Victoria Barbour is looking for her Happily Ever After (Soaps Blog Hop)

Then again, aren't we all? ;-)

Victoria was kind enough to talk about her family history of soap watching and the real reason she comes back, whether she wants to or not.

Who was your favorite couple? Leave a comment on her blog and be entered to win one of her ebooks?

Cruz and Eden on Santa Barbara- best couple ever? If not, pretty damn close!

What I Learned From Guiding Light (Soap Opera Blog Hop)

The longest running of all soap operas- not including its radio beginnings- Guiding Light had a lot to say about redemption. Even the evilest characters were not beyond hope and someone's love. Roger Thorpe, the show's tortured supervillain for almost three decades, would never be good enough in his father's eyes, but that didn't stop Holly, his ex-wife/victim/codependent and their daughter Blake (Christina) from going to great lengths for him even when they knew better. While not healthy by any means, viewers couldn't turn away because Roger wanted to be redeemed.

Roger Thorpe and Holly Norris, codependents from Hell (who always wanted to be better)

No one on the show was perfect. In the Sixties, Ed Bauer was a wife beating alcoholic. By the Eighties, he had sobered up and was a head of family and community whom many came to for advice. On this show, good people were always thisclose to tipping to the other side, and bad people wanted to be better. The ratings ultimately dropped not because people couldn't accept their beloved characters' human frailties, but because the stories that highlighted them started to be rushed and out of character.

The lesson: characters are the foundation of a story, but the plots have to be worthy of them.

What I Learned From The Soaps: Sometimes it's all about what you shouldn't do

When a soap opera works, it's magical, and every commercial break makes you grit your teeth. When it doesn't...well, that's when writers want to put on their thinking caps and figures out where it's going wrong.

Karen E. Martin hosts Meredith Schorr (don't you just love teamwork?) to talk about some of the foibles we've all seen on our favorite soap. Please stop by and share some of your favorite What The ^^**$ moments from the soaps.

Marlena's Possession on Days Of Our Lives, an example of a story that shouldn't be incorporated into your work in progress

What I Learned From As The World Turns (Soap Opera Blog Hop)

By the time I started watching As The World Turns in the mid-Eighties, it had been going strong for over twenty-five years. (My grandmother and aunt were fans back in its heyday.) Despite the rich, complicated history, a new viewer like me could get acquainted pretty quickly with the back-story. The Hughes were clearly the main family, but the Stewarts had also been around for just as long. The Dixons and Montgomerys had also been well-integrated into the show, and the newcomer Walsh and Snyder families, followed a few years later by the Kasnoffs and Cabots, were filled with strong characters that made their mark quickly.

As The World Turns, like many CBS shows, placed a premium on middle class and then upper middle class family values, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a set of siblings who all shared the same biological parents. In other words, couples changed with a lot of regularity, but this was the show that actually pioneered the "super couple" concept back in the early Sixties, as well as amnesia as a dramatic plot device.

Lily and Holden, As The World Turns' signature couple

The show's modern flourishing took place under the helm of writer Doug Marland, who focused on star-crossed lovers Lily Walsh and Holden Snyder, related through (and separated by) adoption (it's a long story). While he was well-known for introducing young new actors for several scenes at a time without a shirt (is that why so much of the action shifted to a farm?), he also knew to play the beats of romance and family secrets, and that a long payoff with some fan frustration along the way was preferable to a quick happy ending.

Marland was famous for planning out complicated stories aside from his signature romances, but everyone makes mistakes. The Who Killed Carolyn Crawford mystery started out as a suspenseful mystery that touched several of the core characters. However, Marland decided midstream that Darryl Crawford, the original culprit, was too likeable and valuable to "waste" as the murderer. Unfortunately, the backtracking was obvious and the story became ever more convoluted. Once the story was resolved, viewers were still at a loss as to explain who killed Carolyn Crawford and why. Still, this was notable because it was so rare.

Marland's untimely death left the show floundering for several years, and while it was gotten back on track years later by Executive Producer Chris Goutman, it never reached the same level of popularity, due in part to the trend to tell stories more quickly.

The lesson: a writer with a long-term vision is essential to the success of a show.

How the world sees us – or selling Australia to the world via Soap Operas (Soap Blog Hop)

My friend Monique McDonell joins the Soap Blog Hop to talk about the power of Aussie soaps, both in Australia and abroad.

