Two opinions on love triangles

Has the inundation of pictures of shirtless Taylor Lautner, brooding Robert Pattinson, and half-asleep Kristen Stewart made you utterly sick of love triangles yet?

A while ago, the great blog YA Highway posted an article on Why there are so many love triangles in young adult fiction, and some good reasons why maybe there shouldn't be.  Which I sort of agree with, in this respect: without a love triangle, the Twilight series would be a pretty dead series (awful pun, sorry).

But if you took the love triangle out of the Hunger Games series, you'd still have a strong story, don't you think?

I guess that's how I like my love triangles, an interesting "bonus" feature of the story, but not something the entire plot hangs on. 

When someone says Lord of the Rings, love triangle isn't the first thing that comes to mind, is it? Even though there's definitely some added tension in the Aragorn/Arwen love story when Eowyn shows up.

Which leads to my second opinon, if you'll humor me. Arwen/Aragorn/Eowyn love triangle is the only female-male-female* triangle I've found so far... so this leads me to think a) this type of love triangle can really work and b) it certainly hasn't been over-exploited yet! Though there are really lots of other trianglish opportunities out there, as I discovered on the mind-boggling TV Tropes website.

Blast me with your opinions, please!

*another complaint I've heard related to paranormal YA a lot is the girls falling for much older "boys".  Now granted Lord of the Rings isn't YA and was written over 50 years ago, but it was breaking conventions even then: Aragorn falls for an elf-girl many hundreds of years older than him :-)


This is a really me-centered post today because first of all I have drenched you with my opinions and next I go on to say I've won a the Versatile blog award from Jenna Cooper and the Irrestisibly Sweet Blog award from Amy (Ramblings of Amy). Thank you!

I'm passing these awards on to some new friends I've made in the blogging world:

Melissa Marsh at Writing with Style - she's a fellow history lover, like me

Ghenet Mythril at All About Them Words - she writes YA and I love her YA Cafe posts

Bethany Elizabeth at Ink-Splattered - she writes fantasy and YA and she's got this great How-To-Write-Guide based on Nintendo - that has some really intereting points!

Tanya Reimer at Life's Like That - she's a fellow crusader and writes Urban Fantasy and I'm longing to find out more about her immortal "whisperers"

Lyn Kelley at Random Acts of Writing - she writes about pirates and has a treasure map as her computer wallpaper. I'm hooked. (pardon the pirate pun).

I've also been tagged by Lisa Gail Green, Julie Dao and  Sophia Richardson.

But guess what? I really don't think the world needs to know anymore about the last time we all ate chicken meat. So I have CHANGED the questions (I know! I'm probably breaking some cosmic internet rule here!) And next I'm doing something even more potentially dangerous: I'm STEALING questions from the great blog Fantastic Book Reviews, because I love the questions. But I'm giving her credit, so it's okay, I hope.

If you were given a chance to travel back in time, what year or place would you go?

Ancient Greece and Rome - ever since reading the Illiad and Ben Hur, these have been my favorite time periods. Another great book set in ancient Rome is A Voice in the Wind by Francine Rivers.

Describe your writing work-in-progress (Handful of Scars) in seven words or less?

End of Rome, handsome Huns, troublesome genies.

Please share with us about your favorite book and fictional crush to date?

An obscure book few have heard of: Green Grass of Wyoming by Mary O'Hara. Ken McLaughlin is way too young for me, but there you go. This book is why I moved to Wyoming.

If you could be any character in fiction, whom would you be?

Carey from the above mentioned book, but since nobody knows her, my second choice is Lucy Pevensie from Chronicles of Narnia (not the girl from the movie version, though she's cute too).

If Hollywood made a movie about your life, whom would you like to see play the lead role as you?

Liv Tyler, because she's my favorite actress, though about the only thing we have in common is we're brunettes. Oh well.

How would you describe yourself in seven words?

Dreamer, writer, geographer, wife, mom, Christian, friend

Pretty much everyone I know has been tagged already! But if you are interested in answering my new set of (stolen) questions, let me know, because I'd love to do some interviews here of my friends.