Hi. I’m Tricia and I love paranormal romance.

There. I said it. I love reading paranormal romance. I like writing it, too, but I definitely have more experience as a reader than as a writer.

Paranormal romance gets a bad rap. Pseudo-intellectuals love to make fun of the people (mostly women) who read it. Wanna-be writers enjoy mocking those who write paranormal romance. They love to hate Stephenie Meyer, gazillionaire author of the Twilight Series. They criticize her for lack of plot, purple prose, and bad writing in general. It seems Stephenie broke all the rules of writing.

You know the rules I’m talking about, or maybe you don’t. If you’re not an aspiring writer, you may not be aware of all the rules other aspiring writers and would-be critics have invented. Some of these rules are good: don’t create five-hundred word sentences lacking in punctuation, don’t write a two-hundred-thousand word novel entirely in cryptic text-message language, and don’t rely on Microsoft Word for all your editing needs. Some rules are crappy and are too numerous (and sometimes confusing) to list.

Yeah, Stephenie broke the “rules,” and she made a gazillion dollars doing it. For those of us who haven’t landed the multi-million dollar, three book contract and a movie deal, we have only our “rules” to console us. Stephenie  has a gazillion dollars. I wonder who is happier? Something tells me Stephenie doesn’t care about our rules.

Say what you want about paranormal romance, but it’s popular. Millions of women buy it, read it, love it. Here are my own made-up statistics: for every person who laughs at the cover of a novel featuring a shape-shifting, magically gifted vampire/werewolf hybrid, there are ten people who are picking up said novel and saying, “Hmm, this looks interesting.”

So, this is a call to all you men and women who love paranormal romance: stand up, put your hands in the air, and shout: “Hi. My name is _____ and I love paranormal romance.”