So What Do I Write Again?

Author Amy Lane will be  my guest author for Friday.    She is well known for her magical novels, all available on Amazon and visit her stunning website http://www.greenshill.com/!

English teachers can be some of the worst literary snobs on the planet—and we know it. In a way, it’s to be expected—we get out of college all fresh-faced and dewy-eyed with THE LITERARY SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE, and then, as we sit down to bless the masses with our arcane and perfect knowledge of Beowulf and metaphorical motifs, the masses bless us back with a toddler’s whine: This is bo—-rrrrrr—iiinnnggg. Can’t you teach real books? Like Twilight?

 

* sigh*

 

Now don’t get me wrong—I’ve been the Great Defender of Commercial Fiction in my department for going on fifteen years. As far as I’m concerned, if it moves your heart, makes you think, makes you want to be a better person or a better citizen or even just a more thoughtful lover, it’s REAL LITERATURE. You know—the same stuff that contains THE LITERARY SECRET OF THE UNIVERSE? I mean, people forget—the guy who slapped Beowulf together one dark and stormy night wasn’t out to write LITERATURE—he just wanted to get fed! In order to get fed, he had to tell a story people liked enough to keep him around and (hopefully!) throw him an extra blanket, some food, and maybe a wench or two. And no amount of leading 12^th graders to MacBeth by their pierced eyebrows is going to change that fact that Shakespeare wrote most of it while sucking up to King James—same motivation as the Beowulf poet, slightly more complicated version of the English language.

 

But still—from the moment I first published Vulnerable, four years ago, I lived in fear of the question. And it didn’t help that the first guy to ask it is a sober, serious, cracking brilliant author of SERIOUS AND SOBER fiction himself.

 

“So, Amy, what kind of book is it?”

 

My first answer wasn’t all that impressive. “Uhm, you know. Like, uhm, fantasy.”

 

“Oh!” He smiled kindly—as though this figured, since my own emotional immaturity would automatically incline me in this direction. “Like Harry Potter.’

 

I thought of the amount of alternative sexuality in Vulnerable. “No. Not like Harry Potter.”

 

He blinked, because I was usually more forthcoming than this, and tried again. “So, like science fiction?”

 

Elves and vampires? “Mmm…no. Not like science fiction. It’s, you know, like high fantasy. But set in modern day.”

 

Ah-ha! He had me now! “Oh! I get it—like magical realism—that’s a great genre. Gabriel Garcia Marquez…A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings?”

Well, yeah. I’d read the story. But I think Green and Bracken would be a little miffed at being dismissed as Really Tall Pretty Guys With Enormous Schlongs, and Adrian would certainly be unhappy as A Dead Pretty Guy With Pointy Teeth.

 

“Mmmmm…no.” I shook my head. “No… it’s sort of a coming-of-age romance with, uhm, paranormal creatures.”

 

“So, a paranormal romance?”

 

“You know, Len—let’s just say I don’t niche well and leave it at that, shall we?”

 

But my department didn’t leave it like that. No… no. Shortly after the release of Wounded and Bound, another colleague was all the way across the lunch room, when he looked up at me and hollered, “Hey, Amy! Vampire blow jobs!”

 

I stared at him blankly. “What in the hell?”

 

“See,” he said, talking to the person next to him, “that’s how you get her attention.”

 

Okay. This absolutely had to stop. I could say “I did some research” but, in fact, I simply put together all of the reading I had done beforehand, the stuff I loved, that inspired me, and put it together in my English teacher’s head.

 

What I write (I think) is Urban Contemporary Fantasy.

 

What most people think I write is Paranormal Romance.

 

Urban Contemporary Fantasy (UCF) has its roots in regular high fantasy—you know, Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, The Sword of Shanara—as well as old fashioned science fiction. The idea is, simply, that the stuff of our dreams of yore—elves, magic, witches, etc.—as well as some of the more, uhm, virile figures of our horror and adventure stories—werewolves, vampires, demons—are real. And they exist in our modern day world with just as much impunity as they lived in the past, less technologically advanced world.

