Not so long ago one of my Friends (we’ll call her Amy), who had just read my contemporary fantasy novel Fight The Gods, pointed something out to me that I hadn’t really thought about: Fight The Gods is a romance.

Amy, you see, isn’t the world’s biggest fan of fantasy adventure. It was only because her fiance–we’ll call him Blair–dragged her to the Farpoint con in Timonium, Maryland that she saw Fight The Gods sitting on my table and got interested enough to secure a copy. Her hopes for it weren’t very high, I think. But she liked it. And she did so purely because she had discovered a thread that, for her, made the experience worthwhile. “It’s a romance,” she told Blair when she was done. Told him unequivocally, I might add, because Amy is pretty firm in her opinions.

To be honest, I had never thought of Fight The Gods in that light before. I was all focused on the protagonist’s journey of self-discovery, on the conflicts that shape him, on the deepening mystery, on the whiplash-inducing, roller coaster action of the plot. I wasn’t really thinking about true love.

But it happened. Pretty much the way real love does, now that I think about. It comes out of nowhere, when you least expect it.

Mind you, the protagonist’s girlfriend, a New York City cop, is no freakin’ Disney princess. She’s tough, no-nonsense, even caustic at times. But she’s deeply in love with our hero and he’s deeply in love with her. And if not for that love, there’s no adventure, no mystery, no self-discovery, no roller coaster.

Of course, all the good stories are romances. Not just in the modern boy-meets-girl (or some variation thereon) sense of the word, but in the original epic-striving-for-a-higher-ideal sense of the word. They involve putting someone or something on a plane higher than oneself.

Except Amy wasn’t talking about the latter meaning. She meant the hugging-and-kissing thing, the emotional attachment so intense that someone would risk everything–life and more–for his or her significant other. And in the case of Fight The Gods, she was absolutely right. It was a romance.

It was about a guy who loved high and far and a gal who returned that love, and the way in which they redeem each other across barriers mortals seldom cross. And in the end…well, in the end, you find out what the beginning was about. Because the end and the beginning of a book have a love affair all their own, now don’t they?

So…Fight The Gods? A love story. Go figure. It just goes to show: You Learn something new every day.

So far my novelist career has been comprised of outrageous science fiction adventures, a mix of screwball comedies and multi-dimensional chaos.

But within those pages … are love stories.

In my scifi backpacking comedy Finders Keepers, Donald and Danielle are newlyweds in Eternity, who, through bizarre machinations, accidentally knock a jar of the Universe’s DNA into the still for
ming Earth.

As these two characters fret about the disaster they’ve caused, they individually go to great lengths to protect the other. As Donald says at one point of Danielle, “She’s not just wife, she’s my girl.” But when he says those things … that’s really me talking about my own wife, Liz.

We’ve been together now for more than 13 years, and have two children together. Yes, she’s the mother of my children and indeed she is my wife. And she’s my girl.

Switching gears to my scifi adventure Crossline, our hero, space pilot Marcus Powell, is displaced into a modern-day, parallel Earth, desperately trying to get back home to his wife and daughter. When he laments his predicament — that he is responsible, at least in part, for his own misfortune — he’s expressing his innate desire to be reunited with his girls. Nothing else to him matters.

When I wrote Crossline, it was always me — as a husband and father — thinking about how I’d feel and act if I was ever separated from my family, and what I’d be willing to do to be reunited with them.

My novels have been described in many ways, but no matter what adjectives one might use, I know that in my writer’s heart, there are love stories within those pages.

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.

But seriously, folks.

My New’s Years resolution is to stop procrastinating and finish what I

Back in 1981, I made a New Year’s resolution to write a book. More specifically, a fantasy novel. It would be my first. If it was also to be my last, I would nonetheless die a happy man. That was what I told anyone who would listen: Gimme one, just one, and I’ll be content. After all, I’ll be a writer.

Four years later, that book was published. It was called The Hammer and The Horn. Four months after that I delivered the sequel to my editor at Warner Books. I was on my way.

But I had a new goal, one that seemed unattainable but was all the more appealing for its unattain-ability. I was going to write 100 books in all. Sounds greedy, considering I’d been willing to settle for one back in ’81. And prideful, definitely prideful. But then, a man’s reach should always exceed his grasp…or, I mean really, what’s a heaven for?

100 books. Certainly, I wouldn’t be the first. But it would take a lifetime. And so it began…

After my first four books came out, my agent hooked me up with editor Dave Stern at Pocket Books, who almost derailed my life’s plan when he turned down my first outline. But he liked the second one, so I was back on track.

In the years that followed, I wrote some 35 Star Trek books. Not just novels, either. The nifty, compact, and eminently useful Star Trek Federation Travel Guide? That was me (though, to be fair, the idea came from editor Margaret Clark). The beautiful and impressive coffee table book New Worlds, New Civilizations? Me again (as before, with a helping hand from Margaret).

I also wrote the adaptation of Batman & Robin, the autobiography of Hulk Hogan, sequels to The Wolf Man movie and the Aliens franchise, a bunch of Lois & Clark novels, and a whole lot more. A few years ago, I co-founded Crazy 8 Press, which published my last two original novels and is currently re-releasing The Hammer and The Horn.

The total to date? 71 books. So just 29 to go–including I Am The Salamander, the book I’m working on now. The unattainable now seems strangely possible. Not a slam dunk, certainly, but it could happen.

And it all goes back to a New Year’s resolution 32 years ago.

To me, the weird thing about New Year’s resolutions isn’t when we make them–though picking an arbitrary date like January 1st rather than March 12th or September 29th is undeniably weird. It’s that we give ourselves a year to carry them out.

Some resolutions can’t be carried out in twelve months. Some of them take a lifetime.