Ground breaking! Marc Vun Kannon and St. Martin’s Moon.

Welcome Marc! His new book, St. Martin’s Moon, will be released May 22, 2011. The Moon is haunted, but the werewolves don’t know that!

Marc has the honor of being the first male guest poster on this site.

Confessions of a (non)Teenage (non)Romance Writer

I was just reading a blog post, about how romance stories could take a lesson from thriller/scifi-type stories and give the characters some sort of dilemma for their romance to chew through. Not just the usual sort of caught-at-exactly-the-wrong-moment-for-maximal-misinterpretation-of-events-type shenanigans that make so many romantic comedies work, but real consequences, along the lines of “You can have your true love, but you have to give up everything else to get it. Oh, and the world comes to an end if you do.”

The point of the post, I think, is that it is a good thing for a romance story to be about more than just the romance, just as an SF story would be well-served if it was about more than just the SF. Which is great, as far as it goes, but I don’t think it goes far enough. This is easier to see in a non-romance context, though.

A big problem in much SF, mysteries and thrillers is when the story focuses on the gizmos-the laser blasters, warp drive, whodunit, or ticking time bomb-rather than on the characters that have to use, build, solve, or prevent them. They’re enjoyable, sure, but to me a good book is one that I want to re-read, and gizmo-centric books usually don’t fall into that category. Once you’ve read the solution to the mystery what else is there?(I suppose there are some people who read SF for the science and the ideas, and others who read police procedurals for the…police…procedures..but I won’t talk about those people.) I like characters. I like to read about them, I like to see them in movies, I like to write about them. A story is a set of characters in motion, and the gizmos are the things they are moving about, with, and to. Most often the story element added to offset the gizmo effect in these stories is a romantic one.

The Gizmo Effect as it applies to romances is of course the romance. It may seem strange, the idea of a character-based gizmo, but to me a gizmo is anything the book is about that isn’t a character. A romance novel that puts the characters second to the relationship is just as guilty as a SF novel that defines the characters in terms of the warp drive they’re building. Once you’ve read the book, and seen the romance play out, do you feel any need or desire to watch/read it again?

Having recently seen both Knight and Day and The Killers, very different variations on the Mr. & Mrs. Smith theme, I could appreciate the point of the post. The stakes in Knight and Day are very much absent in The Killers, and it shows. Knight and Day had a bigger budget, and that shows, too, but I digress. (Not, by the way, that big budgets make better movies.) The issue is choice, and the choices, the prongs of the dilemma, the things to be potentially sacrificed, are what make you care. What is being sacrificed, and do I the reader view it as a sacrifice?

Adding other character-based material to enhance a character-based gizmo is a bit trickier, like trying to find a diamond mixed in with a bunch of cubic zirconia stones. Plus you run the risk of adding what will ultimately be just another gizmo, just as SF gizmos can be. What is needed is a gizmo that creates/represents a choice that the character has to make, one that will send him on his way a different man, regardless of how the gizmo itself works out. The good thing about romances, and the hard thing, is that the romance itself can do this, if it’s done right, and I’ve read a few that were. They all required some element from beyond the romance for their resolution.

You can see why, of course.

Like many writers, I started when a story came along and decided that I should write it. Don’t ask me why. Others followed, until now I’m afraid to go out of the house with a recorder or notebook in my hand. But I show them, I refuse to write the same story twice!

Links: http://marcvunkannon.com

Steampunk Santa: http://tinyurl.com/4k433rj

Ex Libris: http://tinyurl.com/mvk-el-kindle

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