Laura Welling | The Joy of Bromance

I adore a good bromance.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s a close friendship between two (or more!) men. In romance fiction, it’s a great opportunity to reveal positive parts of a hero’s personality that might not be immediately apparent to the reader otherwise. The word is relatively new, but the concept isn’t. The idea is enshrined in buddy movies: think back to Butch and Sundance or Top Gun, for example.

When I set out to write HEIR TO THE PACK, I didn’t know it was going to contain a bromance. I had my hero, Dash, and my heroine, Annie, very clear in my head.

Then Annie was standing in the kitchen of Dash’s house, and this happened:

Turning to head back to the dining room, she faced the wall of glass that separated the kitchen from the dark garden.

On the far side of the glass stood an enormous naked man with shaggy blond hair, his body ripped with muscle. His iridescent yellow eyes stared right at her, and he pressed his body against the window. He leered at her and wiggled his hips lewdly. She screamed and backed away, clutching the sippy cup to her chest like a shield.

I didn’t know who this guy was, or what he was doing, but the characters that elbow their way out of your subconscious and insist you write about them are often the most interesting.

It soon turned out he was Gaelan, Dash’s best friend since childhood, and, man, he was a scene-stealer. Writing the two of them bouncing off each other, sometimes literally, was a ton of fun. Dash is the responsible Alpha turned family man: Gaelan is a ladies’ man and never plans to settle down. Dash is serious, Gaelan always cracking a joke. But each of them would die for the other without question.

I love reading bromances, too: even in a pretty dark book they can provide humor and warmth, just like a real life friendship. Some of my favorite bromances, in no particular order, include:

- Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan from Ocean’s Eleven
- House and Wilson, which is of course a riff on the Holmes-Watson dynamic
- Butch and Vishous from J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood

You’ll notice all of these involve a lot of wisecracking and banter, which is one of my very favorite things in a bromance.

There are different variants on the bromance, naturally. Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Rings have a relationship that matches the tone of the books. Harry Potter and Ron Weasley grow up together. What’s your favorite bromance?

About Laura Welling

When she’s not writing, Laura Welling wears a lot of other hats: mother, farmer, and software engineer. She's Australian but lives in the United States on a horse farm, which she shares with her family, crazy dogs, and various horses, cats and chickens.

She is a compulsive reader of all genre fiction, who started reading before the age of two, and never stopped. She wrote her first “book” when she was five—a spy story, which has since been joined in a bottom drawer by various other early attempts.

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About HEIR TO THE PACK

Three years ago, Annie had a three-day fling in Cancun with a handsome stranger, Dash. Two years ago, she gave birth to his son. Now, Annie's son is fading away with a mysterious illness, and she must seek help from his father, who doesn’t know he exists. But Dash has news for her: first, he’s a werewolf; second, he’s about to be crowned their king; and third, their son has been touched by an ancient curse.