There are those women who yearn for romance in their lives and there are those who have figured out how to make a living off that yearning.
Lisa Bingham figured it out early.Her business card simply says "novelist." Romance novels, to be exact. "Bodice rippers," cynics call them, though the bodices on Bingham's heroines stay snugly buttoned through most of her books. More than 250 pages into her second novel, "Silken Dreams," highwayman Ethan McGuire is still trying to do the right thing by Lettie Grey.
He doesn't abandon his nobility until page 266. And even then, he doesn't rip her bodice. He gently unbuttons it.
"I'm conservative," Bingham said. "My characters don't hop into bed every other page. But I can get away with that because the action and dialogue are sensual. If I can put the sex as far back in the book as possible, I've got the reader hooked."
Bingham, a 27-year-old Ogden high school teacher, has published two historical romance novels. A third will be published in August, with a fourth due out in January and a fifth slated for publication in 1993.
She's known for creating sensitive heroes; the kind swept with waves of tenderness rather than lust.
"My editor says I need some bad boys in my books," she said.
That's got to be the only thing she needs. Bingham has built her personal version of the dream life. She drives a red sports car; travels to exotic locales to research upcoming novels (she plans a six-week jaunt through Europe next summer - the second in three years); indulges her appetite for clothes and computer hardware; and attends conventions for romance writers where publishers wine and dine her in ways that would never occur to her family, principal, students or boyfriends.
"I have more doodads than some people twice my age," she said.
Ensconced among her doodads, Bingham spends as much as eight hours a day writing and goes as long as two weeks without tapping a key. "I'm what's called a binge writer."
The young Utah romance writer is also savvy about the pitfalls of publishing. "When I started, I thought you mailed your manuscript in and they mailed you a check for $50,000."
Not quite. Bingham still reels from editorial criticism. "They never write back and say, `This is a wonderful scene!' They write back and say `Change these 500 things.' "
And when they do mail the checks, they aren't for $50,000. Advances range from $1,500 to $5,000, depending on the author and the publisher, Bingham said. What an author makes after that depends on how well the book sells.
Although she hasn't made her fortune yet and demands for a complete rewrite can send her spiraling into depression, other writers who have struggled for years to break into the business would say fate took a special liking to Bingham.
She sold her first novel at 22, after only a year of trying to break into the market. Having sold a novel every year since, she is now hot property on the romance writers' workshop circuit.
Between publishers' demand for more books, writers' demand for her workshop and her high school's demand for a dedicated AP English teacher, Utah's leading romance writer has found she can't make time for romance in her own life.
The lack doesn't trouble her. "I don't need a man to take care of me. My parents have been married 41 years and my father is still very passionately in love with my mother. That has spoiled me. I won't settle for less. If I marry, it will be for that kind of love."
In the meantime, she'll write about it.- The Deseret News welcomes comments from readers on this topic or others pertinent to the Single-minded column. Please address letters to Single-minded, c/o Marianne Funk, Deseret News, P.O. Box 1257, Salt Lake City, UT 84110; or contact her at 237-2100.