Thursday 8 June 2017

A Clarification of Definitions

So I'm throwing my hat into a three-ring circus this month with all the pitch contests.  One consistent quality is that each entrant has to define their genre.  Always useful.

I'm pitching a Fantasy Romance, but not every contest has #FR as a category. Do I cringe and stick a #PR tag on it, or do I be true to the novel and double-tag it with #F and #R?  I've been doing the latter, because Of The Dark, despite it's magic, is definitely NOT a Paranormal Romance.

There is a difference between Paranormal Romance and Fantasy Romance.

  • Paranormal Romance is a real world with a layer of magic over it. 
  • Fantasy Romance is a fantasy world (sometimes a second world, alternate reality or otherworld) with magic in it.


If you take all the magical stuff out of your world, and left everything else behind, how would your Romance be categorised?  If you remove the vampires and the shifters et al., you'd be left with a contemporary Romance. Take magic out of a Fantasy Romance, you've still got a Fantasy Romance.

I can't call an otherworld Fantasy Romance a "Paranormal", because there's no "normal" to para.

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Her Grace finds these contests fun, but doesn't eschew the Original Contest of sending a query to an agent the old-fashioned way.

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