Here is my problem, I recently received one last critique on
my finished novel “Forbidden Connection”, and this one, along with several
others was on the line of, “Love the premise, hate that they fall in love so
quickly.”
Excuse me?
The entire premise of the story is that the hero is part of
an alien society which is set up around insuring that their youth form a “connection”
with someone of the opposite sex by a certain age, but the hero somehow manages
to “connect” with a young lady who isn’t part of their group. Ergo the title.
I even have in the story where he tells his dad he loves the
girl and his dad says, “Son, with the connection, you have no choice in the
matter.”
I also have a subplot where the heroine’s cousin connects
with the hero’s sister. The cousin goes from barely knowing the hero’s sister
exists to can’t take his eyes off her in a matter of minutes! How else I can
show this connection is instantaneous? I’m mean I’m certain I didn’t show it with
the hero and heroine getting together, because at the very first of the story, I
have the hero bemoaning that he finds her, an outsider, so attractive. I also
have her telling him she finds him attractive and she had tried to get his
attention while they were still at school together.
In other words, the entire premise of the story isn’t whether
or not they fall in love. It is about whether or not their families will accept
their union, period.
Maybe my mistake is in saying this is a romance, since all
other such stories are about the couple getting together and falling in love,
not about whether or not their love will be accepted by those around them, but
what kind of story would it categorized as?
It can’t be sci-fi, even though the hero is an alien, it is
set on contemporary Earth, no fancy technology or anything.
And it can’t really be paranormal because the closest it
comes to that is the form of ESP that is what the hero’s people call the
connection. It’s a one on one thing. This is in fact how they
form couples. There are no spirits, no magic, no mysticism. Nothing
supernatural beyond “the connection.”
And now clearly, only a few people see it as romance, the
few who managed to get that they fall in love so fast because of “the
connection.” The few who actually get the premise.
So now the issue is, do I scrap the entire story and start all
over without “the connection” as part of it (in other words come up with a
different premise) or do I try to figure out a different way to market this story
as is.
I’m telling you, each time I’ve mentioned that I got a critique
saying they didn’t like how fast they fell in love to any of the few people who
actually get the premise, they’ve exclaimed, “But that’s the entire story!”
And they are right. If I change that they fall in love so
fast, if I take out that her cousin and his sister fall in love even faster,
then I don’t have a story at all.
After all, why even have the worry about acceptance if you
don’t love the person in first place?
And how do I market a story that isn’t your typical
romance/sci-fi/paranormal, it really doesn’t fit in any of those categories,
and it doesn’t fit at all in any other category. So where do I market it? Who
is the audience?
Well I already know that. I know that from the reaction of
my then preteen and teenaged nieces to the first draft of the story. They not
only loved it they drove their mother mad with talking about the hero and
heroine as if they were real and talking about the hero’s alien culture as if
it really existed.
And one of my nephews, on hearing how much his sisters
talked about these aliens, snuck onto my sister’s computer and read it himself.
He loved all the alien parts of the story and hated, as he put it way back
then, “all the mushy stuff.” Of course, he wasn’t a teenager yet, and I haven’t
asked how he feels about all that mushy stuff now. Then again, I never expected
him to read it, I never intended this to be something guys would read.
But now I need to figure out who would read it beyond my nieces,
their mother, and my one friend who all got the premise. Any suggestions?
Happy writing everyone. 😊
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