Discovery

The day I discovered that I wrote romance novels was a shocker to me.

I thought I wrote science fiction. My first novel, Unified Souls, was set in another galaxy. Therefore, it's scifi, right?

I studied and researched scifi novels; I knew the different genres, the different types of stories, everything.

Yet there was this tiny part of me that rebelled a bit. After I read any scifi book, I would sneak in a contemporary romance novel, just to "reset the brain," or so I told myself. I couldn't read scifi after scifi, simply because my eyes would glaze over and my head would start to swim after the pages of "Tom Clancy-esque" description of how a ship worked, or what made the gun fire. I felt like I was back in chemistry or physics, and my brain would start to hurt, and I'd wonder what day it was.

So I'd read a romance in between. And that's not to say that romances don't make you think, because they do, believe me, but it wasn't as painful as a process. Most of the time I inhaled romance novels, reading them in mere days, when it would take me weeks to read a scifi novel.

I wrote it off to my "girly" factor, saying that I "got it" more than I did with the scifi.

After a filleting of my latest submission of Unified Souls in its most infant stages, I got to talking with two other writers.

One of them asked me a question, which changed my life.

"What matters more in your story -- the relationship between the characters or the mysterious plot?"

I immediately replied "The relationship between Devin and Jasmine."

"Then you write romance, honey, not scifi."

Those words slammed me in a way I had never expected.

It explained my need to read as much romance as I did. It explained everything!

Now, here I am, five years later, a proficient romance writer.

Am I proud?

Heck yeah.

Where else can you get paid to write sex scenes?