| | In the August issue of RWR, there’s an article by Colleen Gleason called “The New Romance?” (page 21 if you’re looking). Now, I’m notoriously late reading my RWR, usually regaling it to the bathroom mag stash for quick article reading (I read everywhere). And, I hadn’t read this one, yet, when I received a post on our chapter Yahoo! Group linking to a blog post of the article -- Friday’s response on Sizzlingpens Blogspot ( www.sizzlingpens.blogspot.com ) of course, I simply had to respond, and respond, and respond. My first response was, “what’s HEA”? Hmmm, H is for Husband and DH is for Dead Husband, says my speculative fiction brain, causing no small sense of shock, you can imagine, when I read DH. In RWR, Colleen writes, “The new types of series are different because they are about one woman, and they don’t strictly follow the accepted principle of romance: one man and one woman riding off into their happily-ever-after.” And about non-HEAs she says, “But at the end of the day, they’re still romances.” We (at NTRWA) just had a speaker about a genre labeled "women's fiction", where, instead of an “HEA ending”, women's fiction has a "hopeful ending". Yet, perhaps we'd have to call a paranormal HEA a "sub-genre" because it has no separate floor space. (But when you're already a vampire, or get turned into one by the end of the book, could that really be hopeful?) This notion of the “new romance”, where the ending of the book has no male/female protag happy ending, bothers some readers and writers, and it bothers them a lot, thinking that the classification for this new trend should be “women’s fiction with romantic elements” (per Juliet Burns in the Sizzling Pens blogpost). These trends especially are blossoming in the paranormal romance sub-genre. In one of the articles for our chapter newsletter, I wrote on the influence of speculative fiction in paranormal romance ("Pushing Paranormal", Heart to Heart, June 2008), about how it melded from the gothic romances seasoned with science fiction and fantasy. (I'd say all romance is fantasy, but that's a whole other bag of magic beans :). The ever-expanding genre of romance is developing into an "umbrella term", like speculative fiction is now. Many readers think that if they spend their hard-earned money on a romance, that it must have an HEA. All things change, for better or for worse, even the romance genre. That said, paranormals aren't going to follow the "old tradition", because when speaking of paranormal romance, what is the "old tradition" anyway? The paranormal romance isn't THAT old, certainly not old enough for any tradition to set in. Not that the romance hasn't been around for a while, it has. (Jane Austin bless your heart, and who can forget Sir Tristan? :). Tradition in is different for everyone. It is defined by our purpose for reading romances, what it satisfies inside us, the niche it fulfills in our lives. The age of the reader most likely will determine that person's definition of "traditional" (unless and until there's a sub-genre of romance called "traditional", now why didn't I think of that? :) Paranormal is a new blend (new I say because I'm 53 years young and have watched genres develop). So why should it follow traditional strictures? Without the HEA, paranormals, and for that matter, any genre, has wonderfully endless (as in infinite, though, in writing, what is ever infinite but our capability to proscrastinate?) creative possibilities. Juliet says “I love a good vampire story. Especially if they have some elements of romance in them. But to call it a romance? Isn’t that kind of like wanting your cake and eat it too?” Yes, and why not? It's fiction, why can't we have the universe with sugar icing AND whipped cream AND chocolate syrup and anything else we want? Certainly, the genre label doesn't define our reading-taste buds. Well, yes it does, to some extent. Labeling a genre is a bookselling gimmick, a marketing device, used to separate all the types of literature in the world into designated bookstore floor space. Just ask Diana Gabaldon, whose best-selling OUTLANDER series (another series!) weaves history, time travel, and romance into a rollicking good adventure. Or ask Andrew Davidson, author of THE GARGOYLE, where a beautiful gargoyle sculptress tells a third-degree burn victim that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. Davidson’s book isn’t marketed in the romance section, but obviously includes romantic elements. Whatever sells the most will get more hype and attention, whether it's an entire genre, or a single book. The baseline here is money, that green stuff most writers get so little of. And as Colleen stated in her article, usually the publisher determines where a book is placed in a bookstore, but sometimes, the publisher allows the bookstore to decide. It’s placed where they think it’ll sell well. Readers may not be satisfied with a series romance where several books frame the HEA story. However, the HEA, if present at all, is there, it just takes longer to get from A to Z. These are stories too big to publish in one book (that green stuff again). It can be frustrating to start a series that isn't completed yet, dropped by the publisher before the story frame completes, or doesn't have more than one or two books published when begun. That isn't anyone's fault, especially not the author's (we can only write so fast). If it's a good enough story to read more than one or two pages before it’s tossed, (I'm very picky) then it's probably good enough to read an entire series, however long that series may be. So, a series of books doesn't necessitate a lack of story or HEA. It just means a more full-bodied story with larger landscapes and deeper characters. I heartily understand anyone’s disappointment with a seemingly never-ending story when expecting an HEA (expectations ruin relationships, even the readers’ relationships with the characters and the author, however, it never seems to affect the publisher, funny how that is? No, not really). Perhaps the problem would be better addressed by asking a question: ~~ How does one determine which sub-genre to select? ~~ Which I’ll answer next. ~ Alley is a member (and past board member multiple years) of the DFW Writers' Workshop (www.dfwrite.org), co-founder and member of the North Texas Speculative Fiction Workshop (www.ntsfw.com), and board member and newsletter editor at the North Texas Romance Writers of America, (www.ntrwa.org). She writes speculative fiction with romantic elements. |
