Tuesday, October 28, 2014

The Travesty of a Romance Novel


The first big ass, horribly written, should never have gone on submission, I'm so sorry agents novel was... a paranormal romance with roughly thirteen points of view.  Any shifter race one could imagine made an appearance. The protagonists didn't meet until chapter eight. When they finally had a chapter or two alone how they ended up there was highly improbable (which, for paranormal takes some doing).  There might maybe have been a scene or two that danced too close to the lines of bestiality (ew). Oh, and the word count? 150k.

I know. I know. I know.

I'm not proud.


The root concept I still like. The protagonists I still like. Heck, even a few of the shenanigans scenes are redeemable. The story... erm... When "It's too complicated" was the nicest bit of feedback CPs could muster, it finally penetrated my thick skull that it was time to bury that puppy and never allow it to be bazombified again.

Contrary to popular perception, a good romance is pretty freakin' hard to write.

Pretty much every romance novel I've ever penned (all of ten or so) languishes in the dark ether of a digital file cabinet backed up to a thumb drive hanging from a lanyard in my office. Will any part(s) of them ever be resurrected?  Ehhhhmmmm, mebbe.



Posted by
Labels: ,

7 comments:

  1. B.E. SandersonOctober 28, 2014 at 4:27 PM

    Oh man... I forgot about the romances I tried to write before I made the decision to actually be a writer. Yeah, those will never be finished. I did put a few chapters of the best one on my old blog and my friends liked it, so it wasn't a total loss, but romance just ain't for me.

    And now I totally want to read your 150K complicated behemoth. (Except for the bestiality parts... cuz, yeah, ew.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. K.A. KrantzOctober 29, 2014 at 8:43 AM

      Oh, thank goodness I'm not the only party guilty of "Romances: some stories are best kept behind closed doors."

      And one day, one very far and distant day, snippets of that behemoth could be exposed as "what not to write." :D

      Delete
  2. Veronica ScottOctober 28, 2014 at 7:23 PM

    THIRTEEN POV's???? Wow, I am in awe. You and Tolkien, right? Wonderful post....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. K.A. KrantzOctober 29, 2014 at 8:40 AM

      ~hangs head~ Nine of them were "disposable" POVs; aka they showed up once, told their view the story then vanished, never to be seen or heard from again.

      Delete
    2. Jeffe KennedyOctober 29, 2014 at 10:49 AM

      omg. lol!

      Delete
  3. Sharon StognerOctober 29, 2014 at 8:58 AM

    This makes me lol for real. As a reader, blogger and editor you just described all the classic failures of a romance book I've run across a few of these and the most polite thing to do is DNF sometimes. With 150K words to play with you can probably whittle that sucker down into a good story one day :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. K.A. KrantzOctober 29, 2014 at 2:00 PM

      Oh, Sharon, on behalf of those of us who wrote the things that should have been locked up, I'm so sorry you've had to endure the DNFs that escaped from under the bed!

      Delete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)