What’s a Man to Do?
Every few months someone asks how I, as a male author, approach writing women. The question is fair. Half the characters I put on the page live lives I will never inhabit, and the temptation to fill that gap with assumption or stereotype is always present. What follows is not a manifesto or a set of rules. It is simply an account of the choices I have made, and continue to make, when I write female characters—illustrated with examples from the Love of a Lifetime series and its companion stories.
Begin with the Person, Not a Category
The first decision was simple and non-negotiable: every female character begins as a specific person, not a category. She has a private logic that is not required to justify itself to me or to the male characters around her. Her desires, contradictions, vanities, and blind spots are hers before they are useful to the plot. If she only exists to advance a man’s arc, or to embody a corrective to male failure, she is already dead on the page.
Alison is the clearest example of this choice across the series. In The Night We Met she is introduced not as “the military woman” or “the separated mother,” but as a person who has been competent at almost everything—career, adventures, raising children—yet experiences her failed marriage as a personal shortcoming that still anchors her Friday evenings. The same woman runs a clinic, managing custody logistics, and deciding how much of her rekindled relationship she is willing to risk visibility for. Her choices are driven by her own calculus of risk, desire, and responsibility, not by what would most conveniently serve Christian’s story.
Camilla, central to The Other Woman, is given the same treatment. She is not reduced to “the other woman.” She has a career trajectory of her own—moving from a coastal tourist town to the highest office in the land—and an interior sexual life that exists independently of any man’s approval or narrative need. Her fantasies, her professional adjustments, and her private routines are rendered as her own before they intersect with anyone else’s.
Pay Attention, be Humble, and Refuse to Flatten
I do not claim special insight into women. I claim the ordinary disciplines that apply to writing anyone outside my own experience: attention, humility, and the refusal to flatten. I listen more than I invent. I notice how the women I know actually speak when no one is performing for an audience—how they interrupt themselves, how they protect certain silences, how they recalibrate in the presence of different people. I read women who write women without apology or translation. I pay attention to the physical facts that shape a life without turning those facts into destiny or metaphor.
In Patagonian Affair, Alison’s exhibitionist impulse is not treated as a decorative kink or a metaphor for emotional exposure. It is shown as a specific, recurring private logic that has already collided with real-world consequences. The physical details—bark against her palm, grass underfoot, the sudden awareness of being unseen by men absorbed in their phones—are concrete because the desire itself is concrete to her. The same principle governs Camilla’s morning rituals in The Other Woman: the precise memory of a past night, the private language she uses with her toy, the way her professional day in Canberra sits alongside that interior life without one cancelling the other.
Distrust the Convenient Instinct
I have learned to distrust my first instincts when they feel too convenient. The “strong female character” who is competent in every domain and never needs anyone is as thin as the damsel who exists only to be rescued. Both are projections. Real people are inconsistent. They can be decisive at work and evasive in love, generous in one register and petty in another, clear-eyed about others and stubbornly self-deceiving. I try to give female characters the same permission to be unfinished that I give the men.
Alison’s competence is never absolute. In Tampa Gold she is capable enough to keep a clinic running and custody arrangements functioning, yet she still feels a flash of inadequacy when Christian calls her at night while she is still in her practical navy work uniform. She invents a more glamorous version of herself for the phone call—not because the story requires her to perform for him, but because the gap between her everyday self and her erotic self is real to her in that moment. Camilla, for her part, can be professionally ambitious and still return, in private, to detailed and sometimes contradictory fantasies that do not resolve into a single coherent “type.”
Test Your Assumptions
There is a practical test I use. If I removed the character’s gender from the description and the behaviour still felt coherent and particular, I am probably closer to something honest. If the behaviour only makes sense because she is a woman fulfilling a known cultural script, I have more work to do. This does not mean erasing difference. It means refusing to let difference do all the labour of characterisation.
Strip the gender markers from Alison’s Friday custody exchanges, her decision to leave a room key as an invitation, or her careful management of phone contact while the children are with her, and the behaviour remains recognisably hers: organised, slightly self-punishing about perceived failure, capable of both restraint and sudden risk. The same holds for Camilla’s dual life of political staff work and private erotic recollection. The specificity survives without the label.
Accept that Some Things will be Wrong
I also accept that I will get some things wrong. The alternative—never writing women, or writing them only as types I feel safe with—is worse. The correction comes from the work itself: from revision, from readers who know more than I do, and from the ongoing practice of treating the characters as if their interiority matters independently of mine.
The women in these books are not arguments. They are people with private logics, unfinished edges, and the right to contradict themselves. That is the choice. Everything else is technique in service of it.
And yet, honesty requires one final admission. In these particular stories the women are, in the end, love interests. Sex is not incidental; it is one of the engines that moves the plot forward, creates consequences, and deepens (or complicates) the relationships at the centre of the series. I have tried to give Alison, Camilla and the others lives that feel specific and self-directed, but I have not pretended the books are anything other than what they are: erotic romantic adventures in which desire and its aftermath are allowed to drive events. That functional role does not erase the effort to write them as particular people. It simply sits alongside it.
But that is enough from me. Now you decide. Do the women in my stories feel real to you?
Other Authors of Interest this Week
Savanna Bradford’s impulsive reaction to her boyfriend Ryan’s proposal spirals her into a rendezvous with fate and a mystical gift that could alter her future. Will the timeless struggle between dreams and passion bait her into repeating history, or will a simple gift from her bizarre encounter steer Savannah toward her true destiny before it’s too late?
Seven-year-old Lenora doesn’t understand the Fairy Queen’s demands, but she has seen the cost of disobedience. Years later, when her mistress, Charlotte, is forced into a marriage with the monstrous Lord Vale, Lenora follows her into the shadowy halls of Vale Castle, a place that guards a dangerous secret.
I broke into a billionaire wolf dynasty’s private club to expose them. Now the man assigned to erase me is sleeping in the room next to mine because his wolf thinks I belong to him
Jonah Grady, a former SAS operative, escaped the Kentucky mountains and the faith that tried to erase him. He was never coming back to the Dominion. But when his estranged parents die in a suspicious car crash, he returns to settle their estate and bury what’s left. He walks right into a trap.
Benedict has been my client for some time now, and it always feels like I’m fighting him to make progress. I love a challenge, but he’s proving to be more difficult than my average client. I’m used to men feeling like they can’t perform and couples looking to spice things up; that’s what I see the most of, being a sex therapist and all. That said, I feel like I’m finally making some headway. Not bad for two years spent trying to coax him through his personal issues.
Hal Pluton keeps several businesses, and her family, steady. It can be overwhelming work, so she built her dream home in a quiet spot in the mountains. It’s perfect. Perfectly quiet. Perfectly lonely. And the perfect place to daydream about the man she saw skipping stones near a waterfall.
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