 

The plots in Urban Contemporary Fantasy tend to follow one character or a set of them through a series of books. The end of one book may not be happy (Vulnerable certainly isn’t!) and the happy ending of another book may not be definitive. There is always another adventure, another romantic wrinkle, another potential lover for the hero/ine to embrace,

 

So (you may ask) how is that different from Paranormal Romance? (Okay—when I hear you guys asking me that question, it comes out quizzical and interested. When I hear my colleagues ask that question in my head, it comes out So? That’s different from vampire porn how? Uhm, I like you guys better.)

 

Well, Paranormal Romance actually has its roots in whole other places. Authors like Sherrilyn Kenyon, Christine Feehan, and Jacquelyne Frank actually have their beginnings in the contemporary serial romances—Harlequin, Silhouette, and the old Boons & Mills. For the same reasons UCF became popular (my guess is that modern life feels too damned crazy for there not to be something supernatural and sinister laying plots around us), PNR suddenly exploded in a happy tangle of heroines, limbs, and species.

 

But not too tangled. The plots in Paranormal Romances tend to feature a series of couples from the same ‘family’ or ‘group’ of preternatural creatures, pairing off in happy romantic bliss. The external conflicts brought on by the paranormal circumstances make the pairing both more exotic, sometimes more erotic, and very often more complicated than the standard boy-meets-girl contemporary. What they don’t do, that UCF does, is offer the situations in which the hero/ine, instead of having to choose between two lovers, ends up having to choose them all. What they do have, that UCF doesn’t, is the ever-beloved happy ending. You may see the happy couple in the first book later on in the series, but you know they will be happy. There are no break-ups and no major character deaths—and many readers take great comfort in this knowledge when they pick up a PNR book, and I don’t blame them. Having actually killed off a main character before, I can tell you, it’s nice to know that after the vampire bites and werewolf dismemberments, the couple you’re rooting for will really be happy at the end.

 

So I should be happy too, right? I know what I am—I’m an Urban Contemporary Fantasy writer—hooray!

 

Well, sort of.

 

Because The Little Goddess series has same-sex pairings, and people (erm, publishers?) keep telling me that it fits into slash fiction.

 

But the main character is a girl and her lovers—so that fits into ménage and UCF.

 

And my other series (Bitter Moon I & II—both available at amazon.com) is traditional fantasy, but, to my great dismay, the lack of unicorns, fairies, or anything close to a magic sword renders it equally un-niche-able.

 

My Jack & Teague (& Katy) stories (Yearning, Waiting, & Reaching—all available for free on www.greenshill.com) really should be labeled slash—but the people who love the guys (some of them heterosexual men!) tell me that you can’t limit the series to just m/m romance—there is a richness to the relationships that defies traditional romance, and it’s link to The Little Goddess series gives it that much more depth. And the people who read a lot of slash tell me that it just doesn’t fit the parameters of m/m romance.

 

And yet another male colleague calls it gay-porn/butt-luv. (Yeah—he knows he’s a prick, why do you ask?)

 

So what kind of writer am I?

 

I guess who I really am, is the long lost descendent of the poor schmoe who first played and sang Beowulf in front of a strange crowd at a strange castle, hoping to get fed. “I don’t know what it is… it’s got a monster… and a queen… and a really strong guy who can rip your arms off… the question is, did you like the story? Will you buy me dinner for it? Hell, I’ll settle for an extra blanket and a place by the fire!”

 

I hope that guy got fed well, by the way, because I’ve enjoyed his story once a year for the last twelve years. And when people tell me that my books make their keeper shelves, I think that’s just as good or better than a meal by the fire. Or maybe it’s the same because honestly, I want the same niche the Beowulf writer and every other writer since time began has yearned for—the warmth and satisfaction of knowing the whispers in my heart became a story well told.