I do remember my first kiss, quite clearly, but there’s not really much to say. I remember feeling like I had waited forever and that I must have been the last girl to get kissed. In retrospect, I think I was rather young. I was 14, he was 17 or 18, it was quite pleasant. But I didn’t feel sparks with a kiss until my first serious boyfriend two years after that. My own kissing history is not all that entertaining though so I wanted to talk about something different. The first kiss between the hero and heroine.

I love first kiss scenes, and I get very excited when I know I get to write one. I figure out how this scene will unfold by considering the heroine and what the perfect kiss for her would be. Does she need the hero to pull her mercilessly in his arms and kiss her senseless? Or would a slow, perfect seductive kiss work best? Perhaps she’s the type of heroine who will press herself against the hero and steal her own kiss. There are as many different first kisses as there are hero/heroine combinations and each one is unique and special in its own way. And as an author I am always eager to see how that first kiss is going to go as it generally says a lot about how that couple is going to interact through the rest of the book.

Some of my favorite first kisses are Jack and Amanda’s in Lisa Kleypas’ Suddenly You, Alicia and Stanton’s in Celeste Bradley’s Seducing the Spy, and Evie and Saint from Suzanne Enoch’s London’s Perfect Scoundrel. So what about you? Do you have any favorite first kisses?

To celebrate first kiss week, I wanted to give you all a very brief lesson on the history of the kiss!

The term kiss derives from the Old English word cyssan. The scientific name for it is osculation. Warm and fuzzy, both. For a long time scientists thought when people touched lips it sent an electric current between them. This was later disproven and instead they determined that it was a way for us to exchange hormones. If my hormones like yours, then we’ll probably kiss some more (raises eyebrows suggestively).

The first mention of a kiss in writing was in a 1500 B.C. Indian text. Kissing wasn’t mentioned much in the Western world until the Romans came to power. Some who believe kissing is learned think they may have learned kissing from Eastern culture. But can that be right? Were people just not making out in the West before that? I can’t believe it.

In many fairytales a kiss ‘awakens’ or ‘transforms’ a character. Some famous movie kisses include Lady and Tramp in Lady and the Tramp, Buttercup and Wesley in The Princess Bride, Michael and Fredo Corleon in The Godfather: Part 2 (the kiss of death), the beach kiss in From Here to Eternity, Rhett and Scarlet in Gone With the Wind.

So, what is your favorite book, movie or art kiss? And can you REALLY believe that Westerners didn’t kiss before Roman times? I mean, really???

I am sorry to say I can’t remember my first kiss. It probably happened when I was about 16, with my first real boyfriend (who will remain unnamed). He was a wonderful guy, and we went together through 11th and 12th grade, but I broke up with him just before the prom. I am totally ashamed of the way I treated him … I know I hurt him badly, but he still wanted to take me to the prom. We went together, but we both had a terrible time. I was vastly uncomfortable with the whole thing, and he knew it was over – for real.

I came across these fabulous tips for men regarding their first kiss. Great advice here, but I’m wondering how important you think these 10 pointers are.

And here’s an article about the way women feel about a first kiss, compared to men.

What do you think? Can a man or woman tell whether a relationship is going to go anywhere from their first kiss?

Welcome to First Kiss Week at The Sisterhood of the Jaunty Quills! This week all the JQs will be blogging about first kisses. So stop by everyday—you never know what secrets we’ll reveal.

Speaking of secrets, let me tell you about my first kiss. I’m not talking about the first peck I received on the cheek by some cootied boy in Kindergarden or even the quick kiss on the lips from some long-forgotten boy in elementary school. I’m talking about a real kiss.

With tongue.

It was the summer before ninth grade, and I was taking American History in summer school at the local high school to get ahead. Butch—names have NOT been changed to protect the not-so-innocent, so that was REALLY his name—was taking summer school because he flunked.

Star-crossed lovers, right? Or maybe star-crossed losers?

Anyway, Butch was going to be a Junior in high school, so he was an older man. That must have been why I overlooked the fact that his name was Butch or that the letter jacket he gave me when he asked me to go with him still smelled like his last girlfriend’s perfume.

But I wore that letter jacket everyday, despite the fact that the temperature routinely soars to over 100-degrees during the Houston summers. Despite the fact that my friends and even the teacher teased me unrelentingly.

It was “just a foolish beat of my heart” (to borrow from a Debbie Gibson song popular at the time), but I thought it was love—or at least excitement that a high school Junior liked ME!

So I guess Butch and I had been going together for a couple of weeks, when we had our first kiss. The setting was romantic—our history classroom when the teacher was at lunch. Butch took my hand, led me into the room, cut the lights for ambiance (or so that we wouldn’t get caught), and put his arms on my shoulders.

The next thing I knew he was kissing me. It started off nice, and then turned…weird. I knew French kissing had to be done open-mouthed, so when I felt his tongue, I opened my mouth. And then he did some weird thing with his tongue that totally reminded me of a helicopter propeller. I was shocked and kind of grossed out.

Since the teacher could have come back to her room at any moment, the kiss was mercifully brief. A few days later, Butch found another girlfriend and I had to give him the smelly letter jacket back.

I was sad—sort of. I mean, I dutifully listened to my Debbie Gibson tape (fast forwarding to all the slow songs) and moped for about three hours. It was a long hard road back, but I got over him.

I don’t think I’ll ever get over that kiss. Yuck!

So what about you? Any gross first (second, third) kiss stories?

Today El Guapo and I returned home from the gym to find that someone had vandalized our fence. Graffiti all over our fence and a little on our actual house. The police came and a report was filed (since sometimes these things are gang-related). We’ve just spent the last hour trying to get the paint off the fence (we’re taking a break to let it dry before we start again). But these are the things that make you just want to move into a cave away from people.

So… what makes you want to hide? What brings you out of the cave?

And how do you recommend getting spray paint off of a wood fence?

I attended a workshop today on Health Care and one point that was brought out surprised me. Hopefully I’m remembering this correctly…but in 2006, Americans spent 48 billion dollars on alternative medicine (vitamins, herbal supplements, accupuncture, chiropractic medicine services etc)

The person that was doing the presentation was a physician and he talked about what leads consumers to go down that road (a road he clearly didn’t approve of…

My friend and I (sitting in the last row) just smiled. We’ve both had chiropractic appointments in the past week and my daughter has been seeing a physician for accupuncture. The crazy thing was not so many years ago I wouldn’t have considered going to a chiropractor. But then I started having trouble with my neck and all the doctor wanted to do was to give me muscle relaxers. I started going to the chiro and immediately saw the value. They treat the cause of the pain, not just the symptom.

Accupuncture?? Well, my daughter swears by it….but I’m not yet sold. But hey, give me a couple years and I’ll probably be going on a regular basis.

How ’bout you? Have you ventured over to the alternative medicine side?

Ever had a morning like this?

Happy Friday! Hope everyone has a great weekend!

My sister and I are about to take a weekend of R & R in NYC, and we’ve got quite an itinerary lined up. It will also be the NY Marathon weekend, so we’ll be doing our uptown visiting before Sunday. In any case, I’m wondering, if you had three days to wander in the Big Apple, what would be on the top of your list of places to visit?