I've decided I've been too hard on female urban fantasy writers and their penchant for romance plot lines. It had gotten bad enough that I began to complain that women were evidently incapable of writing without romance either being the main point of the story, or at least as important as the ostensible central plot.
But now I need a subplot. My story's going well, actually. I'm at just over 18k, I have a good daily word count (around 3k yesterday!) but I'm feeling that it's all a little too ... linear somehow. I sat and stared at where I'd left off. The cops have just delivered their warning, the werewolves are off doing their thing, it's daylight so the vampire's asleep, Rachel's alone in her shop, and I thought "This is where the subplot should begin."
Only I don't have one. And the first thing that occurred to me? Re-writing a bit to start a romance with the male cop.
NO! Bad Kali! So now I'm thinking that so many people use romance because it's easy. They're built around emotion, so you can get immediate involvement with the reader. They come with a whole host of built-in complications, and they can easily tangle your main plot into something more thorny and knotty. So NaNo has given me a whole new perspective on the prevalence of romance in urban fantasy. In recognition whereof I donated $25 to NaNo. It was worth it.
Instead of starting in on a romance, I took Rachel off to the Catholic church to get some holy water, and gave her a crush on a very nice Roman Catholic priest. That should shut 'er up for awhile.
Today should be a busy day at work, so I'm not sure I'll have time to daydream up a new plotline, but I gotta come up with something.