Finding the Balance Between Reality and Fantasy: Part 2 by Dani Collins

We have author Dani Collins this week talking about "Finding Balance Between Reality and Fantasy". She also has a new book out this month, Untouched Until Her Ultra-Rich Husband. 

Award-winning and USA Today Bestselling author Dani Collins thrives on giving readers emotional, compelling, heart-soaring romance with some laughter and heat thrown in, just like real life. Mostly she writes contemporary romance for Harlequin Presents and Tule’s Montana Born, but her backlist of fifty books also includes self-published erotic romance, romantic comedy, and even an epic medieval fantasy. When she’s not writing—just kidding, she’s always writing. Look for Dani’s latest Presents, Untouched Until Her Ultra-Rich Husband, out now!

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Finding the Balance Between Reality and Fantasy: Part 2

One of the most common criticisms of the romance genre is that it’s not ‘realistic.’ I take issue with this because I work really hard to make my characters relatable and ‘real.’

At the same time, with Harlequin Presents/Mills & Boon Modern, the whole point is to sweep the reader into a world of glamor and luxury. In my latest book, Untouched Until Her Ultra-Rich Husband, I was asked to take those touches of wealth into the stratosphere, which ran the risk of being cartoonish.

Today I’ll share some tips on how I build the fantasy world of obscene wealth (when I don’t actually live one myself) yet ensure my characters feel like someone the reader wants to be friends with.

Part 1 of this 2 part post is on Revisions & Editions here.

3)      Allow the characters to acknowledge what the reader is probably thinking—that this is over-the-top.

My heroine, Luli, has been living in Gabriel’s grandmother’s Singaporean mansion. She isn’t a complete stranger to Gabriel’s standard of living, but she’s been a servant and sheltered in other ways. When he buys her a trousseau in Paris, she doesn’t appreciate until later how much it costs:

“What reason would I have to lie?”

“The twenty million I just dropped on clothes and shoes, perhaps?”

“You didn’t.” She stopped dancing. The world continued to sway and swirl. She thought she might faint as all her lifeblood dropped into her feet. “Please say it wasn’t that much.”

“With the ring, closer to thirty. It’s Paris, Luli. What did you think?”

Sequin-covered bikinis and formal evening gowns were expensive, but they were the price of pageant entry, maybe the cost of bus fare or a flight to get to the competition. They weren’t the value of a district’s worth of housing. What had she done? She clung to his sleeve to keep herself upright, vision hazy as she absorbed that she had indebted herself to him far beyond anything she could have imagined.

4)      Show the characters valuing things beyond material wealth

After the scene above, Luli suffers a type of culture shock. Gabriel shows her his aquarium to soothe her, because who doesn’t chill out when they watch fish swim? It’s still a ridiculously expensive aquarium, but the value is in the way it meets her needs in the moment.

He didn’t turn on any lights as they entered the massive room with the massive bed. She barely looked that direction or took in anything else. She was drawn to the primordial glow of the floor-to-ceiling aquarium.

She gasped, pulled forward by the muted burble to feast her eyes on the iridescent blues and neon pinks, the fierce reds and flashing yellows. Spots adorned long lacy tails that swished in slow motion while striped orange missiles darted into crevices in the colorful fingers of coral and swaying blades of sea grass.

She didn’t know where to look and grew dizzy trying to take it all in. She wanted to lean against the glass, breath fogging upon it as she watched.

5)      Show the characters wanting what all humans want – human connection

Luli is an ex-beauty pageant contestant from Venezuela being held as an indentured servant in Singapore who has taught herself computer programming. You may be excused for thinking she sounds a bit far-fetched, but I’m receiving a lot of great feedback on her. I think it’s because readers relate to her loneliness, though she doesn’t wallow in it. Here she’s explaining one of the reasons the rest of the servants didn’t like her:

“I sat in on the butler’s meetings with Mae when they reviewed household expenses and raises. It was my task to prepare the performance reviews and suggest appropriate wage increases.”

Gabriel’s laugh was a single cut of disbelief. “Have you made any friends here?”

“Perhaps you’ll be my first,” she said with a smile of false hope.

As you can see, keeping the reader believing the story—no matter how outlandish it might be—comes down to showing character reactions and making those reactions relatable. The reader doesn’t need to believe the world is real, only that the people within it are actually a lot like herself.

FUN FACT: Ironically, Luli was inspired by a real person. While my son was at school learning computer programming, he mentioned his classmate named Luli. I liked her name so much, I stole it for my heroine (with her permission.)

Untouched Until Her Ultra-Rich Husband

The only woman to challenge him…

…is the only woman he’ll marry!

Multibillionaire Gabriel Dean is so outrageously wealthy that when computer genius Luli Cruz uses her skills to hold his inheritance to ransom, her audacity simply amuses him! Innocent Luli needs Gabriel’s help to avoid destitution. Gabriel’s solution? He’ll secure both their futures by marrying her! But sweeping wide-eyed Luli into his luxurious world, Gabriel discovers the chemistry with his untouched wife is priceless…

Welcome to the exclusive world of the ultra-rich…

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