Hi Dave,
I recently answered this question when I was a guest author on the RNTV blog, so I’m pasting my in-depth answer here. And yes, I do agree that the paranormal genre lends itself to a much darker, more intense style of writing.
Kim wrote:
Patrice–what made you decide to write paranormals? Did you always know you wanted to write about otherworldly characters?
Patrice wrote:
Kim, I started off reading historicals when I was a young teen and I ONLY read them exclusively for years up until my mid-twenties. Somewhere in that long time frame I picked up Linda Lael Millers’ vampire trilogy and really liked it, but I still continued to read my historicals. I mean, I had greats like Jude Deveraux, Johanna Lindsey, Julie Garwood, Judith McNaught, etc to keep me happily buried in books.
And then I read Christine Feehan’s Carpathians and I really was so impressed that she could make a vampire world feel to “real” to me. So I realized I love reading vampires, but still had no plans to write one myself. As a matter of fact I was working on my cowboy book when the right inspiration came along for a paranormal story.
A strange experience of a ring I was wearing that seemed to carry a perfumed scent, no matter that I’d washed my hands a TON of times. LOL! But that experience spurred an idea…what if I wrote a book that’s core story surrounded a ring with a perfumed scent. I knew it had to be paranormal and sexy…and bam, I thought of vampires. That book was my very first sale: A Taste for Passion. And I’ve sense moved on to write a dozen other paranormal stories.
I’d asked myself WHY I love the paranormal and it dawned on me a couple months ago while I was answering an interview question: What did you want to be when you grew up? My answer was: WONDER WOMAN.
So I guess I’ve always loved the idea of superpowers and larger than life characters. After all, that’s pretty much what historicals are in many ways…
Here’s a comparison to consider as to how close Historicals and Paranormals really are on a fundamental basis (this is from an in-depth blog post I did a while back)….
Patrice’s Blog Post about Historicals vs Paranormals:
I suppose it seems a stretch to go from loving historical to paranormals, but in truth, the heroes in these two genres are closer than you realize. We’ve just called them something different. I still get my “bigger than life” hero. Instead of an Earl, he’s a Vampire or a Werewolf. Both are leaders, both dangerous in their own way. Instead of an adventure of “Sailing against pirates”, now the adventure is “Wars between vampires and werewolves”. Instead of “Sword fights”, now the fights are with “Fangs, fur and claws.”
Instead of “nobility”, there are “clans and packs”. Instead of courtly intrigue, there is vampire or werewolf societal politics—whether historical or paranormal, the characters in both subgenres all have strong familial ties.
The paranormal heroes are still arrogant, they are still tortured, they’ll still fight to the death to protect the women they love or for friends in peril. Instead of their wealth, the paranormal men wield their supernatural strength, wearing it like a protective shield around their hearts. And yes, they too feel like they don’t understand women (LOL!). Ah, but they are all vulnerable in the ways that matter. They all love, they all experience emotions, they all have a strong code of honor and most importantly, they all know how to touch the heroine and make her melt.
And just like with historicals (where the world is different from contemporary times), I have to build an entire world in my paranormals. Okay, I confess, I get to make my world up, BUT I still have to be consistent with my world rules and develop my world in such a way that I can convince readers to suspend their disbelief and willingly fall into my alluring paranormal creation.
You can read what’s on the back of the collector’s cards if you go here at eHarlequin and read the intro. The hero spotlight on the back of the cards isn’t in the books anywhere so this makes these cards special.
