Before I started writing alien romances I read dozens on Kindle
and I still read them. I've read some really good ones and some that
were pretty awful. Some of the bad ones seem like poor translations
or they have been written by people whose English is their second
language. Even some of the latter are pretty good despite some of the
awkward phrasing. The better ones would benefit from good editing by
someone whose first language is English.
I most recently read two that were not horribly bad, but were
merely mediocre. The author made a lot of common mistakes that
budding authors make. Instead of building three dimensional
characters, they simply tell what happened. They tell what the
characters did and saw, but we don't know what they are thinking and
feeling.
A lot of these alien romances are based on the premise of an alien
world in need of females because their civilization is unbalanced
with a great surplus of males and not enough breeding females to keep
the race going. Some of the writers are quite creative about how this
came about, while others give no plausible explanation. The
explanation is not always vital to the story due to the reader's
willingness to suspend disbelief.
Going back to the two samples in which each protagonist is
abducted by an alien or aliens. Both had a pretty good framework for
a story, but they both fell short. The first one started out like a
close encounter abduction where the heroine finds herself being
experimented on with no idea how she got there. She is obviously
scared and confused then resistant against the plan for her to bear
young for the prince of the realm.
Way to much prose is spent on the experimentation and we don't get
a real sense of the hero with little interaction between them. The
heroine finds him attractive physically, but not until the very end
did I find a reason to like him much. Unfortunately, by that point I
just want to be done with the story that left me with more questions
than answers.
The second alien romance was a better story, but the beginning was
tedious in wading through a broken romance for a number of pages.
All of those details were boring. All we really needed to know was
that she had a broken romance and moved to a new town because of it.
That was background, not the story the reader wants. They want to
know about the alien romance. I didn't want to know about her
unpacking and getting groceries. The first date with the grocery
clerk's son was unnecessary to the story. Only the second date was
pertinent.
The heroine goes to a bar and leaves to be accosted by a biker
gang(?) and the alien hero rescues her and takes her back to his
planet to be his mate. For me the biker gang was even further out
there than the alien abduction romance. The alien world and diverse
culture was interesting but again I wasn't feeling the love---and not
even much of a sexual attraction.
I feel the point of the alien romance just like any romance is to
take you away from your mundane existence to a place far away to
spend a sexually satisfying life with an attractive male who loves
you like no other for the rest of your life. You have to make the
reader feel the love if you want to call it a romance.
Copyright © 2016 by Clarissa Lake
