It’s kind of strange to call The Warlord’s Concubine a Paranormal Romance. When I hear paranormal, I’m still thinking of ghosts and the occult. Of modern day Satanists and wiccans.

Yet calling it a fantasy romance makes me think of, like, a vacation cruise where you meet a gorgeous person and instantly are swept into this beautiful, wonderful thing with them. Fantasy is more widely used to describe our fancies and fantasies, more so than the genre of fantastical things out of fairy tales.

Phrases like high fantasy, low fantasy, epic fantasy… they’re still only well known to people that grew up reading scifi/fantasy in the 80s and 90s, when wizards and dragons were more popular than vampires and demons.

We grew up reading those types of books, though, and they’ve inspired us a lot in our writing. We’ve never really been drawn to urban fantasy in books (though we love shows like Buffy!), but there are themes there that we love to explore. Especially the dark and intense relationships.

So we deem The Warlord’s Concubine as a paranormal romance because language is all about conveying an idea clearly to as many people as you can. Our books tend to be dark and gritty, like the gothic novels that Paranormal romance was born of. They tend to feature taboo relationships between humans and something otherworldly. Demonic. Evil. Fantastical.

But in the end, it’s always about the characters. About their relationship and how it develops. About how it changes – and how it changes them.

The Warlord’s Concubine, for us, was about taking a lot of really common themes of dominance, submission, fantasy, and really making it into something unique. The relationship between the two main characters – Mirella and the God-King – starts out as something typical and blooms into something deeper.

They scrape away the surface of one another and get to know that raw need beneath.

It isn’t the sweep you off your feet romance. It isn’t the doting man and the happy woman, falling flawlessly in love. It’s dirty, and it’s extreme, but it’s what works for them.

That’s been what we’ve always liked exploring. Imperfect relationships, love that adapts to the partners, affection that’s shown in subtle and personal ways.

So maybe paranormal romance is what describes us and our work best. It’s dark, and gritty, and filled with powerful emotions and beings that are fantastical. Yet the relationships, the core of the books, they’re relatable and honest.