Writing romance is a constantly changing world. Okay, all writing is, but I don’t often notice it quite as much as I have these last several months.
It’s like seeing your kid daily, it’s still your kid. But someone sees them after a year or two gap and they can’t stop talking about how much the kid changed.
Now try that for five years, as my romance writing just did.
From 2012 to 2019 I published some 50 romance novels and over 70 short stories, most of them in what I now call the Emily Beale Universe (emilybeale.com). Then I stopped. I found it more and more challenging to keep the romance fresh…and I had this great idea for a thriller series wrapped around a woman air-crash investigator who is on the autism spectrum. (Fourteen books later, I’m still in love with Miranda Chase, miranda-chase.com.)
To make it even more of a time gap, I hadn’t written my major military romantic suspense heroine, Emily Beale, in an MRS since 2016.
However, my fans have been clamoring for a new Emily Beale book since, well, the first Emily Beale book back in 2012.
Restarting
How did I decide it was time to return to a long-closed series—long-closed genre for that matter? It was not at the begging of the fans. As Stephen King says in his fabulous On Writing book, I keep my ideas’ door firmly closed to the outside world (except for my lady, who’s an awesome brainstorming partner).
Nor was it because I’d finally recovered from some sort of romance burn-out. If you read my Miranda Chase, you’ll find plenty of strong romantic elements. As an intriguing side note, in a thriller series, the relationships are spread out over a much longer arc. As the Happy Ever After is for the plot elements (i.e. the crisis is solved and the world survives to turn another day) and not the love stories, the relationships can add grist without conclusion. Spinning out their personal lives—it’s the same core team throughout the whole thriller series—allows me much more depth of in motivations and evolving those relationships. Seriously fun.
But back to my main point, restarting a romance series.
The characters had been very quiet. Oh, now and then they’d pop their heads up with a question or idea, but nothing much came of it. The core of a book needs a powerful character question. I used to think this was especially true of romance but, the more I write, the more I think it applies across all genres.
And the characters from my Emily Beale Universe weren’t tossing out any big character-side questions. Until last winter.
The Question
Oddly, it didn’t come from the romantic couple. They took me a while to find. No, to relaunch an older and successful series, the question needed a bigger source.
Well, the core voice of the entire series was Emily Beale. No one, in all those books, wasn’t somehow affected by Emily (even books and stories she wasn’t in at all). The question had to come from her.
And, my own theory, the question must be: simple, yet deep.
For Emily, it ultimately came down to “What’s next?” It was only as I delved into the question that I found those deeper layers. How do I dig down? Easy. I write the book and see what I learn.
To answer her question, I had to find what drove it. Emily is a force of nature, the best at everything she does and not an other character wouldn’t take the bullet for her because she engenders that much respect. For her, it turned out that “What’s next?” is a very deep question because it must be something that she believes in and believes that it serves her country, her team, and her family. Also, she’s never asked what might serve her best, a huge (and interesting) blind spot.
In fact, it’s such a big question that, like the romances in my thriller series that I mentioned earlier, it won’t fit within a single book. I fully expect that this is a launch of a new series (the next characters haven’t fully shown up yet, but I expect to hear from them soon…perhaps this next winter). And if it becomes a series, Emily’s question is going to drive right up the core of these titles for a long time to come.
The Craft
“Putting my romance hat back on” as a writer was like riding a bicycle, after a multi-decade gap. There’s an inherent structure to a romance, any romance. There’s a meeting (or re-meeting for second-chance), there’s connection and troubles galore, and finally they get their Happy Ever After. I’m a purist. To me, being a romance means there’s an HEA. (HFN, Happy for Now, just makes me angry. I heaved Bridget Jones Diary: The Edge of Reason at the wall at about page five because I’d bought into the HEA of the first book and then had it taken away. Like all the actors, but movie #2 annoyed the crap out of me, too. Just sayin’.)
Romance structure can be pure (as in contemporary romance), mixed-in (like romantic suspense), or nearly overwhelmed by other elements (vampire lit among others). But once familiar with the structure, and I mean down to a writer’s core after crafting numerous books, it becomes a powerful base to build story upon.
Over the last five years of writing thrillers, I’ve learned the thriller core as well. But it’s a very different tool. Story has a different shape, the writing has a faster pacing, the action behaves differently. The chapter, paragraph, and even sentence structure are quite different.
So, “putting my romance hat back on” made me feel like I was stuttering at the keyboard. (I put a lot of mileage on the backspace key in the first hundred pages, a lot.)
Keeping Clear
This was actually the biggest challenge.
I remember way back when I’d finished my first fantasy novel. It sold to a tiny press, so I was hands-on for every step: edit, polish, cover design, and final production. When it was all done, the editor turned to me and said, “Great. When do I get the next book?”
Uh…
I still think the scariest moment in my entire twenty-nine years of writing was opening that blank white screen and knowing that, for a fact, anything I wrote was going to be utter crap compared to the book I’d just been working on. It took me many books to truly understand that the purpose of the first draft, to get something, anything down on the page (you can’t edit a blank page). I actually now call my first draft, the Ugly Draft. It keeps the pressure off—a bit.
After so long hiatus, I ran into the same issue.
The original Night Stalkers, Firehawks, and Delta Force series won numerous awards and titles: Top 10 and Top 5 romance of the year from people like Booklist, Barnes & Noble, and NPR. (I typically no longer submit my titles to traditional review sites, but it was certainly fun while it lasted.)
Now I was sitting down, opening that blank document once again, with little more in mind than Emily’s question. All of those accolades had to be left outside the closed door because anything I wrote, even after 75 novels, was going to be…well, there’s a reason I call it the Ugly Draft. And to do it in a genre I hadn’t touched in five years…
There’s a screen saver on my computer, a tumbling: Let Go! Have Fun! The more I did those two simple tasks, the easier the writing became. I was there to tell a good story. Not to load myself down with stress and angst.
The Result
It’s both similar and different. It follows the same romance structure that I developed in my earlier military romantic suspense titles. And I did enjoy putting that particular writer hat back on.
But it’s also, in some ways, unrecognizably different. That’s probably mostly my perception rather than my readers’ reactions. But the feel, the depth, the focus are far more elaborate than those earlier titles. Of course, I’ve also had about 2.5M more words of practice since the last time I wrote a big Emily Beale story, so I’m far more conscious of those bigger elements and building them as I go.
Now? It’s time to let it out into the world. And move along! I’m already 30K words into the next book (another Miranda Chase at the moment).
If you want to see what I wrought, Night Stalkers Reload #1: Guard the East Flank releases June 1 direct-from-the-author at https://mlbuchman.com and is available everywhere for a July 1 pre-order (https://books2read.com/guard-the-east-flank).
BIO
USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestseller M. L. "Matt" Buchman has over 75 novels, 200 short stories, and 50 read-by-author audiobooks. From the beginning, his powerful female heroines insisted on putting character first, then a great adventure.
PW declares of his Miranda Chase action-adventure thrillers that: “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more.”
About his military romantic thrillers: “Like Robert Ludlum and Nora Roberts had a book baby.”
A project manager with a geophysics degree, he’s designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, solo-sailed a 50’ sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and designs quilts. He and his wife presently live on the North Shore of Massachusetts. More at: https://mlbuchman.com
