McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
The start of paranormal romance
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Snowleopard on October 20, 2012, 02:31:57 AM ---I saw a T-shirt design somewhere that I loved.
It said - Spike don't sparkle - with an image of our favorite blond vampire. ;D
--- End quote ---
I think I want the Aziraphale and Crowley reading Twilight one:
"But vampires don't sparkle !"
"You're not using enough gunpowder."
OZ:
I don't know that a single author's work can be determined to be a starting point for a trend. It partly depends on exactly how you define the genre you are talking about. It is not always easy for me to differentiate between urban fantasy and paranormal romance. I feel some stories definitely belong in one genre or the other but many blur the lines. We could probably spend pages and pages arguing which genre Sookie Stackhouse or Kate Daniels books belong in and in the end most people would still cling to whatever they originally believed. I personally saw the Anne Rice vampire stories as the start of the urban fantasy trend with the Anita Blake books building on them. Sookie Stackhouse came soon after. I still see the first book in the "Dead" series as a spoof on the Anne Rice books and maybe a little on the LKH books as well.
arianne:
I personally define "paranormal romance" as any work that has romance as one of the main plot points. "Urban fantasy" would be a work that takes place in a modern urban setting and contains elements of fantasy characters/worlds/etc. For example, most people would probably say that Harry Dresden is urban fantasy (although in some places I know DF is placed under "sci-fi), but I doubt that any of them would class it as paranormal romance.
Anita Blake for me would definitely be paranormal romance, as would Sookie Stackhouse and Kate Daniels. A general rule of thumb I use is, if the main character is spending more than one in five pages thinking exclusively about the guy she loves/should not love but has feelings for/thinks she hates but really loves/etc, then it's a paranormal romance.
(btw, little side question, but has anyone ever come across a paranormal romance with a male as the main character? To the best of my knowledge, all paranormal romances have females as their protagonists.)
Snowleopard:
And now a brief pause for something...well...that doesn't sparkle. ::) ::)
Pauses to put out drool buckets.
It'sallSue'sfault - I found pics of the Spike don't sparkle t-shirt but I couldn't
seem to track down where to find/buy it. Sorry, I did try.
LizW65:
Wikipedia has this to say on the subject:
--- Quote ---The first futuristic romance to be marketed by a mainstream romance publisher, Jayne Ann Krentz's Sweet Starfire, was published in 1986 and was a "classic road trip romance" which just happened to be set in a separate galaxy.[8] This genre has become much more popular since 2000. Krentz attributes the popularity of this subgenre to the fact that the novels "are, at heart, classic historical romances that just happen to be set on other worlds."
--- End quote ---
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