DEYROLLE 2012

Director Wes Anderson at Deyrolle before the fire

On a cold and rainy January day seven years ago, my husband and I were wandering around Paris when a curious little garden shop caught our attention. Inside we found an assortment of tools, books and clothes but nothing remarkable enough to carry home to Texas.

As we were about to leave, the clerk told us there was a premier étage and pointed to a stairway at the back of the shop. Not wanting to be rude, we climbed the steps expecting more of the same and were stunned by what we found—a grand suite of rooms full of hundreds of stuffed animals posed as though they had frozen in mid-action when our feet hit the top stair. Like many before us, we had discovered Deyrolle, the cabinet de curiosités.

Under normal circumstances, I might have found all the taxidermy somewhat appalling, but there was something so charming and playful about the way the animals were arranged, I fell in love with the place and every creature in the extraordinary menagerie. I couldn’t help thinking, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if whoever owns this place could bring these animals to life when no one was around?”

That man became Adrien Durand, the hero of the paranormal romance novel my agent has out on submission. Since then I’ve returned to Deyrolle many times, and have taken friends and family to visit my favorite place in Paris. Sadly about three years ago a fire destroyed most of the second story and with it hundreds of animals lovingly collected over more than a century.

The fictional place I call La Maison d’Ermonie has taken on a life of its own in my imagination—a fantastical world that is more real to me than the place that inspired it. I shouldn’t have been surprised this week when the somewhat reconstructed Deyrolle no longer held the enchantment of the original, but I was. Surprised and disappointed. The animals were no longer posed playfully and the whimsy has been lost. Change is inevitable but I still mourn the loss of a grand dining room set for dinner with a guest list of zebras, a donkey, a lion, a water buffalo and a goat presided over be a magnificent stuffed horse I named Maurice.

Have you ever revisited an old haunt or a literary shrine only to find time had stolen its magic? 

Read Kimberly Frost's New Series! Now!

This weekend I finished Kimberly Frost’s ALL THAT FALLS, the second in her Etherlin series. I liked the first, ALL THAT BLEEDS, a lot. With the second, I’m totally hooked. In Ms. Frosts' world the descendants of the ancient muses live in a glittering community in the Colorado Rockies called the Etherlin, while beyond the wall live humans and vendala, human-vampire hybrids who crave muse blood. Here are excerpts from the cover blurbs:

ALL THAT BLEEDS

Alissa North is inspiration made flesh, so she should never have met Merrick, a deadly half-vampire enforcer, but when they do meet, the connection is instantaneous, and an illicit flirtation is born. The long-distance friendship was never supposed to go any farther. But when she is kidnapped and thrown briefly into his world, everything changes.

ALL THAT FALLS

As his muse, Cerise propelled her musician boyfriend to the heights of fame, but when he died under mysterious circumstances her powers vanished. Now she’s plagued by disturbing half-formed memories of his final night…until she meets the fallen archangel Lysander who seems to hold the key to restoring her memories and abilities.

I love the world Kimber’s created—the magical Etherlin which is too good to be true and the violent Varden where Merrick and Lysander live—and the characters who go against their natures to connect with each other. These beings are larger than life and yet very human in their capacity for love and loyalty. The villains are deliciously evil, the heroes heroic and flawed, and the action is fast paced, epic and addictive. If you enjoy paranormal romance, you’ll love this series! I certainly do.

Anyone have any book recommendations this week? I'm headed to RWA and would love to pick up signed copies at the 2012 "Readers for Life" Literacy Autographing in Wednesday. Details here. 

HELP! WHO MOVED MY GENRE?

Several years ago I attended my first Romance Writers of America meeting. The lovely and generous Colleen Thompson introduced herself and asked what I wrote. The question threw me. It should be obvious since I was there that I wrote romance. “But what kind of romance?” she asked. I was baffled. There were different kinds? Yep. Within a few months I determined I wrote contemporary single title, or at least that’s what that first 200,000 word mess was…sort of.

Over the last few years I thought I’d gotten the whole genre thing down. My second manuscript was a romantic suspense, my third and fourth are paranormal romance. Or at least they were until yesterday when I read a Barnes and Noble Review interview Eloisa James did with Lisa Klepas about her new release, RAINSHADOW ROAD. Eloisa is one of the most prominent romance writers in the industry (not to mention a Shakespeare professor!) and Lisa Kleypas is right up there with the best of them. Here’s the paragraph that startled me:

 Rainshadow Road is a deeply moving romantic novel, but it's definitely not a "paranormal" romance.  Your heroine, Lucy Marinn, has the ability to change glass into living creatures, so the shards of a broken ornament turn to "living sparks," a dancing procession of fireflies, for example.  In a paranormal romance, the heroine herself might change shape, though generally into a member of cat family rather than a firefly, but a shape-changer has presumably lived with her feline self for most of her life.  Within the context of the world of the romance, her abilities are normal. 

Whaaaa? By this definition neither SHADES OF PARIS nor SHADES OF THE DEEP  are paranormal! My characters have psychic abilities and their world is strongly influenced by made-up science. Sure, some of the antagonists use Voodoo-like magic, but nobody shape-shifts, drinks blood, or enjoys/endures any version of immortality.

The interview goes on to label RAINSHADOW ROAD magical realism, a new concept to me, but that’s not the point. In the publishing industry we constantly hear agents and editors talk about where to place a book in the marketplace and on the shelves, and now I’m wondering if I even know my own genre. Are my stories contemporary romance with psychic elements? Romantic adventures with psychic characters? I’ve heard Jayne Ann Krentz describe her Arcane Society series as romantic suspense with characters with psychic abilities.  No mention of paranormal.

I’m not alone in puzzling over genre. My critique partner and good friend, Sarah Andre, finaled in RWA’s Golden Heart contest in the Romantic Suspense category but has been rethinking whether her story is technically a suspense because the main characters are solving a murder mystery through most of the story and are not in immediate dire peril. 

Genre labels wouldn’t be important of they didn’t create agent, editor and reader expectations that impact contracts and sales. How can my agent pitch my work to editors if we don't know what genre it is? As writers we write what we love, but, as professionals who want to make a living writing books, understanding where our stories fit in the marketplace is becoming more and more important as genre lines blur. 

What do you write? Has genre expectations impacted how you market your work? If you’re a reader, what do you think of when you hear paranormal romance?