So in Dallas, there was a recurring conversation that went something like this:
“I so want to go to her panel/spotlight/signing, but I don’t want her to think that I’m stalking her!”
It seemed we were always treading this fine line between wanting to interact with our favorite authors or dream editors and not wanting to look like obsessive fans of dubious mental stability.
And it seems, in romance, there is often that fine line between attention and persistence that is swooningly romantic and scary stalking.
In college, I was once at one of those award dinners and found myself seated across from a very cute couple. In the course of conversation, they told the story of how they’d got together. They’d met at a party, and the guy was instantly smitten. The problem was, she left the party before he could get her number. All he knew was her (very common) first name and the name of her hometown. Now, we had this student directory that listed all of the (30,000) undergraduates and included their hometowns in the entry. So this guy spent the rest of the weekend going through it, page by page, to find an entry with her first name and hometown so he could call her up. I found that swooningly romantic, yet not without its shades of stalkerish obsession.
I don’t know that I’ve ever stalked anyone myself – but then there’s that mortifying thing (and this happened in Dallas, too) where a certain person … Read More »