And who wouldn't love a sexy blond guy in Napoleonic-era uniform holding a baby?
Adding in bottle blonds in leather yields yet more opportunities for admiring the lighter-haired side of life:
And how can I forget the geeks, culinary and otherwise?
But when I go shopping for a hero for one of my books, my mind goes places like this:
Or here, though I'm still trying to figure out how to make Ichiro work in a Regency/Napoleonic setting:
Really, this is about as light-haired as my heroes get:
My heroines, too, are a pretty dark-haired bunch. Anna in The Sergeant's Lady has black curls, while Lucy's in A Marriage of Inconvenience are a rich dark brown. The heroine of my current WIP has ash brown hair, and my unfinished manuscripts and ideas that may become books eventually are full of hair ranging from light brown to black. I don't do this on purpose. They just come into my head with varying shades of dark hair. It is perhaps not a coincidence that I'm a brunette married to a man with black hair and the mother of a brown-haired daughter. I suppose it's just my default.
My question for you as readers is whether or not this matters. Would you even notice from book to book if an author always wrote dark-haired heroes and heroines, if all her heroines were short or tall, flat-chested or buxom, etc? Would you care if you did?
Honestly, I don't pay close attention to hair color unless it is a red-headed hero 'cause those are few and far between...and I love red heads! I do notice if an author writes similar heroes/heroines over a long list of books.
ReplyDeleteBabs - I love redheads too! But I like blonde and brunettes alike. It's good to spread the love. :)
ReplyDeleteYeah, if you had nothing but romances to go on for your knowledge of genetics, you'd have to conclude red hair is a sex-linked trait, since it's so common in heroines and rare in heroes!
ReplyDeleteOoh, this is a good discussion! I agree with Babs - love a red-haired hero! And there are a lot of handsome blond men about but like you, Susanna, my mind heads to the dark side when I'm writing heroes.
ReplyDeleteNicola, sometimes I think even aside from my own preferences it makes sense to write dark-haired heroes, since no matter how I describe the hero the odds are high the cover model representing him will have black hair. :-)
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