ROMANCE

WHEN I began my authoring career, my first editor said, “Raymond, if you want to be a mainstream author, you need to know how to write violence and sex,” meaning, they might be exceptionally challenging to write about. In fact, violence and sex are everywhere, often together these days. What I found easiest was writing about violence and sex, and most challenging writing romance. Okay, you might say, that’s because Raymond’s a he. However, to be honest, I find most men and women I know equally romantic. Again, you might retort, that’s because Raymond’s bi. That one’s a bit harder to discount, but irrespective of inclination, I find romance everywhere alongside the more in-your-face violence and occasionally ribald sex.

For more clarity, I turned to my trusty dictionary, to find that romance (definition one) is “a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.” Okay, I get it. Romance is supposed to lead to that elusive state of being called love, which is assumed to lead to lust and ultimately sex, which, if you take the position that people are inherently dangerous, means at least the possibility of violence, or, if nothing else, violation. Or, if neither, then the issue of trust. But there’s also definition two: “a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.” Now that one I can wrap my heart and mind around. As an author, I’ve always loved writing about mystery and excitement, and from my bio (and I quote) “the multi-award-winning, reclusive writer-artist-photographer-videographer, who, in his own words, ‘lives and breathes’ San Francisco” — surely implying a well-established remoteness from everyday life. So, I am a romantic!

In fact, I’ve always held that it’s the third part of definition two that more than anything else categorizes romance, if you, like me, are of the opinion that romance is a situation outside everyday life. That is to a large extent what makes it exciting and mysterious, whether associated with actual lust, love and sex or not. A torn bodice may be just that. It doesn’t necessarily lead to lust, love and sex, but there is that ever-present, deep-seated desire, hope, expectation — whatever you want to call it — of something more that makes it romantic. Romance is a nether world, or maybe better, simply an exception to everyday life, holding within it the faint but heart-wrenching promise of something even more exciting and mysterious.

Call me existential, but I think that’s a pretty good way of viewing and authoring romance. It’s all about tapping into that basic human need, want and desire to not be alone in this world, given that much of the “everyday life” is mostly alone. While we were being born, we were overwhelmingly alone, though once born it was generally into warm human arms. When we die, everyone knows in their deepest of hearts that we die alone. It’s romance that gives us that much needed feeling of companionship, with the possibility of something even more exciting, mysterious and comforting that gives meaning to life. I tried to convey this in my newly released novel, THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor, that begins with being born from a baby’s unique perspective and unfolds through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood in a future world, not unlike our dis-integrating current world — “a challenging and dangerous future place for three young firebrands to live.” Call it danger or romance or both, it’s all about our deepest hopes, fears and desires — the very fabric of life that clothes our everyday mundane existence and makes life worth living.

The Edge of Madness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je6CC...