Astoria romance novelist and English instructor on crafting the modern love story

Astoria author Kama O’Connor thinks a lot about romance and love. Writing under the pen name Kristine Lynn, her seventh romance novel — “Accidentally Dating His Boss” — was published last month by Harlequin. In addition to being a romance novelist, O’Connor is also a writing and English instructor at Clatsop Community College in Astoria. Next month, those two passions will converge in a new humanities course called “Modern Love.” From Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” to Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” the class explores the evolution of love stories in books, movies, songs and pop culture. O’Connor joins us to talk about the course, becoming a romance novelist and changing perceptions about the genre and its authors.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Kama O’Connor thinks a lot about romance and love. She’s published seven romance novels under the pen name Kristine Lynn. Her latest, the Harlequin novel “Accidentally Dating His Boss” came out last month. O’Connor is also a writing and English instructor at Clatsop Community College in Astoria. Those two worlds will converge next month in a new course called Modern Love. From Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” to Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” the class will explore the evolution of love stories in books and in pop culture. Kama O’Connor joins us now to talk about all of this. Kama O’Connor, It’s great to have you on the show.

Kama O’Connor: Oh thanks, Dave. It’s great to be here.

Miller: Were you a reader of romance novels before you became a writer of them?

O’Connor: Oh, my gosh, that is such a question to start off with. I was not, I was a romcom enthusiast. But I got into this sort of by accident. It was a bit of a dare because I wrote literary fiction and love the world of romance. But because I did my masters in fine arts, it was sort of taboo. No one talked about genre fiction.

Miller: So taboo is like the outside world. But what did you think of it yourself as somebody who got an MFA and was writing “serious fiction.” If someone said to you five years before you actually started doing it “what do you think about romance novels?”, what would you have said?

O’Connor: Gosh, I would have laughed. I honestly would have laughed out loud instead of thought out loud that that was a good idea. I held a lot of the preconceived stereotypes that folks have about romance and what makes it a maybe less than serious undertaking for both readers and authors alike. I think they’re both unfairly misaligned now. But I was one of the so called haters, or academic world what we call “outsiders.”

Miller: When did that change? How did you become a writer?

O’Connor: Well, a romance writer. I’ve been a writer my whole life.

Believe it or not, it started with “Lethal Weapon.” It’s such a funny side story. I was obsessed with Lethal Weapon movies, and the main character’s wife was a romance author. I just thought what a funny thing to be able to supply all this money to your family on the side with this pen name and write these saucy things, and never thought about it again. That was in my early twenties when Mel Gibson was in the movies.

And then one of my colleagues got published in romance writing while she was finishing up her MFA, and speaking of taboo, she was just sort of this out of left field author to be doing that on the side in secret, because we didn’t talk about it. And she said “you should try it, it’s the most fun you’ll ever have, you watch the movies, why not?” And so I spent all winter break writing a romance novel. And in three-and-a-half weeks I had my first draft of a book that will actually be out in May. It’s so fun.

Miller: How was the writing different for you than the writing you had done before?

O’Connor: Oh, I was humbled Dave. I was absolutely blown away by the complexity of romance novels. I expected that “I’ve got this MFA, I could sit down and write one of these in a month, so clearly I know what I’m doing.” But I didn’t read the genre avidly, at that point I was starting to pick them up.

Miller: It’s really hard to do anything if you don’t know what you’re doing. Your first step wasn’t to read some of these?

O’Connor: Well, it was, but it was simultaneous. And then I thought “oh, I nailed it right out of the park.” But they’re not as formulaic as people think. I think the formula actually acts as a barrier to writing, as opposed to making it easier. You’ve really got to focus on these characters’ emotional arcs much more than you do plot or these other outside factors that come in.

Miller: So because there is some kind of a formula, an impediment to the pair getting together of various kinds or some other formulas, you’re saying that does exist, but that doesn’t make it easier. Because it exists, you have to work harder to figure out something new?

O’Connor: Absolutely, and a fresh take. I’m sure anyone who reads books is aware of tropes. There’s the secret baby, which actually exists in the “Golden Compass,” which is not at all a romance novel.

Miller: What is the secret baby?

O’Connor: Harry Potter is a secret baby story, we’ve got this child growing up in this world where he doesn’t belong and he can’t figure out why, he knows he doesn’t fit in. And then oh my gosh, we find out his lineage, his parentage, and he’s not who we all thought he was.