In Australia we’ve been lucky enough to watch lots of soaps from around the world Days of Our Lives and the Bold and The Beautiful being enduring favourites from the US, Coronation Street from the UK and Shortland Street from NZ. 

Over the years we had our own soaps that came and went but nothing has stuck as well as two created in the 1980’s – Neighbours and Home and Away. US readers may not have had the pleasure but these soaps are so huge in Europe that you can take a bus tour in Melbourne of places featured in Neighbours and many a tourist pilgrimage to the set of Home and Away’s beachside location.

Here’s a little bit of history. Neighbours launched on Channel 7 in 1985 and is now Australia’s longest running TV show. It was cancelled by that network after 170 episodes and bought by another network picking up exactly where it left off. Realising their error Channel 7 came up with Home and Away to replace Neighbours and thus Australia got two long running rival soap operas.

Neighbours is set in the fictional Melbourne suburb of Erinsborough, specifically in the cul de sac of Ramsay Street and centred originally around two families (as so many good soaps do) the Robinsons and the Ramsays. I was a teenager when this show launched and nobody, who didn’t want to experience social death at school the next day, missed an episode of Neighbours.

You may not have seen the show but it launched many iconic Australian actors’ careers. Guy Pierce was an original cast member (I had quite a crush on him back then) as was Kylie Minogue. Other alumni include Natalie Imbruglia and Russell Crowe. UK music producers Stock,Aiken and Waterman plucked many of their artists from the show’s cast.

It was a very suburban story – kids went to school, fell in love, met for coffee while their parents hosted barbeques and pool parties, had petty feuds and tried to keep troublesome teens on track. Sure it’s suburban Melbourne but it could have been any middle-class suburb in any city in the country if you were willing to admit that blonde supermodels moved into suburban cul de sacs and lived with distant relatives.

The Real Summer Bay

Meanwhile Home and Away was set in Summer Bay. The original premise was that a nice couple and their brood of foster children moved into town and took over running the local caravan park/tourist trailer park. It was an idyllic location where the sun always shone, everyone walked home along the beach and if you needed to kiss your boyfriend you headed for the sand dunes. 

Home and Away was an idyllic postcard for Australia full of hope and optimism and teen romance.

Like Neighbours before it Home and Away has launched many a career – let’s give a wave to Simon Baker, Chris Hemsworth, Melissa George, Isla fisher and Ryan Kwanten among many others – but it also was a daily postcard for the country. Beamed into homes across Europe it showed a different carefree way of life, a place to visit and maybe call home.

