The reason she was shelved in romance in the first place was because her publisher had no idea where to shelve the first book– it had the elements of paranormal and historical fiction and romance and suspense. Basically, they decided that since the element that had the most impact was the overwhelming love story between Claire and Jamie and hence, the romance tag/classification. She’s been quoted as saying that she has nothing against romance (in theory) but that her books really aren’t romances. Which is true– by the definitions of the genre that so many people so slavishly adhere to, no, she’s not writing romances.

Angie

I agree that it’s annoying when some group of readers mistakes their personal preferences for genre boundaries, but what’s really annoying is when the publishers start doing it. :/ You get enough people complaining about, say, a guy who’s not ridiculously wealthy, whether by snail mail or e-mail or on forums or blogs, and eventually the publishers just won’t take a manuscript with a middle-class guy, much less a poor one. It’s like telling all the poor people in the world, “Sorry, you’ll never ever be happy or find love and we all know it, so shut up and fantasize about money like the rest of us.”

There are some tropes and settings and character types I don’t care for either, but the full range of variety should be available whether I personally like all of it or not, so that other people whose tastes are different from mine can read what they like. And I don’t get why everyone doesn’t get that.

e.g. the domineering and downright violent alpha jerk and his sweet little doormat heroine

One can find that in m/m too, with the doormat being the cute little twink-boy. It’s not as common as it is on the het side, though, so I don’t have a problem with it. Again — variety, even if it’s not to my personal taste.

I absolutely agree about the lack of gender issues, though. Fallout from the gender wars is all but impossible to avoid with het relationships. One of the reasons I like writing m/m is being able to get out from under all that.

Angie

All genres have their peculiar hang-ups and taboos that make little sense to outsiders, e.g. the screeching of certain SFF fans at even the slightest hint of romance or – gasp – sex or mystery readers being up in arms over the death of a cat, never mind that five people die in the same book.

But hanging out on romance fora, I am often struck by how many readers confuse their personal likes and dislikes (no sexually experienced heroines, no non-alpha heroes, the hero must be an aristocrat or at least rich, the hero and heroine not even daring to look at anyone else, no one finding true love with the brother/sister of someone they previously dated) with absolute genre taboos. It’s okay for readers to have individual likes and dislikes. There are certain themes, settings, tropes, etc… that I will not read either, regardless how highly acclaimed the book is. But it’s when these individual likes and dislikes turn into prescriptions for the entire genre that the problem starts.

M/M romance or same sex romance in general does make it easier to avoid some of the problematic power issues connected with gender relations that occasionally plague the romance genre, e.g. the domineering and downright violent alpha jerk and his sweet little doormat heroine, which is a trope that drives me up the wall.

Me too, and I agree that it seems to make a difference in expectations and tolerances.

Angie

I agree, absolutely. [nodnod] I’ve seen most of those things done in romances from other genres, and they can work wonderfully well. Kate Elliot’s Jaran, for example, is an SF novel but swept through the romance community when it came out, to great acclaim. But the Guy and the Girl meet, don’t get together right away, and the Girl has a couple of other lovers, then she and the Guy get together (and get married) later on. It’s an awesome book, but there were a few people on the boards who refused to even try it when they heard about that part. Their loss IMO, but there you go.

And I’m particularly sick of the alpha hero thing. Yes, they can be very cool if done right. (Which they aren’t always. [cough]) But there are other kinds of guys who are perfectly cool and romantic. Some variety please? [sigh] I’m not saying get rid of the alpha hero (or any of the other tropes or character types you mentioned) but simply allowing for variety if the writer chooses to do something different.

But yes, there are so many ways of writing a really good romance which are closed to genre romance writers. It’s very frustrating. Luckily, m/m doesn’t have most of those barriers. (Yet. [crossed fingers]) I think there are some real opportunities, too, for a smaller publisher to break through some of those roadblocks. Keep the HEA — I agree that a happy, stable relationship, or at least a promise of it, is an integral part of the genre romance definition — but pretty much anything else you mentioned I’d happily trash as a hard-and-fast rule.

Angie

I’m a little late to this, but SLOW BLOOM, one of my novels with Anah Crow, is well over 100,000 words. PANDORA PROJECT: RUNAWAY STAR is over 90k. I’m sure there are lots more, but the limiting factor for m/m books is that, in order to go to print, they have to fit within the most profitable range for POD printing, and 100 tends to be past that.

Love can be very messy in real life and it would be nice to see the occasional romance novel reflecting that messiness.