Miller: But how does that fit into romance?

O’Connor: So we use a lot of the same tropes that exist in other popular fiction genres and other literary fiction. Secret baby is one of them. A secret prince, for example. Some of my first published books in the genre were secret prince novels. They’re just so fun to write these stories, they try to pretend to be someone they’re not to get out of this world that they’re not comfortable in, which is, believe it or not, one of the best parts about romance. It’s so relatable. Like how many times have we all wanted to not be who we were and find out we were something different and special?

Miller: In preparing for this conversation, I learned that there’s a name for a kind of story that I’ve seen a million versions of, “grumpy sunshine.” It’s hundreds of years old, Jane Austen did it, Shakespeare did it, almost every romcom I can think of can fall into this, “When Harry Met Sally,” “Annie Hall,” “Groundhog Day.” So what hasn’t changed? That history goes back 500 years, grumpy sunshine. We have a name for it now. What do you think is new?

O’Connor: This is a fascinating thing that I’ve learned. This is what happens when you put an academic in the middle of the romance world. I do deep dives into these sorts of questions and how it relates to the genre in its current state. I think grumpy sunshine exists in the same way. But when Jane Austen wrote grumpy sunshine, she was writing her life. She wasn’t writing what we’d consider Regency novels today. We’ve got this real broody moody character who you can’t help but fall in love with. It takes a while for him to come along and be sweet to her. But the problem is, that was what existed in Jane Austen’s day. So hers was really a critique of the times as much as it was a romance and a trope. And then we’ve got the dukes who have to be serious and then get to be playful, or maybe something softer with the person they can trust themselves with, who, if we are talking binary examples, the hero and the heroine, and it’s the heroine that brings that out.

But one of my critiques of the genre, because we have to be able to critique the genre and see where it can grow, is that the grumpy sunshine character, the “grumpy,” we’re running the risk of them almost being toxically masculine in some stories. And I think that’s what’s changed a little bit. We’ve got these beautiful grumpy sunshine stories, some of the rom coms that you mentioned are prime examples. But then we’ve got these characters that sort of dip over the edge. I don’t want to create any haters here, but Edward from “Twilight” is somebody that’s brought up in academia a lot as being just over the edge of grumpy into maybe toxic. So I’d say that’s one of the areas that have changed. But the trope remains fresh because a lot of folks put forth that front of who they are.

Miller: What are some of the subgenres that you have focused on in your career as a romance novelist?

O’Connor: So the prince and princess, the secret baby trope, is so stinking fun to write. I just really enjoy the glitz and the glamor of that. That’s a little bit more of my escapist romance writing. But my father is a physician and I grew up in the world of medicine. My mom worked in his private practice office when I was growing up. I was surrounded by all of these stories. So now I write these medical romances as my more serious examination of a story. I really love the world of high stakes medicine, and bringing these characters into these worlds where it’s fast paced. And it can be a little bit more on the serious side like the princes and princesses aren’t. And I’ve been doing some cowboy stuff. If you want to talk about grumpy sunshine, who’s grumpier than a cowboy in Austin, Texas, right?

Miller: If we’re talking about heterosexual romance, are there grumpy sunshines where it’s the woman who’s grumpy and it’s a man who is the sunshine?

O’Connor: Yes. Actually, it’s so funny bringing that up, Dave. Two of my books that are about to come out in April and I believe June after that are two brothers. And one of them I had to turn into the grumpy, because I started with her and she just came off so gruff. And I guess I don’t know my own line as a female inhabiting that space, what that looks like for a female to be grumpy but pull it off. But I’ve read some really good examples.

Miller: But it didn’t work for you, so you had to switch it. You had to go back to the old norm?

O’Connor: I did. She sounded just nitpicky and sort of awful. I had to completely rewrite the book.

Miller: An Amazon reviewer for one of your books wrote “I enjoyed this book. There was just the right amount of drama and naughty parts.” How do you think about that balance, and how much direction do publishers give you about that balance?

O’Connor: Ooh, great. For me, that balance resides in a love scene being part of the character’s natural character arc and evolution. So it’s not [that] there’s a number of scenes that need to happen. Although in reading, just like watching movies, you sort of plot out those beats to a movie, it’s very similar. In a book with a little bit more sexual content, a little spicier is what we would say, there tend to be two or three of those scenes, especially for Harlequins. Although they run the gamut. There are sweet Harlequins all the way to very, very spicy. And so for me, I want to make sure that it feels natural and organic that a character with his or her partner can look at them and really feel safe in those moments, so it doesn’t feel like a cliche, like “well, there’s that one bed,” which is another popular trope. “So we have to get busy.”

