I’ve been doing something lately that has been, well,
agonizing. I’ve been writing outside my genre.
No, I haven’t given up on Science Fantasy (genre of choice,
really). Nor have I given up on my current project, but while looking it over,
I realized something. My story had a really big subplot: Romance.
Now, I’m not sure why I didn’t see this earlier, but there’s
some major romance going on between two of the characters, and without the
whole romance thing, there’s really very little motivation for the MC. I sort
of brushed that under the rug the last time I tackled this project, but it
leaves me in a pretty sticky situation: I have to write romance, at least, a
little romance.
And I have no idea what I’m doing.
None.
I have no idea how romance novels keep things going with
just a couple trying to get together with a few things between them. I mean really?
REALLY? Is that what they do?
Oh yeah, and I’m about as under-qualified to write romance
as I am to conduct brain surgery (though I do know more about the brain than I
do about romance, so that might not be a fair analogy).
Then, worse, at right around the 1/3 mark, the book goes
from being a sweet romance with dabbling in magic to action adventure/sword and
sorcery with the MC going off to save the guy she loves (hence the need of the
romance section) who’s now working for the bad guy (under duress of magic
spell). And here’s where the doubts go from “Well, I don’t really know what I’m
doing, but people can be n00bs,” to “My readers are going to hate me for luring
them in with a girly girl story, and ending with a Micheal Bay action flick
(less boobs more dragon, but a Michael Bay FX budget for sure).”
This really sounds like an IWSG post. Sorry about that. I’m just
trying to wrap my brain around the genre bending The advice is that I have to
write the book that only I can write. Well, here it is. No one else is going to
write a girly girl Michael Bay book.
No one but me.
But will anyone want to read it besides me?
Right, well that’s a question that’s pretty unfair because
the book doesn’t exist yet (though you can see it’s marching right along in the
sidebar over there). So instead, a fair question. If you were only ever going
to read one romance novel EVER, what would you pick? I know a bunch of you
write romance, and I’m very interested in your answers because it’s clear I
need to do some research (and if you can’t narrow it down to one, go ahead and
list your top five, even if one of them is Sailor Moon… hmm, Sailor Moon is
almost girly girl Michael Bay; I’ll have to keep that in mind).
Right, back to work.
