Hello, I’m Kristin Miller, and I’m a category romance addict.
When it comes to tropes in category romance novels, I love them all. I swoon
over mistaken identity mixed with bribery, ogle over marriages of convenience
mixed with enemies to lovers, and adore wrong bed mixed with some sort of
CEO/Secretary relationship. Give me tropes I can laugh and cry with, ones that
are extreme or down to earth, and I’m a happy reader.
I’m a hard-core category romance fanatic, though I wasn’t always that way.
In middle school and high school, I read suspense novels by Dean Koontz and John
Saul. In college, I devoured Harry Potter and Twilight. In the
years after college, while I was teaching high school English, a friend
recommended a handful of romance novels. Nora Roberts and J.R. Ward were in the
glorious TBR pile.
Needless to say, I’ve been gleefully lost ever since.
Romances celebrate love and female strength. They glorify heroes who treat women
like queens and, quite often, pleasure them beyond their wildest dreams. But
it’s not only about falling in love with a hero who sweeps the heroine off her
feet. It’s about heroines finding the strength to love themselves. It’s about
emotional and mental growth, independence, and feeling worthy despite all odds.
How could I not fall in love?
In SO I MARRIED A
WEREWOLF, I wrote a heroine who is both a dog trainer and blogger,
struggling to start up her own business. She’s also looking for love from her
best friend and neighbor, a fellow packmate from the Seattle Wolf Pack. Since I
love writing really fun and sassy paranormal romances, I knew immediately that I
wanted to add complexity to the hero and heroine’s relationship to spice things
up. The hero is desperate to land a promotion at work, though he must prove he’s
over his playboy lifestyle. The heroine, on the other hand, is about to sink
into debt from paying her brother’s college tuition. It’s not long before the
two strike up a marriage bargain that heats their relationship from friends to
lovers.
I took every single trope that I absolutely loved to read about
(“friends-to-lovers”, “boy-next-door”, “fake fiancée”, “marriage bargain”), and
wove the threads of the tale together to make something really fun, snarky, and
sexy.
It’s taken me sixteen novels and countless stacks of beloved books on my shelf
for me to realize one simple thing: Yes, I’m a category romance addict. And yes,
I’m damn proud.
4 comments posted.
We are a family of readers with different tastes with the women in my life leaning towards the romance type book. This one sounds like one that they wouldn't want to put down
(John Zeiger 3:42pm August 2, 2014)