I had a bee in my bonnet about romance for the longest time, but it was reading about the Australian Romance Readers Convention that got me thinking again about romance and how I’ve changed regarding it.
I, like many other readers, looked down on the Mills-and-Boon genre – to be honest, anything in which romance seemed to “overpower” everything else. “Overpower” is a relative term here. Anything, including having two lines in a synopsis mentioned the main characters’ MFEO-ness and I was done.
I did an interview Leigh Greenwood some months ago — he’s a bestselling romance author and not someone I would have ever expected to write romances. But, he made a point that romance is about bringing out the best in characters and people respond to that, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Having edited quite a few, I can definitely agree with that.
What’s weirder is that it was romance that got me hooked on my favourite genre – Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series and urban fantasy. Book 3 featured Paige Winterbourne, who resonated with me, but a part of her pull was her relationship with Lucas. They were compelling because they were relatively normal (they were a witch and a sorcerer after all), but they were also blessedly relatable. She was perfect and she stuffed up, but I was comfortable with her. It was like looking in on my best friends’ relationship.
I still compare all other romances to theirs, and I’ve found that more often than not, the romances in the urban fantasy genre tend to blur together. There’s always the strong (often leather-clad women), with their wounded pasts and the men they’ve left behind or those that always have some sort of past trauma that makes them the “wrong” choice. Until, you know they get their happily ever after. I have to admit, that has resulted in my skimming through more than a few pages of books I wouldn’t otherwise.
All genres have their romance conventions, sometimes it’s just hard to see the good in amongst all the bad.
And now the question that has to be answered: why oh why was the ARRC convention in Canberra of all places? That’s just not fair!
