Yep, I said genre.

For Christmas/Yule/halfway-through-the-dark-day, my lovely spouse gave me a big stack of paranormal romances—at my request.

I’ve never really read any paranormal romance, you see.

What?! The urban fantasy writer does not know the genre’s illegitimate-half-sister, the paranormal romance?! It’s madness, I know, since the line is so fine it hardly exists. Is Laurell K. Hamilton’s work urban fantasy, or P.R.? Jim Butcher’s Dreden series is firmly (harhar) U.F., but where does Kim Harrison fit? Is Ilona Andrews’s Kate Daniels series a romantic urban fantasy or a thriller urban fantasy?

You get my point.

You may remember that I said I’m currently writing a romance, and if you follow me on Twitter, you may further remember me saying that I’m almost a quarter of the way into the book and there have been about six fighting scenes and zero kissing scenes. Romance continues to elude me.

So now I’m reading paranormal romance, and I’m finding the hair even harder to split. But as I make my way through the twelve-book stack, I’ll be observing here some of the things I learn from each book. I hope, as readers and (some of us) writers, we’ll learn a little bit about genre, writing, and reading as I study each book with a critical eye.

The more, erm, “romantic” books, I may be less critical about because, um, the squelchy bits* only vary so much from book to book. So stay tuned in January and February, and I’ll tell you a little bit about my exploits in the paranormal romance genre.

Coming soon: Pleasure Unbound by Larissa Ione and Darkfever by Karen Moning. I’ll also be venturing into Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake Series and crossing from True Blood to The Southern Vampire Mysteries. Are there any other paranormal romances you would recommend? (They may very well already stand in my to-be-read pile, but refer away!)