Fantasy Romance
The Tamarian soldiers stared at Leikar, then one nodded toward the Knight of Valor. “Closest Priestess of Thalia is hard half day ride from here. He won’t survive that long.”
Leikar stared at the young Knight, his sword no longer aflame with the god’s light. “I know how to cure zombie rot if you can get me the ingredients quickly enough.”
Several of the soldiers whispered he was a mage and shouldn’t be trusted.
Finally, the soldier in charge met Leikar’s gaze. “Get him what he needs. Quickly.”
At least, don’t be a writer of romance novels when your daughter is in first grade but reading at the fifth grade level, and she wants to read the book you wrote.
Yeah.
About that…Errr, no.
I tell her the stories in my books will scare her, and there is some truth to that. She has put down more than one book in her few short years because there was death in it. She almost quit reading The Magic Treehouse series altogether because of a book in the series where the kids go back in time, meet an Egyptian queen, but when they return to the present, the queen is a mummy. My daughter was super unhappy about it, saying it was a terrible ending.
I have no idea where she gets it from. *whistles while avoiding eye contact*
And I’m totally lying.
But my romance novels are not fade-to-black. And there is no way she is ready for one of them, much less one her mom wrote.
Heck, I’m not ready for her to read them and the barrage of questions that will come.
But she is my daughter, and as we were playing a video game together, her main focus wasn’t on the combat, or maximizing loot, it was all about marrying off the characters. She was especially delighted when that resulted in the parents being “gifted” with an unruly child they had to deal with.
I have no idea where she gets it from. *whistles while avoiding eye contact*
Kids show you the best and worst sides of yourself.
I’ve toyed with writing her a story just for her, but I’m not sure I can do it. Or that I want to spend my writing time doing it when Knight of Valor is calling to me.
Maybe I could rewrite my current stories and remove the non-fade-to-black scenes.
I’m trying to remember when I first started reading Victoria Holt, and I’m almost certain it was fifth or six grade. I still remember sitting on my bed devouring book after book, and based on where the bed was positioned, I know it had to be before seventh grade when we moved. It wasn’t too long after that I discovered Kathleen Woodwiss and was cemented as a lifelong romance reader.
Granted, it wasn’t until much more recently that I decided I wanted to write what I read. I’d toyed with traditional fantasy, urban paranormal, and science fiction before realizing I could incorporate those into romance and write what I read.
And I’ve never looked back!
There are few rules when it comes to writing, but one of the few is that a romance novel has a happily-ever-after or a happily-for-now ending. If it doesn’t, it isn’t romance.
I have seen this bashed a lot on social media lately and even in “regular” news. And no, I am not going to link to it and them more publicity. Seems like everyone wants to take a shot at the romance genre, love in general, and the happily-ever-after (HEA) ending the genre demands.
Pssst. It it doesn’t have an HEA or at least happily-for-now ending, it isn’t romance.
And I am not going to apologize for wanting this ending.
To me, it’s not a detractor of the genre. It’s why I read it.
No matter how awful the circumstances, no matter what horrible things happen in the story, I know the author will give me my happily-ever-after.
The bad guys get their comeuppance. The good guys get their happily-ever-after.
Yes, I know it’s not real. It doesn’t have to be for me to enjoy it any more than I suddenly expect any Marvel movie ever to be “real”.
It’s my escape. It’s my form of self-care.
Lately, I need what happy endings I can get. Even a character-focused video game I’ve been playing lately threw me when it killed a main character. I had to restart the whole thing to meet the criteria for the character not to die. Then, at least three more character, two of them main characters, died.
And there was nothing I could do about it. They are scripted to die. I put the stupid game away and haven’t played it since.
The job of a storyteller is find a way for them to live despite the obstacles you set in front of them!! This was wrong on so many level.
I find it interesting at the amount of derision and scorn pointed at the romance genre that I simply don’t see leveled at others. Not that I want it to be. Read what you love and be done with it. But I still find it interesting that genres such as horror or sci-fi don’t face this kind of stigma.
