Yes, I'm up at a god-awful hour. There's a dog barking out front, really weird sounding barks, and then I saw a man walking up and down the street (our bedroom's in the front of the house) and then the phone rang. I didn't get to it in time, but surely if it was an emergency they would have left a message, right?

Anyway, I'll go back to bed in a bit, when my heart stops pounding.

I love love triangles – GOOD love triangles, where you’re rooting for one guy or the other, where each guy (or girl) is just as deserving of the love of the main girl (or guy.) Okay, to be honest, I’m not so much in love with 2 girls and a guy triangles. But having two guys vying for your love…that I can get behind!

One of my favorite love triangles was the Pacey/Joey/Dawson one on Dawson’s Creek. I really wanted Pacey to win. (And seriously, the two of them, on the boat all summer, and NOTHING happened??? Tell me another one.)

I want Kate to end up with Sawyer, Jim to end up with Pam on The Office, even though I like Karen, and Roy seems to know what he’s lost, Peter to end up with Simone on Heroes.

I think Grey’s did a great triangle with Derek/Meredith/Addison, especially when they gave Addison such a great personality. I thought the Alex/Izzy/Denny triangle was good. But the Derek/Meredith/McVet triangle fell flat for me. McVet was very deserving, but Meredith wasn’t, if that made sense. You knew she’d never treat him right because she would always wonder about Derek.

In books, triangles seem more prevalent in series than standalones, probably because there’s more time to lay out the characters and conflicts. Look at Stephanie Plum (Morelli, please. But I stopped reading about 6 books ago – I can’t keep up.)

In recent reading, Colleen Gleason’s The Rest Falls Away, I rooted for Rockley, the regular guy in Victoria’s life, to give her balance. Trish was rooting for Max. Maybe she’ll come by and tell us why ;)

Stef Feagan had readers vote to choose a hero for her heroine, Pink, in her Bombshell books. She said she never intended to have a triangle, but the one guy kept taking over bigger chunks of the book, and she fell in love with both of them.

Why do readers pick sides? Because the writer makes the characters so real, gives them vulnerabilities and strengths that make us pull for them. I tend to root for the character that seems to reach a deeper need of the main character.

In my zoo story, that I wrote a million years ago, I wrote a triangle. The other woman was such a bitch, she made the hero look weak for loving her.

Now that I’m looking at Spy Girl again, I’m thinking about how to strengthen the characters so that not only will my heroine have a hard time choosing, so will the readers.

I know first I need to beef up my heroine. She needs to be worthy of two men battling over her. (Another problem with the McDreamy/Meredith/McVet triangle – I never got that Meredith was worthy of all that competition.)

And then I need to give my potential heroes appealing traits. One friend suggested each man needs to address a different need in the heroine, so I would need to make each need equally strong, right? Hey, there might be something to this plotting thing after all!

That same friend suggested that I make the bad guy appeal to her dangerous side and the good guy make her feel safe. Another friend suggested I make the good guy act like a bad boy, and I thought about the bad guy making her feel, well, not safe, because she knows who he is and what he’s done, but…you know?

Have you ever written a triangle? How did you make all the characters appealing without making it obvious who the heroine would end up with on the first page?