Miller: Harlequin is one of the publishers, one of the most famous ones and one of the ones you’ve worked with for some of your books. How much direction do they give you? Because as you said, it’s not purely formulaic. But there is some formula that readers have come to expect. Do publishers say “we’d like you to follow this basic structure”?

O’Connor: Different publishers handle that in different ways. Right now, I’m some sort of simultaneously being published by two different houses. So there’s Harlequin, but it’s series romance. The interesting part about Harlequin is there’s branches of it. The series is like “Heartwarming,” “Harlequin Presents.” They’re what you would see those really thin tiny books on a Walmart shelf. That’s where the medicals are. And yeah, they do give you some parameters. It’s got to be 50,000 words, plus or minus 10%. I’m lucky enough that they can be sweet or spicy for the medical line.

Miller: Those are the words that they use?

O’Connor: Correct, yeah. We’re getting away from “clean” and “dirty” to signify that any sexual content would be dirty. But yeah, it’s pretty funny the parameter. Sometimes there’s little spice labels, like with chili peppers.

Miller: Like you’re at a Thai restaurant.

O’Connor: Totally, yes. But Tule, I just wrote the book and they said “Love it, we’re going to run with this.”

Miller: That’s a different publisher?

O’Connor: That’s the other publisher, a female-owned and operated publisher.

Miller: Do you mind reading us an excerpt from early “All’s Fair With Love and Cowboys?”

O’Connor: Yeah, this is a Tule novel that’s coming out April 4th. And yeah, I’d love to.

Miller: It may need a little bit of a set up here. This is a woman who’s returning to her family ranch after making a business name for herself in the big city.

O’Connor: Yep, absolutely. And her father has passed away and left her this ranch that’s really in disrepair. And when she left the ranch, she really didn’t expect to be back. Her father kicked her out to the big city, but she also left behind her high school sweetheart when she left. So that’s the scene that we’ll pick up on.

[Reading an excerpt] “Out of the corner of her sight a figure appeared, but through her blurred vision, she couldn’t make out much detail. ‘Who the-’ She shot out of the SUV before the driver could open the door for her, drying her cheeks as she went. ‘Excuse me, but this is Newman property. May I ask what you’re doing?’

“The man turned to face her and her breath stalled. The chill that had been nagging her all morning evaporated. Heat and familiarity raced over her skin. Chiseled jawline bathed in scruff, uninterested frown tugged at the corners of his mouth. Jade green eyes belied strength and wit. She’d spent one too many hours drowning in those eyes to forget them or the man they belonged to. The way he stood there hands on his hips like he owned the place was familiar and yet not. One thing was for certain, he looked like he belonged there. If only there wasn’t her father’s land, and he wasn’t 15 years too late.”

Miller: You talked earlier about the disdain that people in the academic world used to, maybe to some extent still do, hurl at the romance genre. I’m wondering about the flipside, has becoming a romance novelist yourself changed or affected the way you think about the other half of your professional life, about academia itself?

O’Connor: It has. And I really love that spin on the question because it’s really easy to talk about the hate, the outsider’s perspective. But what’s been really great is the way I’ve been welcomed in this new academic space. I don’t know how much the listeners are aware, but Astoria, Oregon is filled with writers and artists. It’s per capita very rich in that population. And so I’ve been welcomed into that community, both as an academic and a romance author, to the point that I’m giving talks at local bookstores. I’m doing a Women’s History Month reading from one of my novels. And it’s allowed me time and space to sit with my students and say “what do you want to write?” Because I teach fiction. Not everyone was like this in my masters of fine arts program. I don’t want to be like the folks who said you can’t. I’d like to invite students in and find out what it is they’d like to write about. So it’s changed dramatically.

Miller: But what can folks expect at the Ales and Ideas talk you’re giving in Astoria tomorrow evening?

O’Connor: Well, we’re going to talk a little bit about everything. The “outsider” perspective of romance, where it’s going, what it does right, maybe some places that the area could grow. And we’re really going to dig deep into what the future of romance might look like.

Miller: Kama O’Connor, thanks very much.

O’Connor: Thank you so much, Dave. It’s a pleasure being here.

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