Time-travel romances

From Guidevines

[edit] Time-travel Romances

These are stories on the romance template where either the hero or heroine move out of their native era to a different one. Normally this involves the present or an historical period: moving to a future of our world is normally considered a form of futuristic romance or science fiction romance. Extremely rare is the story involving persons from two past time periods. More oddly, since one would expect time-travel to be discovered in our future, one almost never sees the person out of our future transported into our past.

Publishers of tt romances are not looking for scientific treatises on the technology of time-travel. Indeed, they may explicitly state "no time machines." One can usually get away with machines if you keep them off-stage and don't bludgeon the reader with the explanations. Someone sent by a machine who doesn't know how it works is good.

The more usual means are magical artifacts or simply accidental slippages in time, such as have been reported on rare occasions.

Equally, most publishers wish authors to avoid long musings on fate ("Imagine if I hadn't fallen through that hole in time, we never would have met"), or even short repeated ones. The early authors already did that to death. The concept is no longer new to readers, to the point of being a subgenre, and so does not need pounding home.

In fact, any character from our era who isn't in some terribly isolated subculture should have the idea of time-travel from popular media, and not need too long to catch on. It is no longer an unthinkable or unthought idea after the success of Timeline, The Time Machine, Somewhere in Time, and other movies, as well as time-travel TV shows like Quantum Leap, Sliders, etc..

Time-travel may be once, one way, or two ways, once or many times, with or without character control. There may be ticking clocks, as a character knows the door back will shut in a certain time, or a durance in that they cannot get back until a minimum time has passed. There may be a limited number of uses before an artifact "burns out." So the time-travel itself, not just the dislocation, can be a plot element.

Most publishers consider tt romances a subcategory of paranormal romance though some may consider them separately. This is probably because the tt romance works greatly like historical romances, when a present person is transported to the past, and requires some historical knowledge for building someone from the past transported to our era.