Time Travel Romance: No Time Machines Allowed!

I've always been fascinated by time. After all, we never seem to have enough of it. It's always marching inexorably onward. You can't roll it back or jump ahead; it flows in a steady, forward progress that most football teams would envy.

But what if time really doesn't run in a straight line with no allowance for stepping off the narrow path? What if you could control time? What if you could move yourself forward or backward, or maybe sideways in time? (you didn't think I'd forget alternate timelines, did you?) Would you? Should you?

And if you could travel in time, where would go and what would you do?

Isn't that the basis of all time travel stories? At least, the good ones--the ones that don't just use time travel as a plot device to get two people together and then gloss over that bit to focus on the romance aspect. Don't get me wrong, I love a good time travel romance. I just get annoyed when the romance part really could have been told without the time travel. If you're going to use time travel in your story, make it an integral part of the plot -- or else why bother?

I've read submission guidelines from a couple of the publishers out there who publish "paranormals" (and can I just take a brief pause here to say how much I hate that term and how it's used in romance publishing?). The guidelines for romance time travel stories usually say something about how if time travel is part of the story then the publisher does not want to see stories that include time machines. Bwa-huh? Tell me how that's possible without making time travel simply a wave-your-hand-and-it-just-happens plot device?

Oh, wait, that's right, women don't want to read romances that, you know, have any kind of plot that might actually enhance the romance. Wouldn't want to task our poor little brains, now would we? Keep those pesky speculative elements over there in SF, please, because we all know women don't read Science Fiction.

I think it's time to break some stereotypes. Time to acknowledge that women do indeed read and enjoy SF. And that we really enjoy SF if there's a strong romantic element to it. Write an SF-strong time travel and make the romance an integral, nay, primary, part of the story. Market it as both an SF and a Romance and watch what happens. When I say market it as both, I mean target each market and tout the strength of the book for that market (emphasize the SF part to the SF market, the romance to the Romance market). Be smart about it.

Maybe I'm way off base. Maybe I'm the only one out there who feels this way. Surely I can't be the only one who loved Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold because it was a romance in a real SF setting? Something that appealed to both the SF lover and the Romance lover in me and was very well done on both accounts?

All I know is, as things stand now, I'll be limited to submitting to SF publishers when I finally write that time travel romance that I've been plotting for the last year, because a time machine is an integral part of the story. And I find that sad.