…Then you start to question if your heart is black and cold inside.
It’s been said that I have some, trouble, constructing a good romance (small “r”) story… Mostly said by me. To myself. When I try to write romance and it comes out as horror with some romance interspersed like garlic on a pizza.
I find myself thinking, in the middle of a stretch of purely romantic text: “What if one of them were to see some blood seeping out from under the armoire door right now?” Or, “wouldn’t it be cool if, like, the shadow behind him moved all Dracula-like?”
Sigh… It’s like I don’t want to happy. But that begs an important question: Will writing romance make me happier? You may notice that I differentiate between romance and Romance (“r” versus “R”). This is how I separate romance as a popular genre and Romanticism for myself. It is in no way a slight against writers who dabble or throw themselves whole-heartedly into the romance genre. In case I haven’t made myself clear: I’ve tried to write romance. It sucks. It’s hard. It’s like trying to draw roses from a stone that only wants to ooze blood. That’s not to say that I don’t manage some romance in my works. But my take on romance is both cynical and dark. I opt for romance as an example of where love fails, or where it becomes so impassioned that it overrides sense, logic, and the ability to differentiate between that and hatred. The line between the two is thin.
As shown in the “Shades of the Sea and Flame” series (first novel free with a subscription to our mailing list), inflamed, impassioned love can be a firestorm that consumes lovers and destroys everything the two have ever known. That is my cynical take on the genre. That love is never easy. It doesn’t happen out of a puff of jasmine-scented pink smoke. It needs to be maintained. It needs to be watered and fed, and taken for walks. And, sometimes, two people are just incompatible and prone to imploding.
The Gaslight Vamp series (first book also free with subscription), love and romance can happen almost anywhere, at any time, but even when the spark shimmers, the people we love don’t always turn out to be the paragons of virtue we ever imagined them to be. Young love is disruptive to young minds. Love between old enemies is a thing. And sometimes family love hurts more than anything.
It’s desperate love. Clinging to something you’re not quite sure is real in the hopes of escaping what you know with painful certainty is.
Our latest release, “The Slumbering Prince,” is all about redemption through love. Can romance save a soul? “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” explored this concept through Angel’s love for Buffy and the ultimate end of their long, tumultuous relationship (yet another example of how much pain love and romance can cause).
If anything, the romance inherent in Sanguinem Emere novels is not popular romance at all. It is an homage to Romanticism. It is horror, awe, and the ultimate hope that there is more to the darkness than a place without light, without hope. It’s beautiful, and tempestuous, and terrifying, all at once.
Perhaps we suck at writing romance. But we know what we want for our horror. And what we want is light at the end of it all. The raft that our protagonists cling to, the one that promises that it will all be worth it in the end.
For love.
