They say that love makes the world go ‘round. Yesterday was just one example – so many celebrating Valentine’s Day either with their sweethearts, the memory of their sweetheart, or just with family and friends, kids and grandkids or maybe even their pooch. So, this month our Blog Hoppers decided to blog about love and romance and how it affects our writing. Some of us write specifically in the romance genre, but do our other novels have a hint of romance as well?
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Well, I’ve done both. I have a well-received, award-winning romance series: The Camerons of Tide’s Way.
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I’ll start with what I dislike about the genre. For much of the genre it feels a lot like watching the Hallmark channel where the characters, plot and town names are more or less interchangeable. Always a small town. Always someone returning for urgent one reason or another after having escaped the town they grew up in and always the person they had a romance with back in the day is still there and unattached so the love gets rekindled. Sound familiar? The overall genre of romance is more diverse than that, but the strictures of the genre are relatively narrow. My first romance was turned down by the first two editors I pitched it to, because I’d colored outside those lines. Luckily for me, the acquiring editor I pitched it to a third time not only asked for the manuscript but wanted additional ideas for a series. She happened to like my coloring habits. And apparently my readers did as well. That first book Falling for Zoe, orginally panned because the editor claimed there was too much going on, reached best-seller status on Amazon and two subsequent books in the series, Healing a Hero and Worry Stone won silver in the Florida 
Writers Literary contest. I enjoyed writing all of them, but if I’d had to narrow my style to fit Harlequin, I’d never have wanted to see them in print. At least not with my name attached.
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This doesn’t mean I don’t love a good love story. I really do. Early in my adulthood, I stumbled upon Georgette Heyer and not only have I read ALL her books, they still grace my personal library shelves. I won’t name names, but there were other best-selling romance writers at the time that I read one book and never picked up another.
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As I matured and my reading branched out, I began to look for adventure. I discovered books by W.E.B. Griffin – he has several series out, one set in the lives of Army personnel, another with Marines, two with spies etc. They are mostly set during war time, but the thing that appealed to me most was the multi-dimensional characters and the fact that they matured and changed as the series went on. One of the first books I read was about a young officer who was excellent at his job, but in his personal life seemed to constantly mess up in the love field. Other characters started out young as well, got promoted, ended up with wives and kids. IN other words, there was always some romance going on in those books, despite the distraction of military life or international espionage. And I loved them. Vince Flynn, David Baldacci, Steve Berry and others got added to my reading lists with equal enjoyment.
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There is always something that breaks the rule and gets away with it, though. For me it was Jack Reacher. While I’ve read nearly all of the Reacher series, I do find the main character something of a Flat Stanley. Reacher has family: brother, father and mother, but they are rarely seen and even their influence on who Reacher is as a man seems minimal. He’s an honorable man, but one who’s a drifter, with no home and no responsibilities. When he takes a woman to bed, it’s just about sharing their bodies with no love lost and no looking back. As Reacher stumbles on total strangers who find themselves in trouble he never hesitates to jump in and right wrongs, along with delivering his kind of justice to the bad guys. But there just seems to be something missing in Reacher’s character in contrast to the men and women who people Vince Flynn’s stories or Tony Hillerman’s, who all have more depth to their personality.
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But now, about my writing and how I incorporate romance into my non-romance stories. My first published Novel: a mainstream suspense -The Candidate, was set in the midst of a campaign for president of the US, and both my main character and two of the supporting cast had love stories woven in. It is not a political story, though. It’s a people story. My main character was happily married and that was part of who he is. Two secondary characters met and fell in love in that maelstrom of political conflict. Matt Steele, the hero of that book, has made missteps in his past that come to light and influence his campaign forcing him to make a choice between honor and possibly losing his bid for the White House. And that other budding romance is threatened by the opposition, leaving them with difficult decisions as well.
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Crossfire: 
Bullseye
I’ve also started a mystery series set here in my hometown of St Augustine, Florida. My heroine is the only female on the major crimes squad in the Sheriff’s department, for which I interviewed the real-life female on that squad to get authenticity to what it was like for a woman in that world. My heroine, Jesse Quinn, has a personal life as well. The series starts with her, the divorced mother of two teenagers. But she meets someone who clicks and there is a hint of romance added to her life. To me, the reality is that all of us juggle our lives, between the different hats we wear and more often than not, that juggling act brings conflict. When I read, I want the characters in the book to feel real. I want them not to just be a broker, or a banker, or a cop or a soldier. (Or in the case of the Hallmark brand, bakers, librarians, or book sellers.) I want them to be sons, brothers, sisters, mothers, lovers and friends, and often even pet owners.
