OTHER WEDDINGS ARE AVAILABLE ........Linda Mitchelmore

Anyone unaware the UK (and in particular HM The Queen) hosted a Royal Wedding last weekend must have been on some other planet. Love the royals or not (and just for the record I am an unapologetic royalist), I couldn't help thinking the whole shebang was a bit Mills & Boon romance come to life. I am not knocking Mills & Boons, their publications or their authors, but there do seem to be a lot of words like wedding and bride, and more than a few royals in their titles. I Googled 'brides in book titles' and there were hundreds of them!

One of the first short stories I ever had published was set around a wedding. I think I called it 'The Guest List' or somesuch. It involved a bride whose parents had divorced acrimoniously and her mother was adamant she did not want her ex-husband (father of said bride) to be there. But the bride and her father hatched a plan so he could be part of her big day - he was the chauffeur of the wedding car. I wrote it as a twist in the tale and it was huge fun to do.

In my 'Emma' trilogy (Choc Lit - 'TO TURN FULL CIRCLE', 'EMMA, THERE'S NO TURNING BACK', 'EMMA AND HER DAUGHTER') my heroine, Emma Le Goff, has three weddings. The first is a faux wedding. After the local vicar refused to marry her and Seth Jago (the hero of the piece) she has a dilemma - she dearly wants to spend the rest of her life with Seth but she is fiery and spirited and doesn't like being dictated to by a bigoted vicar. So she arranges a sham wedding - a set of photographs, she in bridal attire with bouquet, is taken at a remote rural church, the photographs displayed on Emma's mantelpiece for anyone calling to see - a very brave move for the times ... early 1900s. Emma's second wedding is only alluded to as she prepares to sail for Canada with Seth and his (but not hers) baby daughter, Fleur. She buys flowers for a bridal bouquet before boarding the ship intent on asking the captain to marry them. The third of Emma's weddings takes places - after a lot of twists and turns and problems and heartbreak - when she returns to the UK a widow. When writing that scene, this is the headdress I saw that inspired the dress Emma (a gifted dressmaker with her own atelier) would make for herself for her wedding to Matthew Caunter.

Like I said, there were hundreds of book titles with weddings as a theme. And I was surprised at the diversity of authors who have written some of them. Here's Debbie Macomber

And Kate Mosse.

My soon-to-be-published first title for HarperCollins, SUMMER AT 23 THE STRAND, is a series of linked short stories. And yes, weddings feature. One of my characters is a jilted bride. Another character's life is on a downward spiral but she struggles to regain control so she can attend her son's wedding. And a third features a couple recently in receipt of their bus passes who are having a secret wedding ...... why? Well, why not buy the book and find out?

So, that's weddings for you ..... but as we all know organizing a wedding is the easy bit ...... the marriage that comes after is what requires the hard work. Cynic? Moi?