Danica Avet is in the building!

Hey, Danica! Welcome to the Pink Fuzzy Writers place this Monday morning. What do you have there? Oh, my! What a hot cover.

Does everyone have something to drink and munch? Take it away Danica!

The Moral of the Story

Do you remember when you were little and you read Aesop’s Fables? There was always a moral to the story, some lesson to be learned that I suppose our teachers and parents hoped we would take with us when we left that classroom. I’m sure I learned something, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was. However, I have discovered that as a writer, I follow almost the same formula Aesop did in his storytelling.

When I began to write, I never set out to write a story with a moral. Why would I want to? I was writing about romance and how love conquers all! But then I realized there’s a moral in every romance.

As readers, we want characters in the books we read to be complex and flawed; who wants to read about perfect people? Not me. I want someone who has issues, like me (not necessarily my issues, but you know what I mean). I want to read about someone who triumphs in the end and yes, love conquers all. As a writer, however, I never made that conscious connection. It was only during a recent discussion with someone that I discovered that I write modern day romantic fables.

In the first book of my Veil series, Ruby: Uncut and on the Loose, the heroine has a painful past and she believes being independent from everything and everyone is the only way to be. The hero has…well, a hero complex. He’ll sacrifice everything, even his own love, to make the world a better place. The moral of that story was discovering what’s really important in life. It’s learning to compromise, not just with a loved one, but also with yourself. Deep, huh?

The second book, Succubus-in-Waiting was perhaps a little more blatant than that. That book was about acceptance and prejudice. The heroine knows she’s different, a freak. And really, how could anyone want her because of that? The hero hates succubi because of what one did to his brother. The moral of this story is that hatred and prejudice can blind you to what’s right in front of you. It’s also about accepting and loving who you are, no matter how different you are from “normal” society.

Then we get to the third book, Lifestyles of the Fey and Dangerous. This book is darker than the first two. When I wrote it, I didn’t even ponder a moral or the darkness. I just knew the heroine was going to have to overcome an awful lot. Why? Because I made her an assassin who was out to kill the hero (who, by the way, has his own demons to deal with). How could an assassin be a lovable heroine? How could a former bad guy (the hero) become a sympathetic hero? I made them suffer. There. I said it. I tormented them and then I threw them together and made them fall in love. The moral of this book is that no matter how horrible things can be, how utterly hopeless things seem, there’s always hope. It may not look the way you expected it to, but it’s there just waiting for you to find it.

I never set out to do any of this. It was never my intention to delve deeper into the underlying themes of my stories, but I find I can’t help myself. My brain wants to pick it apart to see what I was really thinking and I was amazed. So to my fellow writers, have you noticed any morals in your stories that you hadn’t before? To the readers, I have to ask the same question. What morals have you discovered in reading romance and has it ask the same question. What morals have you discovered in reading romance and has it helped you in your day-to-day lives?

I'll be giving away a hand-painted mask to one (or possibly two, depending on how many comments) commenter.

The buy link for the book is http://bookstrand.com/lifestyles-of-the-fey-and-dangerous.

http://danicaavet.wordpress.com/

http://danicaavet.blogspot.com/


Hey let's get lots of comments and make her give away 2 masks!