Douglas Rickard

🧭 💋 Inside My Novel – glimpses into its fictional world and characters. 📺 🎭 Soap Opera Influence – iconic stills, story beats, and the moments that inspire my fiction. 🩲 ✨ Life as a Writer – milestones, behind-the-scenes, and occasional flashes of personality. 👓 📖 Book Review Calendar – novels that keep my own storytelling sharp.

It's all part of the same creative world — a nostalgic, melodramatic journey that’s still unfolding.

Hope: I know who I am now. There's no doubt in my mind anymore. I'm Hope. I am your wife, Bo.

DAYS OF OUR LIVES Kristian Alfonso as Hope Brady Peter Reckell as Bo Brady Lisa Rinna as Billie Reed A Corday Productions, Inc. Presentation Copyright © 1995

During my Disneyland Paris stay, I went looking for the bare necessities in Adventureland after a nap back at Hotel Cheyenne.

Baloo made sure I found them.

Landscaping, shade, heat, planting, atmosphere, and timeless character meet-and-greets - tipping my cap to Disneyland Parc. And I always do when I'm here.

Nordic Crowns Tavern might be quick-service, but it doesn't feel like it Just beyond the glass: Arendelle Castle, lit against the evening sky. Outside: spectacle and scale. Inside: something softer, almost domestic.

There's a warmth here that goes beyond the carved wood, the treasured paintings, or the portraits of Anna and Elsa's neighbours. It's in the way the food is served in domestic-looking bowls, and how it tastes. A simple, home-style menu that doesn't try to impress - just there to satisfy.

The whole place seems to belong inside Arendelle rather than simply decorate it.

It breathes differently out here - open space, a wooded fjord, and suddenly… I'm in the story that started beyond those gates at Disney Adventure World.

And across the water, the royal household is right there, with two sisters perhaps together again beneath the blue hush of the North Mountain.

I wasn't casting the nine suitors in my novel-in-progress, but on a Friday night in Blackpool, surrounded by these guys, it felt like I'd walked straight into the story I'm writing.

In my book, Courtney has these presentation parties with nine male attendants. All eyes on them. Everyone quietly sizing each other up.

And suddenly here I was, right in the middle of it.

Not the plot - but definitely the presentation. The line-up. The whole "who's looking, who's being looked at" energy.

Let's just say… from where I was sitting, it felt a little less fictional than usual.

Reading an intimate scene aloud to a writers' group is a different kind of exposure. Some lines land exactly as intended… others feel very different when heard out loud.

By the time I reached my final line, I was very aware of the room. Then came the usual applause, and just like that, the tension lifted.

Smiles. A few flushed giggles. Thoughtful suggestions. And a couple of admissions that they'd happily read something that delicious. One writer told me I'd handled it tastefully. That mattered too.

I'm not writing erotica. My work draws more from the world of 90s American daytime soaps - heightened, emotional, yet unafraid of intimacy - just without the constraints those shows had to work within.

As a writer, some scenes only really reveal themselves once they're let loose in a room.

That morning in Knightsbridge started simply enough - a cat-sitting booking, two Italian Ragdolls, and my usual shortcut through the Harrods Beauty Halls.

Then I looked up. And for a second, I genuinely wondered if I'd somehow walked into my own scene - the one I was due to read aloud later that evening at my writers' group.

On the screens: a Dolce & Gabbana campaign - Madonna and Alberto Guerra - all slow glances, close proximity.

The same level of heat. The same atmosphere. Not that I was complaining - just ideally not hours before I had to stand up and read my own scene out loud.

Writer life, apparently, includes the occasional moment of: oh. right. we're doing this in public now.

Jeffrey: So, is that paradise, or what? Kelly: Yes! Jeffrey: Better than Cleopatra’s milk baths, eh? Kelly: Ten times better!

SANTA BARBARA Ross Kettle as Jeffrey Conrad Robin Wright as Kelly Capwell Perkins Copyright © New World Television, 1987.

The mirror across the room - golden, twisting like endless hair caught in sunlight - threw my reflection back at me in loops, and above the bed, that framed art of Belle and the Beast stared down like they knew exactly what kind of morning-after monologue was coming next.

Was it the hotel room? Or had I sleepwalked straight into one of those glossy bedroom confrontations I keep drafting - silk against skin, secrets half-spoken, the air thick with what-comes-next tension?

Either way, the light was hitting the wallpaper just right, turning everything cinematic.

Victoria: Nicholas! Nicholas: Hiya Sis, how’s it going? Victoria: Fine, uh, what are you doing here? Nicholas: Well, waiting for you to let me in. Victoria: Well, you don’t have to wait any longer, get in here. I thought you were at boarding school in Switzerland.

THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS Joshua Morrow as Nicholas Newman Heather Tom as Victoria Newman Howard Copyright © 1994 by CPT HOLDINGS, INC.