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My latest series, the first one Unspoken Promises will be out in April, is a cross between women’s fiction and romance so I get to have it all. Except perhaps the action of a cop’s life or a spy, or even someone in the limelight of a political arena. But there is a ghost and a love story over 200 years old. And the conflicts of real life along with a heavy dose of romance. (This is the image of The Captain Patrick Murray House which is the setting for my new series. It will be on all the covers. Note the widow's walk where my ghost is keeping watch.)
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For me, Romance is the spice of life. But perhaps some of my fellow-blog-hoppers have a different take on the subject so here’s the list for you to go check them out.
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Bob Rich
A.J. Maguire
Victoria Chatham
Belinda Edwards
Helena Fairfax
Connie Vines
Diane Bator
Sally Odgers
Anne Stenhouse
To be honest, the only change to my life as a writer that AI has brought about is that I now add the stipulation along with my copyright notice in the front of every book published that my work may not be used to train AI. 
I wonder how many people understand how AI learns how to write, or how to create art in any form. For those who don’t know, AI learns how to write through internet crawlers that copy billions of words without licenses or permissions. That means, AI is stealing from work previously created by a human. When a live person does this, we call it plagiarism and it’s punishable under the law. In a school or college setting it can net you a flunking grade. Yet it’s okay for AI to do so? I beg to disagree.
Writing is at once, an adventure and a slog. An adventure that inspires our creative side. Or a slog that can often inspire an author to decide it’s time to go clean the mudroom, mow the lawn, or fold laundry. We’ve created a term for this stall – it’s called writer’s block. So, along comes AI in the form of apps like ChatGPT, Bing and others, that will do the slog for us. AI is meticulous about the rules for writing that we had to learn the hard way and still often transgress. And because AI has scrolled through billions of already written documents, it only requires a few hints to be typed in, and off it goes to create something new. Or is it new? I contend that it is not new since it has just reworked what someone else wrote.
AI can even write poetry, create new images of things that never existed, or paint pictures. But the one thing it struggles with is innovation. It also cannot feel, think or empathize. These deficits leave the writing somewhat bland and devoid of emotion. The whole point of reading for pleasure is to become immersed in the lives of the characters, both good and evil, and caring about what happens to them. If the characters don’t leap off the page and grab your heart, where is the pleasure? Or the reward?
For years I’ve picked up books with a great blurb and a teasing premise, only to be completely turned off by a lack of editing. Sometimes so off-putting that I’ll toss the book aside unfinished. Now I have to wonder, if I find an equally appealing blurb and then discover there is no emotional connection, will I have wasted yet more of my limited income?
Our literature reflects who we are as a culture, as a people, as a country and society. If AI becomes the only source of reading material, will we simply be conforming to the past and never growing into the future? Our knowledge and how we lived in 1225, or 1525 is vastly different than 2025 and our literature reflects that. As an example, if AI learned all it knows from work written long before the Civil War, slavery might still be viewed as an acceptable norm. Even as recently as the middle of the last century would have us stuck in a world where woman either were housewives and moms, or never married and went to work as teachers and nurses. We’ve come a long way in both those areas and our literature mirrors that.
AI does have a place in our world. Reports, and instruction manuals, daily ledgers and so many other things are great examples of places where AI can save a lot of time and effort and still produce easily digested information. Yet, as an author, I see the speed with which AI can create literary works (I use that term literary in the loosest possible terms) to compete with human authored work as a serious threat to human writers, both economically and culturally. 
Personally, I won’t be resorting to ChapGPT or similar apps to help me write. I’ll tough out the slog part of writing and continue to hone my work manually. I’ll be as excited about my characters and their growth as I hope my readers will be. As a reader, I definitely will never waste what precious time I have left in life on a heartless, uninspiring novel created by an AI bot with no ability to think, feel or emote. Reading is meant to be an adventure and I enjoy it being an adventure when I'm writing, too. 
