“Believing in even the possibility of a happy ending is a very
powerful thing,” so says Snow White on the television series Once Upon a Time.
Since I
began reading romance in college, I’ve found that romance novels may be the
most misunderstood books on the shelf, even though they out sell every other
genre. Romance Writers of America defines a romance as “a central love story and an emotionally-satisfying and
optimistic ending.”
I once gave a romance book to a friend to borrow and
she handed it back to me saying, “No, that’s smut.” Never mind that it wasn’t
any more graphic than most Hollywood movies.
I once saw a man in a bookstore shield his daughter
while passing by the romance shelf. (Later I saw them browsing the horror
section.)
Let me take a moment to share how I see romance novels. Remember
the movie Titanic? Had Titanic been a book, it would have been a love story on
the fiction shelf, because it didn’t have the happy ending required to be on
the romance shelf, but that’s the only difference between that story and a great
romance. Was Titanic smutty? Certainty not.
In Titanic, a young woman changed her life, fell in love,
and survived a tragedy at the same time.
Romance stories send powerful messages to both men and
women. You can fall in love and save
the family business after a devastating hurricane. You can have a Happily Ever
After and defeat an invading vampire army. Characters—especially female
characters—don’t have to choose between their goals as they do in many
mainstream stories.
In horror, you have sex and you usually die. In romance, you
can have everything you want if you’re willing to confront challenges. Romances
do not harbor damsels in distress. Romances feature strong women.
Now, some may say Happy Ever Afters are not realistic. True
enough, unfortunately. But why do we read? For reality? No, we don’t read
fiction for reality. We read fiction to experience things we may never
experience in real life—not that I think true love is unrealistic, personally.
That’s why I chose to write in the romance genre.
~***~
Paranormal romances are romances with a strong fantasy
element—vampires or werewolves, witches, Greek gods. I write about angels, demons, and
ghosts. Deep in Crimson is the second book in my Return to Sanctuary series,
which features a world where demons protect fallen archangels from human
poachers.
Both hated by
humans, the fallen angels and the demons joined forces for survival. The love
story in the first book of my Return to Sanctuary series, Out in Blue, is a between a human woman who was raised
by a demon, and a half-human, half-archangel hero. The romance is fast paced
and focuses on the idea that love can happen fast and hard, when the right two
people come together, and that even the most dire external obstacles can be
overcome. I am a believer in true love and love at nearly first sight, and
these particular characters are the embodiment of that.
The love story in the second book in the series, Deep in Crimson, focuses
on free will. Both the demon hero and the demon heroine have issues concerning
whether or not they are the driving force in their own lives. In paranormal
romances, you find a lot of plot lines with pre-ordained destines and such. The
prince and the princess, separated after millennia, reunite in a bar in a
questionable neighborhood in New York. Those stories can be very romantic when
done right.
In Crimson, I examined the pros and cons to being stuck
fulfilling a prophecy, what drives us to want the things we want, how fighting
hard for one thing can allow something better time to sneak up behind us, and
how sometimes we miss that the most important thing was right in front us the
whole time.
In Deep in Crimson, both the hero and heroine are demons,
though the archangels continue to play a critical role in the plot.
Demons in fantasy
stories make, in my opinion, endlessly interesting protagonists and
antagonists. Being inherently evil—or inherently any one thing of limited
scope—isn’t natural for a sentient creature. Personalities and experiences will
always provide variation and growth. That makes the demon a perfect character
to examine in fiction—so much potential conflict. What will happen when they
grow beyond the tiny little box of “pure evil?” How will they turn out when
they sidestep expectations?
I wanted to write
demon characters in the first place because I’ve always loved the idea of
taking the “monsters” of other stories and making them the heroes and heroines.
Vampires in modern paranormal romance and some fantasy are excellent examples.
I’ve always been a fan of more traditional vampire stories, but I also love reading—and
writing--how they overcome their darker natures to be the heroes of stories.
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