Who doesn’t love a good love story? It’s become a running joke between me and my wife that almost invariably, every movie we watch is really a love story. Sometimes it stretches credulity but it’s there if you look for it.

That being said, I don’t write a lot of love stories. I’ve done some sub-plots, some flirtations but no, nothing you could call an out and out love story. The closest I suppose I’ve come to that would be the sub-plot in A Time to Love and A Time to Hate resulting in William Riker (finally) proposing to Deanna Troi.

Love and romance is incredibly intimate and subtle, tricky to pull off. Maybe that’s one reason I’ve never really tackled it as a theme, lacking faith in my skill as a writer to successfully convey those emotions to the reader. Not that I don’t want to try but the opportunity has yet to really present itself.

With that said, I love women. I find myself drawn to writing female characters, hence my as-yet incomplete young adult novel featuring a teen girl lead. Or that my POV character in the ReDeus series is Gabriella Trotter, a woman searching for…something. Gabriella is like me, not quite believing in gods and searching for proof there is something worth believing in. In her story in ReDeus: Native Lands she wound up leaving Seattle, going on the road to see what’s out there.

I hope among the things she will discover will be some form of love. Over the last few months I’ve been mulling over where she should go first and what she should do since her story will form my first ReDeus novel, lightly pencilled in for next year, after solo outings by Paul Kupperberg and Aaron Rosenberg. She is opening herself up to absorb new experiences; her journalist’s mind a sponge, seeking information. How she processes those details and what she does with her newly acquired knowledge will certainly be interesting, especially with Coyote never far from her.

Does he love her? Of course not. She’s a trifle, a brief amusement in his larger game. But Gabriella is certainly worthy of love and being loved. I need to give this one some more thought, perhaps finally challenging myself to try my hand at an honest romance set against a reforming America, under the watchful eyes of the gods.

While I ponder this, stick around and see what my fellow inmates in the C8 asylum have to say on the subject of romance.