Everywhere I look, the term romantasy keeps popping up. It’s the genre mash-up of the year: part sweeping fantasy, part passionate love story, usually wrapped in celestial dust and dramatic declarations. Readers are devouring it, publishers are doubling down on it, and books like A Court of Thorns and Roses and Fourth Wing have turned “romantic fantasy” into a household phrase.
But here’s my dilemma: I didn’t set out to write “romantasy.” I set out to write about magic, myth, and the deep connections that bind souls across impossible worlds. So, the question nags at me…am I writing romantasy and just not calling it that?
In my Mermaid Curse series (beginning with Alabaster Island and flowing through The Atlantis Twins, The Atlantis Song, and The Atlantis Queens) love isn’t the side plot; it’s woven into the story itself. The island rituals, the binding of souls, the oceanic forces that govern destiny: all of it speaks to the same thing the romantasy genre celebrates: connection that transcends ordinary life. The stakes aren’t just magical; they’re emotional and spiritual.
My Moon Shifter Academy books (The Last Wolf, Lost Wolf, and Shadow Wolf) explore this even further. The academy is filled with shifters, vampires, and chaos magic, but beneath the explosions and moonlight there’s a recurring question: how does Kat’s love of Eddie and Artemon coexist with power and destiny? Can two people truly see each other when their magic (or their trauma) keeps them apart? These are, at their core, romantasy questions.
But, I hesitate to adopt the label wholesale. The genre is crazy popular, and I understand why. Readers want fantasy worlds that pulse with emotion and characters whose hearts are as wild as their powers. I love that too! But trends alone don’t guide my writing. I don’t want to write something because it’s popular; I want to write it because it stirs something inside me.
What draws me most to the romantasy space isn’t the “romance” part…it’s the alchemy of it. Two forces meeting and transforming each other. I love how fantasy amplifies that: when lovers are bound by curses, torn between worlds, or united by ancient prophecy, the connection becomes mythic. The magic and the emotion intertwine until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
But I’ll admit there are things about the genre that make me twitch. The clichés that flatten what could be transcendent: the instant soulmates, the “bad boy with wings,” the idea that love alone will fix generations of trauma. In my stories, love doesn’t erase wounds, it illuminates them. It offers a chance at healing, but not a guarantee. And while I appreciate the fantasy of rescue, I prefer to write about partnership, mutual evolution, and the messy work of seeing another being’s full truth.
So yes, maybe I am writing romantasy…but the kind that resists formula. I want the relationships in my worlds to carry the same wild unpredictability as the magic itself. Not neat, not easy, but transformative. Love that reshapes the self, just as power reshapes the world.
Whether it’s a mermaid torn between sea and shore or a wolf-shifter struggling to love without losing control, my stories are about connection: between people, between realms, between the seen and unseen. That, to me, is the real enchantment.
If that’s romantasy, then so be it. But I’ll keep writing it my way, guided not by trends, but by wonder.
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