There's an interesting discussion going on over at Romancing The Blog (www.romancingtheblog.com) about epilogues, which got me thinking so much i decided to blog about it myself.

I said in my comments that the problem with epilogues in romances is that so many of them are the same: weddings and babies, because that is usually the next step for the happily ever after.

One woman commented that, being unable to have children herself, nothing bothered her so much as the "miracle baby." While I was doing intense reading in the early days of Arabesque, I noticed that the books all had similar endings and that no one seemed to be able to make it fresh. For my first book, At Long Last Love (1998), I contributed to the un-excitement by writing the same ending myself (with a wedding, not with a baby, since my heroine wasn't interested in motherhood.) I quickly decided I was going to have to do something a little different; I was boring myself.

My second book, A Love of Her Own (1999) featured an infertile heroine, and I received letters from readers saying that they wished I'd made it so that she somehow managed to get pregnant (it wasn't anatomically impossible since she still had all the parts; just highly unlikely.) I stood (and still stand) my ground on that one: That would have been the wrong ending for the character. I've always injected as much realism as possible into my novels, and the fact is that everybody doesn't get to have children (the ending did involve children, but not children the heroine gave birth to.) The point I wanted to make was that there is still happiness out there to be obtained, even if you feel you got a bum deal by whoever handed out the ovaries.

In my third book, Love Affair, I didn't even have the hero and heroine get married. Lord, did I take flack for that! What readers didn't know at the time was that I planned to feature the wedding of this pair in my follow-up novel, Prelude to a Kiss (2001), because that was a romantic comedy and there was plenty of opportunity for things to go wrong at the ceremony and reception (and because the heroes and heroines of both books were friends.)

Out of all my books, the ones I feel had the most poignant (and therefore effective) epilogues were A Love of Her Own, From This Day Forward (2002), which was the most mainstream of all my romances; and this year's A Love For All Seasons.

One book that used a variation of the traditional epilogue where it was played for laughs and felt fresh was Adrianne Byrd's She's My Baby, published last year by Kimani Press.

So, what's your opinion on epilogues in romance? What do you like? What don't you like? Are they even necessary?

I'd love to hear what you think.