Hi, Laney Cairo here, thinking out loud on the blog today.
Inspirational romances are a kind of story I've been intrigued and charmed by for some years. If you're not familiar with inspirational romances, Romance Writers of America describe them as Romance novels in which religious or spiritual beliefs (in the context of any religion or spiritual belief system) are a major part of the romantic relationship. However, most inspirational romances published are mainstream Christian stories, with hetero-normative characters and worldviews that didn't speak to with my own life experiences, just like heterosexual romances don't reflect my life as a queer person. Being a writer, the obvious response was to write a book that responded to that.
That's the story behind Circle of Change, a pagan inspirational romance about Kim and his pagan boyfriend Dash, which I wrote some time ago, but which people are still reading and talking to me about.
The process of writing the story got me thinking more closely about why I read (and write) inspirational romances. I don't live in an entirely secular world, a spiritual vacuum, and I suspect many readers of this blog don't either. I find it grating when characters don't show any sense of connecting with a larger presence, with an existence beyond the immediate material boundaries of their settings. I like to see characters occasionally acknowledge this wider experience and explore the implications in the narrative.
Not all my stories are message-narratives and even those that contain observantly spiritual characters, like Jude in The Tockleys who is a practising Buddhist, are not necessarily inspirational romances. So where is the difference? The romance arc in Circle of Change is dependent on Dash's growing spiritual awareness and the insights he gains from paganism, and it's that connection between the romantic story and the spiritual growth of the character/s that makes an inspirational romance. This kind of story potentially gives a double serve of Happily Ever After, where the characters both fall in love with each other and get to have a different kind of happy ending in a wider context, when they fall in love with the world too. I love to read that kind of story, and I wanted to write a story like that with pagan sensibilities and queer characters.
What do you think?
You can find a review and excerpt of Circle of Change here.
Publishers, writers and readers of gay romance, m/m, slash, menage and lesbian romance. See what Romance for the Rest of Us (TM) is all about. www.torquerebooks.com
2 comments:
I hadn't thought about Circle of Change as an inspirational, but when you explain it that way, it clearly is.
Mainstream inspirationals, the ones with their own lines and imprints, aren't just Christian; they're conservative, evangelical Protestant. The idea as explained to me was that conservative, evangelical Protestant Christians generally restrict their fiction reading to books that don't conflict with their beliefs, which isn't very many, so inspy lines are designed to tap into that hard-to-reach market. There's no reason to write, say, Catholic or Buddhist inspirationals because they'll usually read "regular" romances if they're into them at all.
I've always thought it was kind of presumptuous of someone to reserve the very general term "inspirational" for a set of books that are only inspiring to one very small chunk of the world's population. The idea of someone writing a pagan inspirational, or a Hindu inspirational, or an atheist inspirational, is pretty awesome. I'll probably enjoy Circle of Change that much more next time I reread it. :D
Angie
I had also not thought about Circle of Change as inspirational, but it does fit (and far more closely to my own world-view than those I had previously considered fitting that niche... time for another world-view overhaul). "Inspirational" should encapsulate stories that inspire to many/all/other (than Christian) belief systems!
Helen (aka Mistry89)
I like the realignment. :)
Thank you.
p.s. I'm in the middle of re-reading tThe Tockleys.
p.p.s. Oddly enough, the word verification on this comment is "bless" *g*
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