The Big Idea: Jennifer Estep

Tension takes many forms, some of them good, some of them bad, and some of them delicious. In this Big Idea for Only Cold Depths, author Jennifer Estep gets into tension, when to make it… and when to break it.

JENNIFER ESTEP:

The Moonlighting curse is real, y’all.

The idea takes its name from the 1980s Moonlighting TV show. Basically, the idea/theory is that when writers finally put a will-they-or-won’t-they couple together – Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis, in this case – that it ruins the romantic tension between the characters, and thus the show. Hence the “curse” aspect.

When I started writing Only Cold Depths, book #4 in my Galactic Bonds science-fiction fantasy series, I realized that the Moonlighting curse also applies to books/stories, especially those with a significant romantic plot.

So far in my Galactic Bonds series, Vesper Quill and Kyrion Caldaren have had a rocky relationship. They started out as enemies, became reluctant allies due to their truebond/soul-mate connection, and caught all the feels along the way.

At the beginning of Only Cold Depths, Vesper and Kyrion are in a romantic relationship, and that’s when the Moonlighting curse hit me. But it’s not really a curse, so much as it is a series of questions:

• How do you create and maintain tension and conflict between two characters who are in a romantic relationship?
• How do you keep a romantic relationship interesting for readers?
• How do you keep a romantic relationship interesting for yourself as an author?

Of course, you can always break up your happy couple (which I have done in other books/series), but Vesper and Kyrion overcame so many obstacles and fought so hard to be together that it didn’t make sense for me as an author to take away their happiness.

Instead, I started thinking about how I could use Vesper and Kyrion’s relationship and all those feels to create even more tension between them, and I asked myself a different set of questions…

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