth. The fabellae are currently living their best lives somewhere in my basement because of course I have them 25 years later.
And finally, as I mentioned last week, my favorite fun fact is that the lost work of the Greek playwright Menander that Maria discovered to earn hotshot status is the story upon which Strings Attached is loosely based. Unfortunately, the play being discovered is entirely fictional, and it remains only known through a Latin translation. I just hope whoever discovers it one day has better luck in the job market than Maria. And also perhaps stays away from both grad students and tequila.
Future Perfect is out today! It’s an angsty, witty, interconnected standalone contemporary romance featuring a chaotic academic heroine, a quietly devoted hero who falls first, and a sweet, slow-burn love story years in the making. Find the full Degrees of Desire series on Amazon - all the books are free to read on Kindle Unlimited.
