#FridayFavorites Christina Perri-The Words

It's only week two of this #FridayFavorites series and I warned that the topics would be varied because I had a million ideas last week. Yet, I've already found myself struggling with what to write about.

I didn't want this week's post to be too similar to the one from last week, since that would risk giving the impression that these will always feature that kind of topic. I didn't want to write two posts in a row that encouraged people to buy something. I didn't want this post to be book-related since I could do a book post on any day and I'd set Fridays aside to do something else.

Perhaps I should write a series of posts about being an over-worrier.

In the end, I decided to keep it simple. My goal for this series is to share something that I'm enjoying and feel like chatting about. This week, I'm obsessed with a music video.

This one:




It's been out for months, six or maybe seven months actually, but somehow it has escaped my notice until this week,

I don't tend to watch a lot of music videos so it's not a huge surprise for me to be unfamiliar with one, even if it's from an artist I quite like. Christina Perri is an artist I quite like. I have the album. I've seen her perform live. She's fantastic.

I've been enjoying this song in particular for months. So imagine my surprise when I discovered Colin O' Donoghue starred in the video.

I suppose I should mention here, in case you don't know me at all, that I am huge fan of Once Upon a Time and especially of Captain Hook. He's about ten times as charming as, well, Charming. Am I right?

I've since watched this video a dozen times. It's lovely. Truthfully, it would be hard to not enjoy watching the handsome Mr. O'Donoghue whilst hearing the pretty song. But as a romance writer, the thing that gets me is the character development.

In four minutes, and without any dialogue, I fall for the man in this video. He is full of contradictions and endearing quirks.

He lives, apparently alone, in this big, old country house with old fashioned floral wallpaper. Who picked the wallpaper? Was it just there when he moved in? The front porch could use some paint, so maybe he just hasn't gotten around to fixing things up. Or maybe a woman chose that wallpaper. A wife? He carries himself with an air of sadness and he's always working his jaw like he's seconds from an emotional display, maybe he's a widower. Or did she leave him? Is that why he looks so wistfully at the passing train?

He works with orchids in a too-charming-to-be real attic room. We see him carefully tying stems together, replanting and slowly pouring precisely the right amount if water into the new pot. It's delicate, detail-oriented, nurturing work that makes us think about his fingers just a little more than nice girls should.

Then he chops wood. He's got the plaid shirt and the ax and we just want to bring him out a thermos filled with hot coffee. He's a provider.

Oh, but with all that wood chopping he worked up a sweat. A normal guy would take a quick shower and make use of a bar of blue-tinted soap. This is no ordinary man. He takes a soak in a big, old claw-footed tub. It's not practical, but it is hot. Really hot.

And then there's the books. We see them casually stacked here and there. We see him reading while eating soup and bread off of delightfully-mismatched china. We see him reading in bed. They're all vintage hardcovers of course; orchid man doesn't have paperbacks.

Two seconds of eye contact with a pretty girl makes him stumble. This guy is not a player. He has no idea how good-looking he is. For me, that reinforces the widower theory. I think he married his high school sweetheart and worked hard to buy the house because she loved the wall paper, only to lose her before they had a chance to fix anything up. Now he doesn't change anything because he can't let go of the past.

He hasn't even installed a shower.