Over the past few days, I’ve spent a lot of time staring off into space. I grin foolishly at inappropriate moments, babble to bored friends, and make stranges faces when nobody is looking or sometimes even when they are. In short, I have all the classic symptoms. I admit it. I am, as my best friend so charmingly put it, dwelling on the planet of Crushcon Five (why five, I don’t know—you’ll just have to ask Nancy.) I go hot and cold; I blaze with euphoria and droop with despair. I have a great, big, embarassing, giggling at odd moments… crush.

On a plot idea.

Yep, that’s right folks. I have a plot crush. I get these every so often, usually when I don’t want to be working on the book I’m actually under contract to write. This past winter, while avoiding working on my fourth book, “The Seduction of the Crimson Rose” (out in hardcover next February! Yes, my publisher has programmed to say that), I fell head over heels with a plot idea based on the life of an obscure seventeenth century woman and spent the better part of five days looking up books in the library that I then never got around to checking out. While I was writing my third book, “Deception of the Emerald Ring,” I had a brief but intense affair with a mystery novel. I made feverish outlines on large pieces of blank paper; wrote a chapter and a half… and then the attraction faded, the idea fizzled, and I returned home, chastened, to my lawfully contracted manuscript.

Most of these crushes (like the boy kind of crush), are pure infatuation. They’re an unfounded bubble of optimism and ignorance, heady while they last, but invariably short-lived. Once I get to know the plot better, I start to see all sorts of flaws. The idea loses its lustre, the notes I took get jammed into a drawer or stuffed between the pages of a book, and I emerge a sadder and wiser author—at least until the next one. Oh, and I go around pretending to all my friends that I never meant it to begin with, and it was always “just another idea” and not anything I had taken at all seriously. No, sirree. Not like I’d gone around saying it was going to be the Best Book Ever, get written in about three weeks flat, win the Pulitzer Prize, and bring about peace in the Middle East.

But every now and again, it isn’t just infatuation. Once in a century, when the moon is in the seventh heist and Jupiter aligns with Mars, it turns out to be True Love. Those are the plot crushes that mature to become books. Like any relationship, they have their ups and downs. There are times when you hate the plot and wish you’d never married—er, started writing it. There are times when it feels like you and the plot have gotten into a rut and you need to take it out for drinks to liven things up. But there’s something there, a magic something that makes you stick with it through thick and thin, through days when the writing flows and days when you never want to see a computer again, through summer afternoons when you’d rather be in the pool, and winter mornings when you would have preferred to stay in bed. And, in the end, it’s oh so worth it.

Whether my current plot crush is the Real Thing or not… well, I just don’t know. I’ve been burned enough times by literary infatuation that I’m determined to play it safe. We’ll ignore the fact that I spent my thirty block walk to work yesterday morning stopping every two blocks to huddle in the shadow of a building or plop down on those little benches that front Central Park, whipping out my notebook and scribbling down bits of narrative and dialogue that I just had to record before they got away. (This odd behavior caused considerable confusion among the homeless men inhabiting the neighboring benches). But I haven’t let myself buy it any presents (i.e. research books), and I’m not going to babble all about it to you right now, even though it’s going to be the Best Book Ever and…. Damn.

I never learn.