Set the World on Fire

I just had an interesting thought. A romance usually is an intimate, even a domestic story. Often, it’s about women who are quite content to be anonymous in their world—known by relatives, friends, and coworkers, but with no ambitions to achieve the kind of significance on the world stage that would lead them to become best buddies, say, with Michelle Obama. Yet the hero of the romance might be an international player, a famous man who has met the movers and shakers of the world and is known and even reviled by millions for his sharp business dealings. That’s an old-style Harlequin favorite: sheer power with no apologies. American heroes tend to be more PC. But my point is that, except for the occasional romance in which the heroine is a famous actress or model, she is usually a nobody. And she aspires to stay that way, even if she has some ambitions to achieve worldly success by running a business or effecting some important civic change. Take a look at the Beyoncé photo. Is this a woman who needs a man to champion her because she has been slighted? To tell the world that she ought to have won a certain award? No. She’s at the top of her game, she’s got a billion-dollar smile on her face, and she is the epitome of a powerful woman. And she even radiates niceness, which makes her accessible to a very wide range of people. That’s a good-girl smile on her face, thank you very much. But she’s not the heroine of a romance, is she? Why not? Because romance heroines usually are not presented as powerful, fully self-actualized women. They more often are shown to be women on the cusp, or women in jeopardy, or women who are lovelorn. Even if they have some measure of success. And often, they are losers who are one step from impoverishment, abuse, or death. Either the hero rescues this kind of heroine and gives her a better life, or knowing the hero empowers the woman to think more of herself, or it all is organic and they raise each other to a happy ever after that includes social and economic security. Contrast this standard personality range with that of the typical paranormal heroine. Does she want to set the world on fire? You bet. She either has a mission or receives one that is so important that she must risk her life to save herself, her family, her tribe, her city, the world—or even the entire universe. Good versus evil on a big scale. It’s the opposite of the small-picture intimacy of the standard romance. What a vastly more important role the paranormal heroine has to play on the world stage. In other words, in a paranormal romance, instead of Cinderella, the hard-done-by heroine who waits for a hero to rescue her from her misery, we have the Angelina Jolie-as-Lara-Croft heroine. Or even Jolie herself, carving her own unconventional life from out of some fairly miserable clichés of world celebrity. No wonder people are so fascinated. Powerful women are few and far between on the world stage. Those who openly work their sexual appeal without apology (such as Madonna) are both admired and derided. But they are not ignored. Imagine Madonna as the heroine of a typical paranormal: her best friend has been turned into a vampire and now she has to kick vampire butt to keep the entire town from turning into a vampire nursery. All she has are her stilettos (both knives and heels, of course), her incisive understanding of men (you go, girl), and maybe a hunky, leather-clad, semi-undead guy who’s hot for her (yeah). Is she going to kick vampire butt? You betcha. Do you see why I am suddenly excited by the subtext of these paranormal romances? These typically are stories in which the heroine effects change directly because of her own powers. She’s not solely dependent on the strength of the hero to fight the bad guys. Even though she and the hero may be on the same team, she’s seen as a powerful member, not a weakling who has been brought along via the hero’s strength. Of course most paranormal romances take the form of uphill battles in which negative imagery abounds. The outcome of a war between shapeshifters and werewolves and demons is never certain, or even (if the writer is doing a series) permanent. But the heroine is committed to the importance of the fight, and she is a key soldier. Unlike the standard sword-and-sorcery cover of years ago (epitomized in the original Star Wars movie poster), the man in a paranormal romance is not the all-powerful figure with the woman at his feet. (Considering that Luke was a tyro who needed Han’s help to do anything, that original image was a lie even then.) Nor is it the other way around. The hero of a paranormal has not been neutered or made weak simply to produce the effect that the heroine is powerful. It’s the real thing: each person has powers that contribute. We need a new visual for that. Currently, the covers of paranormal romances do not usually show men at all. But these stories are not about a female-only world. Paranormal romance plots are not resolved by practice of the domestic arts. Except as wicca can be so characterized (after all, magic spells are recipes), the heroine can’t bake a pie or nurse a sick child or perform other classic womanly tasks to win the day in a paranormal romance. She has to be a full actor on the big stage. She has to set the world on fire.

