WHAT ARE THEY GOING ON ABOUT?
A Fated Mates Glossary (and a work in progress)

  • BANGXIETY - The anxiety you feel while waiting for your MC's to bang!

  • CATEGORY ROMANCE - A shorter romance novel (~55k words) hyper-focused on tropes

  • CINNAMON ROLL - A love interest who is ooey-gooey, soft at the center and everywhere else.

  • DANGER BANG - When you’re facing the end of the world as you know it and gotta get that tension out!

  • DARK ROMANCE - Definition needed.
    DERECK CRAVEN WOULD NEVER
    - DEFINITION NEEDED

  • DNF - Did not finish (the book)

  • EMOTIONAL TITTYFUCK - A big mess. An emotional experience but not in the way you expect. The hero is emotionally messy. Explosive feeling moment. on the part of a constipated character.

  • FATED MATES - Two characters who are destined to be together. This is most common in paranormal romance.

  • FOSSILS - Extraneous plot details that do not move the romance between main characters forward. In reference to Amanda Quick’s Ravished, in which the heroine studies fossils.

  • GROVEL - When a character -- usually the hero -- has to make up for something terrible they've done to their love interest.

  • HEA - Happily ever after.

  • HFN -

  • MACRIEVE BRAIN - When something shocks you or throws you off balance to the point that your mind goes blank - nothing but static between the ears

  • MC - Motorcycle Club or Main Character

  • POLYANDRY - n. polygamy in which a woman has more than one husband. <special usage> [zoology] a pattern of mating in which a female animal has more than one male mate

  • ROMANCE REASONS - When the plot point doesn’t need expiation because it only serves to forward the romantic arc

  • STERN BRUNCH DADDY - I don't know how to define it, but I think Zaf from Take a Hint, Dani Brown probably qualifies. And maybe Roy Kent. Juergen Clop is the “sternest brunch daddy”.

  • SURE (as said by Jen) - What you just described is completely bananas/unbelievable, but please keep going.

  • TAKING THE FINGER - A decision by an author (or the execution of that decision by the author) in a romance that takes a risk, pushes the boundaries, and does something totally bananas

  • TINCTURES, TONICS, AND TEAS - Birth control and abortion in historical romance.

Submit your own addition/update/correction.