Welcome Lilian!
Thanks for having me on your wonderfully witchy blog. I love the way
your career has become increasingly magical over the years.
Isn't it amazing how diverse the romance genre is?
Like Linda, I started in series romance and am still writing for Harlequin
Special Edition. Also like you, however, I found that there were stories I
couldn't tell within the framework of short contemporary romance. You found
that you didn't want to be hemmed in by realism but needed to let your magic
fly, while I learned that I just needed more space, more room for characters
and layers and complexities that contemporary series romance readers aren't
looking for when they pick up that kind of book.
The great thing is that, just as we might feel like cereal for breakfast one
day and toast the next, our moods change as readers. Today we want to pick
up that short, sexy contemporary romance that we can devour in a single
sitting. Tomorrow we might want witchy antics, or the sizzle and danger or
romantic suspense, or the tangled relationships of a sweeping saga.
I love the way the covers on your website clearly show the reader what he or
she is in for, whether it's fun and flirty and hexy, or hot and dramatic and
intense.
But it seems to me that both readers and writers of romance carry with them
some non-negotiable wants and needs when we move into new territory.
We need women we can identify with. Sometimes that means women just like us.
Sometimes it means women who fulfill our long-held fantasies. Sometimes it's
a woman who shows us a part of ourselves that we've almost forgotten or
never seen before.
We need a moral universe that feels right, and in balance. If a major
character does something wrong, he or she knows it. The women we want to
read about can make mistakes sometimes, but at heart they're good people.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need reasons to feel. It doesn't
matter if our feelings come from laughing or crying or holding our breath in
suspense, from being in love with the hero or temporarily furious with him,
or from getting lost in the heroine's richly described universe of sights
and sounds and textures. We just want to strap ourselves in and be taken on
a glorious ride.
My novel Saving Gerda, launched this month, is going to take readers on a
very different kind of ride to any that I've taken them on before. It's the
first time I've set a book in the past, in this case in Germany in the
1930s, in the challenging and confronting period of history that led up to
the Second World War. It's about a mother's love for her daughter as much as
it's about the romance between a man and a woman, although there's strong
romance in the mix. But the story still has all those qualities and elements
I've talked about - women we identify with, a moral universe that reflects
our own, and an intensely emotional ride.
I really hope readers follow me into this new territory the way they've
followed you into your magical world, Linda.
You can buy Saving Gerda at
http://www.backlistebooks.com/2012/06/saving-gerda/ by clicking on the links
to your chosen ebook store.
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