My Quest for (a) Romance

When I used to read thirty romances a month (yes, I really did), I knew exactly which stores had the newest books, and what day of the month they were delivered. And I knew which books had been hanging around for months, and which were hot off the presses. I’m a little out of practice now, because I have a tendency to browse online. I read excerpts and reviews. If I find a book I’m interested in, I usually buy it online or—don’t hate me, fellow writers—see if there’s a nearby library system from which I can borrow it. Recently I was on a mission to find a contemporary romance to read. I've been hearing on other sites that contemporary romances are falling out of fashion and losing market share. I wanted to find out if that was true. Since I didn’t have time for leisurely online shopping, I thought that I would be most efficient if I went to my nearby book outlets, to check out what they had. There was no point in checking out the biggest romance publishers, because they always have space in their publishing programs for contemporary romances. Some even have whole lines of same. Reading one of theirs would not give me a sense of where the market is going. It takes a lot of time for a big publisher to change gears. No paranormals, either. Only a straight contemporary romance would do. You’d think it would be easy. But, constricted as I was by the requirements of my quest, I was soon in the romance reader’s version of hell: Books everywhere, and nothing I wanted to read. To my surprise, I had to visit six stores to find even a few possibles. Six stores. Two were book superstores, two were big box stores, and the last two were a grocery and a drug store. You might think that I should have gone straight to the big bookstores, but actually there was a method to my madness. Bookstores carry back stock. They carry reissues, because they have lots of space. They can keep older titles on the shelf longer than a small venue can. I assumed that it would be easier to find a brand new romance at a store with a very limited area for books. That idea was clever enough, but I finally realized that it would never work, and here’s why: that rumor about the contemporary romance being out of fashion is true. And smaller book sections only have whatever is at the height of fashion, because, duh, that’s what is most likely to sell quickly. Bestsellers by mainstream authors, or by romance authors like Nora Roberts who have gone mainstream, dominated those shelves. I could have bought any number of historical romances featuring women semi-garbed in great sweeping pieces of shiny cloth. But no, that wasn’t my mission. I almost succeeded at a big box store. Set the Dark on Fire by Jill Sorenson says on the front cover that it is “A Novel,” but the back cover sales copy calls it “erotic romantic suspense.” As you can see, it’s a clinch cover, but with lots of purple swirling around, indicating that this story is full of action as well as passion. It sounded just fine until I read the author’s foreword, in which she thanked experts for their expertise about rattlesnake bites. Oh, ick. I kept looking. Show No Fear by Marliss Melton was a serious candidate until I realized that the hero and heroine would be slogging through a depressing and deadly South American jungle, dodging vicious bands of quasi-military types. Nah. Not for me. Doggedly, I continued to pursue my goal. I picked up Sliding Home, by Kate Angell, but even though I love baseball, I don’t usually enjoy romances about "bad boy" star athletes. (In fact, the best baseball scene I’ve ever read in a book was in Chaim Potock’s The Chosen. Really. Those Yeshiva boys kick butt on the baseball field.) I looked at Lucky in Love by Carolyn Brown several times, but it was a ranch book, and I wasn’t terribly interested. By now you’ll have realized that I was being very, very choosy. I’ve played this game before, and so have you. Bored with the same old same old, I’ve looked restlessly for...Something Different. For years I might have been perfectly happy reading whatever was the most popular subgenre flooding the bookshelves. But then, I’d get a yen to read...Something Different. That’s how I found some extremely interesting books. Books that it took guts for the authors to write and faith for the publishers to attempt to sell. Maybe an unusual time-period historical when historicals were in one of their frequent troughs. (They seem to be doing fine right now. There are plenty to choose from.) Or maybe I would have picked up a paranormal when that was still a subgenre-to-be. When it was daring. Or I could have found a contemporary romance about an older woman with a subplot about a lesbian cowgirl (I did read that one; cool book). I will be frank and admit that I have zero interest in paranormal romances featuring vampires, werewolves, fairies no matter how they’re spelled, elves, Keebler elves, ogres, demons, angels, guardians, shapeshifters...I’m getting exhausted here, and needlessly alienating those of you who love a rousing vampire tale. So let me explain that I am not interested in tales of the-undead-and-the-dread because mostly they operate at night. And I am a serious lover of sunlight. I don’t even like to go into my basement during the daytime because I’ll miss some daylight. All those dark nights in dark paranormal books just don’t do it for me. I keep thinking that if they’d just tuck into bed around midnight instead of cruising dangerous bars, they wouldn’t have to fight off the undead so often. I almost gave in and bought an Amish romance, since I've heard so much about them. But most of them seemed to be historicals. And nothing called. Then, finally, I hit paydirt. I found a book whose title tickled my fancy: What Would Jane Austen Do? by Laurie Brown. It’s a time-travel that involves the modern-day heroine with the real Jane Austen. Is it a contemporary romance? A mystery? A historical? I don’t know yet. But I want to read it. There wasn't anything else that was brand new and yet fulfilled that yen for a thoroughly modern point of view and the potential for romance. I'm hoping for kisses and a happy ending. I'll let you know how it turns out. As my extended shopping trip proved, something is up with contemporary romances. Yes, they're out there, but they are currently being crowded off the shelves by other romance subgenres. And many of the offerings tend to feel like retreads; you know, "been there, done that." Which makes me wonder what happens next with contemporary romance as a genre. Because obviously, women want to read romances based on their real (contemporary) lives. But we must be at one of those moments when something key in the mix has to change. I wonder what it will be?