Oh man, Rach, I forgot to reply to you! I agree with Maisey – I didn’t mean dead wives and children were bad at all. That’s very strong conflict. It’s just that there wasn’t anything about my heroine that tapped into the hero’s dead fiance conflict. Yours on the other hand, is fine!

I had to revise the conflict, particularly the conflict in the black moment, from being way too external to being internal. I hadn’t given it any thought before submitting, didn’t know my internals from my externals.

It started with an ex that caused trouble, told the h a lie about the H, which loosely tied into something in her past and made her leave him. When I did my rewrite I went extreme and took out every secondary character that appeared in the end and tried to bring the focus to the h and H and just exclude everyone else. Because there was internal conflict, but I had minimized it in favor of a plot device, and removing said PD really changed it from external to internal. Blah blah. Of course, I don’t know yet if this worked out for me!

Rachel, I think a dead wife and child is real and powerful, and could be a SERIOUS source of present conflict. Depends on the HOW.

Maisey

Thanks Caroline but I don’t pretend to be an expert! If I was I may have had something accepted by now. But if my journey helps others understand things then that’s all good.

“I should have made her want an ONS before the story started rather than have the hero convince her”

Thank you. This is such a help .
Would it have been okay to have her decide after she’d met the H, if he hadn’t needed to persuade her? (I’m wondering if having her decide before the story opens is a best for most ONS stories.)

The revised full, the internet date was external conflict – she had to do it for her job. And the problem wasn’t so much the ONS, it was the fact that she had no internal conflict other than the fact she was a geek. So why was she a geek? I tried to give her some reason for this but it ended up being not very believable.

For the last sub, I exaggerated the characteristics of my heroine to an unbelievable degree – and that was the problem. i wanted to make her afraid of risk but I was too extreme. And I should have made her want an ONS before the story started rather than have the hero convince her – which has the ‘yuck’ factor if you know what I mean.

Does that help?

I’ve been puzzling over this for ages, so hope you don’t mind quickly revisiting it again 🙂

Was the problem not just that you had to push your h into the ONS but also that you had to push her into the internet date as well?

I’ve read a few ONS stories lately and all the heroines act completely out of character by having one night stands and have to be strongly motivated to do it (There’s always that overwhelming sexual attation for the H, of course, but as an extra motivator their boyfriend has recently insulted and dumped them or co-workers called them prim and boring…) But in spite of the motivation, we are still left with the impression that these h’s are just not the type to have a ONS

So I’m guessing with yours it was the fact that she behaved out of character in other parts of the story too that was the problem?

Oh, thanks Lacey! Feel free to whine. Bribing is also acceptable or so I’m told. 😉 Oh and ‘my’ editor? If only!