Maybe because Stephen King and Neil Gaimon made them cool.
Maybe because there’s no kissing in them, and we all know how people feel about kissing books.
I don’t need my fiction to reflect the real world.
I need an escape, and that escape doesn’t need to involve lasers, massive explosions, or enormous battles.
Just a kiss will do.
Leikar knew zombies and knew how to fight them.
Most important thing was to keep them from getting too close to spread their contagion.
His fire spells did just that, and this kind of undead followed orders absolutely. They would continue charging headlong into the flames unless their master commanded them otherwise.
When no command came, Leikar assumed the Knight had already killed the necromancer.
They’d won, but he still wondered if he’d given up his own life helping the man.
As the Knight of Valor destroyed the three ghouls coming at him from behind, the first wave of zombies closed in on him.
The Knight screamed as they tore at him.
Leikar ground his teeth, knowing the Knight was a fool.
But he couldn’t not help.
As he emerged from his hiding place, a fire spell was already
on his lips.
My beta reader was taking a bit longer than normal on this particular piece of work, and while I was a bit worried about it, they have a very busy life.
Yeah, that wasn’t it (though they do). Nice try on my part.
She gave me some high level feedback explaining why it was taking a bit longer.
There will be a bit of a delay in releasing Knight of Valor.
She noted I needed to tighten my beginning. Doable within my original release date timeline.
More than that, I needed to flesh out my hero in the beginning. She thought he felt flat. I cringed a little, knowing why she was saying it and where it came from.
I wrote this book over four years ago. It was one of three books I completed when I first got back into writing, and the only one I loved the characters enough to try to salvage. The other two are now buried on my hard drive and are not fit for human eyes.
But I loved Sir Marcus. I wanted to do him justice. And through him and his story, and I pushed myself to do better as a writer. His story helped me learn a lot about finding my voice, plot and character development, and even trusting myself as a writer.
So, I’d set Knight of Valor aside for a while and work on other things, become a better writer, and tackle this story again.
During the process, I read a whole bunch of craft books. And you can see their influence on the story. One of them was how to write a romance hero…and I did Sir Marcus a lot of disservice. Granted, he overcomes the bad writing advice towards the middle on the book, but it takes him a while.
At the time, they were telling romance authors that romance readers wanted alpha heroes. Don’t even bother writing anything else as it won’t sell and an agent won’t want it. So I changed him.
And he was no longer Sir Marcus.
Don’t misunderstand me. He is neither meek nor mild. He was not the “chosen one” and forced to do anything. He saw evil, and if there was a chance he could destroy that evil, he had to try. He dedicated most of his life training to do just that.
But he’s still a genuinely nice guy. The kind of person who’d come over and help you fix your roof because he heard you were having trouble without being asked. You’d share an ale afterwards, and that would be all the thanks he’d need or want.
Punch a kid or kick or dog? You don’t want him to see you do that.
Kill a village to fuel a evil spell?
Time to run. Fast.
So, I need to let his true personality shine through the first half of the book as well as the second. No easy task, that.
Oh, and I need to fix a plot hole, tighten up my pacing, and remove a few loose ends from earlier drafts I missed. And this is before I get back the full list of revisions.
*deep breath*
I see why this is taking a bit of time to get back the beta read. I also know I sent this out for just this reason.
I am literally on my eighteenth revision of this story. Yeah. Eighteenth. That I’ve counted. The first draft and several subsequent ones (no idea how how many four, maybe five?), I didn’t number and track. I am really close to this story, and I’ve put a lot of work into it. I can sometimes lose the forest through the trees. So I need more help on this than most.
It means a lot to me. I really want to get it right.
So, this is going to be a large revision, not a small tighten-things-up late game revision.
And that’s okay. Sir Marcus deserves the best story I can give him.
Yes, it means my entire plan for the year needs to change.
Yes, it means I will not make that April publishing deadline.
Both are okay.
I want to give you the best story I can.
Delaying the release date until June or July gives me the time to make it the best that I can right now.
You deserve that, and so does Sir Marcus.