Marriages of Convenience - Hot or Not?

I've kind of been slack at blogging lately. And slack at Twitter. About the only social media thing I haven't been slack at is Pinterest. Sigh. I've never been one for collages for my mss but there's something about Pinterest that's just so...Hmmmm.....

Anyway, my excuse for this slackness is due to finishing Mr Sheikhypants. Which I now have. Yay. Of course it does mean that now I have to write the synopsis. Not yay. Synopses and I do not get on. I'd far rather immerse myself in my new idea. Because yeah, now the sheikh is done, I have to put him away and think about the next story, and in the interests of staying ahead of rejections, I'm going ahead with a new Presents/Modern.

This new idea has come together rather different to anything I've done before and I think it's a good thing. Instead of coming up with a set up and charging straight into it, I've actually taken the time to think about it before I start writing. Isane, right? ;-) I've decided to do a marriage of convenience story since I haven't done one before and they're always popular, with an enemies to lovers slant on it. But it isn't really the trope that's the important bit. It's the characters that matter most. And this time I've actually tried to think about who they are as people first, before I decided on their conflict.

What I find interesting about this process for me now is that it feels like the characters come together in a much more organic way rather than merely being a collection of traits and conflicts stuck together. And now I know what type of people they are, I can look back over their pasts and see what their conflict might be and how it has shaped them. All of this without writing a word of the story.

However, this is going to be a tricky story. My hero has a very dark conflict, though actually, that's not the tricky part. The tricky part is thinking of a good reason for a marriage of convenience! Anyone read any good MOC stories lately? Was the reason for the MOC plausible?? Any hints gratefully recieved...