Crushes: Crushing on the “Good” Bad Boy, by Vivi Barnes

Today’s my birthday—pretty special, even though I’m a few years past 30 (“few” is subjective, mind). So since it’s my birthday, and at the risk of sounding like Christoper Walken as The Continental (come on in), I’m going to sit back, have a sip of champagne, and indulge in thoughts of the hot romances that make reading and writing sizzle.

This will shock you, since I’m an Entangled author, but I love romance. Someone once asked me how I finish a manuscript so fast. My response was that in a first draft, I fly through the story just to get to the romantic scenes, and when I get to those I linger, luxuriating in the “will he/won’t he” tension. Then I move along at lightning speed until I get to the next encounter, where I dawdle a bit more. Of course, I go back in Round 2 and clean up the debris that remains from racing through the first draft.

So, naturally, I have to have a bit of a crush on my love interest to make my story work. And that crush is based on someone very close to me—my husband. Which is why my love interest is always going to have a bit of bad boy in him. Being the “good girl” that I am, I was naturally attracted to the “bad boy,” and my husband was the epitome of that. He was the guy who got arrested for throwing wild parties in college, the one whose friends would say, “You’re with this guy? You seem so nice.” But there’s a reason these attractions work in real life and in novels—the bad boy on the outside can be the sweetest, most thoughtful person on the inside. The combination of the opposing traits is magical!

So yeah, my love interests typically have some (or more) bad boy in them. It seems to be a theme in the stories I love to read most, too. Let’s face it—bad can be so good.

(Side note: my husband is the most amazing and responsible adult. The bad boy is buried, but not altogether gone.)

About Author

Entangled Teen

See author's posts