The main pov is a thief but that goes back to when I first started out and didn’t know any better. I’m going to think long and hard about changing this as really, she only uses her training on occasion like picking locks to escape. Taking that way would make things even harder for her. >:3 Hea.

she’s a thief because I love the character Olive so much Olive in the book Azure Bonds. That was the best Fantasy book I rever read and it was from Forgotten Realms, popcorn fantasy. But wasn’t popcorn fantasy it had an actual plot, developed characters that made cry and root for them. Loved it.

I think it’s time to let go of “I wanna be like” and find a different thing for Merryn to be, maybe something new that hasn’t been invented yet.

A vintner! I like it. Room for all sorts of shenanigans.

At this point I am more or less married to using the bee keeper in my next series. Since this is scheduled to be written between now and when I leave for my new life in the off-world colonies, I have some time to think about it. And you make your heroine super cool under her own steam!

Eowyn could be considered a princess in LOTR. She was pretty cool, too!

Yet, I feel we have drifted into a non sequitur. Regency Romance has tropes because dukes and earls DEFINE the genre. Kim, at least in my POV, is addressing a lot of the fantasy stories, not Regency Romance. As an editor that gets countless new MSs from new writers, many of them fantasy? I swear they’re using a drop-down menu when coming up with a story. It’s dull. It’s done. It’s utterly predictable in a genre that should have the most imagination.

You want to sell books, give audiences the same but DIFFERENT. Want to stick with the same old same old fine, but then don’t gripe about crap book sales.

GoT is not the singularly most popular fantasy since LOTR because of a princess or a rogue who mysteriously really is a princess with a brooding knight with a sappy backstory.

Heck LOTR didn’t even really have a princess unless you count Boring Elf Girl With Fainting Couch. What made these stories legendary were the OTHER characters from all walks of life and protagonists who defied expectations (Hobbits). The most interesting characters actually came from common beginnings. Even if we look GoT and at Daenerys. She started out as the backdrop for her narcissist brother who sold her off to a horse tribe. She rose from nothing. A disgraced family, sold as chattel and after everything she scrounged through she ROSE to become royalty through blood, death, tears, and loss.

Romance is a whole other world. It has formulas. There is an HEA. You write Regency, it goes with royalty. But even a genre with strict constraints needs a shot in the arm with something fresh to stand out and set it apart from every other romance writer who’s casting the same folk. Beyond that? Fantasy? Up the game. None of us readers are interested in the low-hanging fruit. It has bug nibbles in it.

Elizabeth, I agree with you. People may say they want something different, but what they really want is the same old, same old with maybe, just maybe, a slight twist here and there. Tropes are familiar, strong, and people like them–that’s why they’re tropes.