I live quite close to Palm Beach where Home and Away is set and I’m surrounded by many people, especially from the UK who have moved to Australia for a taste of that life, no doubt influenced more than a little by these iconic soaps. Showing, if nothing else, the power of a good story to change lives.

~~~

Please read below for more information about Monique's newest novel, A Fair Exchange!

A Fair Exchange

Who hasn’t wondered about their first love? What happened? What went wrong? Where are they now? 

What if you got a second chance?

Amelia Armstrong is about to find out. What a shame her long-lost love, Matt,  has returned  (looking way too good and acting way too sweet) when her life is a shambles and she has finally decided once and for all to put herself and not whichever man is currently in her life, first.

How do you balance that desire to recapture that loving feeling with the need to finally be the best version of yourself? What if this really is the one, how do you choose when to stand your ground and when to cut your losses?  Amelia takes a journey from Sydney to New York and back again trying to find the answers while negotiating with pop-divas, ex-lovers, crazy teenagers, a well-meaning cousin and the tabloids.

A Fair Exchange is a story about being a grown up when, maybe, you’d much rather be sixteen again.

Excerpt

It was not as if he was the first one to mention it. In the past week everyone who had entered my apartment had commented on the shiny new Vespa parked in the middle of the otherwise empty living room. In fact, each and every one of them had imaginatively said “Amelia you have a red Vespa parked in your living room!”  And they all said it in a tone that implied I might not have noticed, as if it may have magically appeared there.

How could I not notice a vehicle parked in what was otherwise an empty room?

What amazed me was that the Vespa was what they chose to comment on.

Not that Nick had dumped me, after ten years, for a twenty-one year-old. Nor that he had moved out, taking basically all the furniture and leaving me with a great view over the beach and an enormous mortgage.

No one even commented about the fact that I, in turn, had quit the fabulous job that had always meant way too much to me.

No, they commented on the Vespa.

What I could not understand though was why it hadn’t bothered me until right then, when Matthew Blue commented. And when he did comment, why had I collapsed into this embarrassing sea of tears?

How had this happened? How had I become this sobbing pathetic figure of womanhood?  And more importantly how had I ended up thirty-six and alone?

Didn’t I used to have so much potential? Everyone had said so, hadn’t they?

“Amelia Armstrong is something special.”

I was one of those shiny young girls who took risks and dreamed big. I was one of the smart ones who knew what she wanted and went after it. I was one to watch.

If I hadn’t been that kind of a girl I would never have met Matthew all those years ago. A different girl would not have found herself, on the other side of the world, at sixteen, staring into his dark and dreamy eyes.

So where was that girl right now, I wanted to know? And how had a girl with so much potential gotten it so horribly wrong?

About the author – Monique McDonell

I am an Australian author who writes contemporary women's fiction including chick lit and romance. I live on Sydney's Northern Beaches with my husband and daughter, and despite my dog phobia, with a dog called Skip.

I have written all my life especially as a child when I loved to write short stories and poetry. At University I studied Creative Writing as part of my Communication degree. Afterwards I was busy working in public relations I didn't write for pleasure for quite a few years although I wrote many media releases, brochures and newsletters. (And I still do in my day-job!)

When I began to write again I noticed a trend - writing dark unhappy stories made me unhappy. So I made a decision to write a novel with a happy ending and I have been writing happy stories ever since. 

I have been a member of the writing group The Writer’s Dozen for eight years. Our anthology Better Than Chocolate raised over $10,000 for the charity Room to Read and helped build a library in South East Asia. I am also a member of the Romance Writers of Australia.

A Fair Exchange is the fifth novel I have released in the last two years.

To learn more about Monique McDonell and her upcoming books please visit her at www.moniquemcdonell.com.au

Links:

Amazon author page

Website

Facebook

Twitter

Blog

Goodreads

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Good villains: go bold or go home (Soaps Blog Hop)

My good friend Danielle Ngontang joins the hop today to talk about the importance of good villains and a yummy, convoluted plot. I don't get to watch a lot of foreign soaps (other than those awesome Korean telenovelas), so I appreciate her insights into British soap Hollyoaks. Well, when those British villains go, they go hard.

The DiMeras of Days Of Our Lives, where sociopaths are devilishly handsome

Please stop over to Danielle's blog and share your thoughts about your favorite soap villain.

What I Learned From The Soaps: One Life to Live (Soaps Blog Hop)

There's a difference between a character that's a star and one that's the heart and soul of a show.

On One Life to Live, Vicki Lord was the core of the show. Her relationship with her father colored her life, but unlike Erica Kane on All My Children, she suffered from too much of his smothering attention. Vicki was a character who may have made mistakes, but she was a good, caring person who always felt the burden of her responsibilities and was the dependable matriarch from a very early age. The viewers always understood the psychic toll that responsibility took, and it was dramatically underscored by the appearance of her Dissociative Identity Disorder alter-ego, Nikki. It was a device that was sometimes used cheaply when the writers wanted to get out of a corner with the character, but most of the time her long-time portrayer Erika Slezak was able to play it with the sensitivity it deserved. And while Vicki was beloved by almost everyone, part of her enduring appeal was the long-term rivalry she had with her stepmother/frenemy Dorian Cramer Lord (among other last names).

Vicki was central to the story, but One Life To Live pushed the envelope with other storylines as much as it could. Head writer Agnes Nixon famously took a lot of criticism for her early attempts to introduce socially relevant stories, whether it was a black character who "passed" for white, a gay teenager in the Nineties or a story about HIV, among many others. It also moved to include characters of different ethnicities and integrate them into the main storylines without tokenism while other shows were hoping to put that off for as long as possible.

The secret to One Life To Live's success, however, wasn't cutting edge storytelling but rather it's focus on strong families. The Lords, Buchanans, Cramers, Vegas and others may not have been the happiest, but when push came to shove, they had each others' backs. The writers also, for the most part, understood the importance of growing family trees and mixing them up on a regular basis.

The lesson: complicated characters and their stories work best when they're told against a backdrop of strong core families.