Feeling Romantic

I woke up to the gurgle of the coffee pot, and sat up in bed knowing that my husband had made coffee. He’d timed it for when he knew I had to be up and about today, so I could have a first sip with no waiting. That’s romantic. After ten years, we know one another well. It can be joking about the last child flying the nest so we can run around inside the house with no clothes – sadly, although today is World Naked Gardening Day, we don’t have a place remote enough to ever make that possible, he notes. I add my own snark that with my skin (I have no pigment over large areas) not to mention Texas is home to many angry plants, it’s never practical. Still… those are the sorts of moments that bond us, where we are letting one another know that in spite of age and body shape changes and all the sundry insults of the passing years to the physical, inside we are still the same couple that was smitten from the start.

None of the above is likely to be found in a romance novel, although there are some that do give a more nuanced and mature glimpse of what life and love really are. Over at the BroadCast we did a two-part romance novel unbagging, (Part 1 and Part 2) and laughed ourselves silly, but it was also educational. Romance writers, cover artists, and blurb writers, you all will get something out of that. If you don’t write romance, you’ll likely still find something there. Because romance is, at it’s heart, the human condition. We all came from the union of a man and a woman, if you boil it down to the essence of biology. Being humans, not strictly driven by our biology, there’s more to it than that. But on the other hand, being humans, we don’t always understand our hormones and the underlying power of urges can lead us down the primrose path…

Which makes for interesting stories. Maybe not a comfortable life, if it were real, but romance novels are highly stylized and as much a flight of fantasy as any book with magic in. While we were filming, and talking about the random books we pulled out of the bags, one or the other of us would open the book to a page and generally, be able to predict what was happening in that part of the story, because there are story beats that the authors must adhere to. The readers of romance novels know what they are getting, and get upset if that’s been thrown off.

Formulaic is comfortable. Comfort reads are nothing to sneeze at, they sell better than any other genre. Why? We live in an uncertain world, and all too often an unhappy one. Romance novels give us a place to escape and find love. Although there is also the genre of novel that is a direct descendent of the Gothic, and that’s a novel intended for readers who have very safe, comfortable lives and want to experience a distant (so distant) frisson of fear and drama. Safely in a book.

CV Walter shared a beat sheet for romances with the Spiky Book Club, which is very interesting to look at. Not being a plotter, I couldn’t write a story based off it, but I can retro-fit a story in edits, I think. At least, it will be interesting to try that. I don’t plan to write ‘traditionally’ romance tales, but there are reasons to fit the story into existing frameworks, not least of which is that I want to write books that will sell well and not garner irritated reviews from readers I’ve stroked in the wrong direction and left all their fur standing on end. If you check the ‘recommendations’ channel on the Discord server, you’ll find an excel file where you can customize the beat sheet to intended story length.

I’d asked this in the discussion on Discord in the Book Club with Spikes, but I’ll ask all of you as well. What is your favorite romance novel, traditional or not-so much?

All of the images in this post were rendered using MidJourney, with the prompt: romance in the garden, classicism, oil painting –ar 3:2.