You write paranormal romance. Why is romance important to you or to your stories? Heck, why is romance important to the writing world? Why use romance to tell a story?
Eh. In the very strict sense of the publishing category, paranormal romance requires an urban and/or contemporary setting and usually a bunch of werewolves and/or vampires and other “dark supernaturals” – as opposed to elves, giants, etc.
What I write, at least in this series according to the readers, is fantasy or SF of some sort. High fantasy, political fantasy, SF, feminist SF... whatever label you use, there’s a secondary non-contemporary -- although partly urban -- world, and no supernaturals in the orthodox sense. There are definitely “non-realist” happenings, but they are sourced less in something out of fantasy than out of SF.
But romance, yep. I write romance, though again, not in the proper category sense. That --as defined by Paula Guran, Juno, Amberlight and Riversend’s editor-- is “centred round a male/ female relationship” and the end is positive if not happy ever after. Well, there certainly are “romantic” relationships in these books, though, not all of them are single male/female, and not all of them are actually heterosexual, especially in the later two books. But there are endings that count as happy, at least to me. Or rather, they are endings that look toward hope. Toward building, and achievement, and a realizable future that involves people in happy, solid relationships. If those are also “romantic,” in the sense of love and/or sex, so much the better, say I. So you could say romance is important to me in the widest sense of the word “romantic.” At the end of a novel, I want to see something through clear if not rose-coloured glasses, however dark the road to that end may be.
As for “romance’s” importance to the writing world, well, we may need to qualify the term. “Romance” in terms of publishing categories is of massive importance because it has the lion’s share of readers and book buyers. What more need I say?
“Romance” in the sense of sexual/love relationships is paramount to the Romance category, so there’s your answer in the second sense. And that such “romance” in the category sense, with the requirement of a heterosexual love relationship with an HEA as its centre, is the biggest fish in the publishing ocean, suggests to me at least that an awful lot of us like to indulge in fantasies -- in the non-writing sense -- of adventure: Hoottttt sex, and meeting, and keeping -- which seems to be the bottom line in category romances -- a dream-fantasy heterosexual mate.
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