Spreading the Love

Shannon – here – for one announcement and a small introduction.

Special thanks goes out to everyone who came to the Indie Romance Convention last night! The event was amazing, and my Amazon rankings even went up! Thank you for checking out The Timely Death Trilogy and supporting me as we near the release date of Take Me Tomorrow. I appreciate your lovely support of the romance genre, and I am hoping to give back to all of you wonderful readers. Email me at shannonathompson@aol.com for a free eBook of my dystopian novel, Take Me Tomorrow before it comes out this Thursday. 😀

Here on WordPress I talk to many fellow bloggers, and their websites become valuable gems that I visit throughout my day. Today, one of those gems is writing for ShannonAThompson.com. Her name is Mishka Jenkins, author of Heart of Arena, Stolen Bloodline, and The Queen’s Jester, and host of the fantastic blog, A Writer’s Life for Me. She’s written a great post about why author write romance, and I hope you enjoy it just as much as I have enjoyed having her on here!

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Spreading the Love

Romance. By now we all pretty much know that romance doesn’t have the rep that other genres get. It’s generally classed as a sub-par genre that you should read only in the confines of your own home, where no one else can see you doing it.

Me? I read romance, I write romance, I like romance and care very little what others say on the topic, because I like what I like and have no shame in it. But, I think a lot of people miss the reason that most like the romance genre. It’s not for the bodice ripping moments or the final kiss (which are great too!), a lot of the time it’s because romance and love gives us a little bit of hope.

Every day we are bombarded with news of war and cruelty, so when I pick up a book I want to escape into it. It’s hard to go from a news story about war and then pick up a book that is filled with yet more fighting and brutality. There are times when I want hope, optimism and to read about moments that leave me breathless. For a while, romance gives me that world where there are more important things than the humdrum chores of washing the dishes or catching the bus.

Romance offers that breather and an escape in a much more comforting way than say a full-blow epic war fantasy or a fast-paced thriller. Those types of books are great, but sometimes their violence and heaviness leave me drained.

And that is why I think romance is important. It shows that not everything in the world has to be about violence or anger. The better qualities and emotions of humanity shine through in romance books, they focus on characters and how, just sometimes, the connection between people can make a bigger difference than a battle can.

If I pick up a romance book I can generally guarantee that when I finish it there will be a happy ending. The problems will have been defeated and the couple will be blissfully in love and I can sigh in happiness, because it gives me a sense of hope in a world that sometimes seems only full of war and cruelty.

Yes, I also read for those romantic moments that make me swoon and send my heart thudding into overdrive. And, honestly, what’s so wrong with that?

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Mishka Jenkins lives in the UK with her family and fluffy muse, a rough collie called Harliquin, who she couldn’t write without. She has a penchant for writing love stories in a variety of exciting genres, and plans to keep writing them for as long as she can type.

She’s written three books- Stolen Bloodline, Heart of the Arena and The Queen’s Jester.

Connect with her by visiting her blog and Amazon page.