Me, Again.

(please don't screenshot this and start threads discourse)

I have been on a very intentional social media break and it’s been fantastic. I’ve simply been living my life: working a new full-time job, planning a David Lynch-themed wedding, being a step-parent. Tending to Joey. Writing another book. I set up a Letterboxd account. We finished watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9 after three years and Josh rejected my idea of recreating Worf and Jadzia’s Klingon wedding ceremony.

he’s been hard at work

I am officially out of the loop and loving it. I’m vaguely aware that a thing called BookCon happened and I’m assuming people must be upset about it. I’ve definitely missed dozens of controversies over various covers and AI writing suspicions. I’ve decided to use the rage-generator known as Threads for anything other than book content.

In short, I’ve emotionally divorced myself from publishing.

I’m content in my real life these days. I’m happy. In fact, when I meet with my psych professional, the only negative stuff to report is literally…author shit. It’s somehow become the…worst part of my life? The part with missed deadlines and stress and lack of control and unmet expectations and spending money and goal posts constantly moving and always someone doing it better than me, and so on.

At some point, maybe a year ago, I decided I didn’t care about any of it and a big chunk of that weight lifted. I didn’t feel those awful emotions throughout the day. The burden of trying to finish this next book is still very much there; I’m just not leveraging my feelings of guilt and inadequacy to push it forward, so it’s taking longer than I would like.

I still love books. I still love writing (sometimes?). I love doing events and talking to readers. I appreciate readers so, so much. If you’re reading this, you’re an actual angel, please know that.

But I feel so disconnected from the larger Romance community and the business aspects of publishing.

maybe you can relate:

I’m tired of the conversations about romance books being centered on the marketing, or a single comp or trope, the “author brands,” the access to advanced copies or special editions…all the stuff that has very little to do with experiencing a story or going on an emotional journey.

I’m just not interested in it anymore.

There’s this vague pressure to quickly put out books that “everyone likes.” That are fast to write. Faster to digest. That are written in the first person or third person or past tense and have the number of POVs that the community has agreed is acceptable this week. Books that conform to an ever-growing list of specific reader desires and avoid their apparent dislikes (which have all been filtered through social media). I have conversations with author friends that sound like we’re trying to solve a Rubik’s cube of “what fucking combination of words mentioned on Threads discourse do i need to write to get my book into Target?”

I’ve never been good at Rubik’s cubes. I got into this because I wanted to make space wizards kiss.

who has the capacity to worry about stupid author problems when you have this dog tummy to rub?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of Romance as escapism or wish-fulfillment. Which is valid. Obviously. It might be the main reason readers enjoy the genre. And even a deeply cynical person like me loves seeing how characters overcome seemingly unsurmountable obstacles to form a partnership and make both of their lives better.

When I’m weighing the things I want to write and the things that most of the romance community (yes that is the broadest generalization possible) seems to want, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m the outlier. I’m the problem.

I don’t care to write pure escapism. I want to write about people who are complex and dealing with nuanced life stuff. And, at the moment, I don’t think there’s a very big place for that in books that are marketed as “romance.”

A big reason I write, period, is that I like experimenting. I like trying new ways of telling a story. This is part of why I fell in love with fanfic. It’s the perfect platform for experimentation. The last fic I wrote was a tweet fic told in pictures of post-it notes. I get so much satisfaction out of discovering a different way to approach a familiar story. I don’t feel like the current romance market is a place where I can do that. When a book is marketed as a Romance it can take on this didactic quality, where it feels like the characters are meant to encourage or endorse a certain type of behavior that falls in line with what readers consider moral or likable. There’s little room for nuance.

Maybe I’m wrong. Every so often, an author (usually an indie author!) will have a huge break out success with something refreshingly different. Which will then be acquired and imitated until it’s oversaturated, rinse and repeat.

I want to write books that people can argue about. That might not satisfy every reader’s expectations of what an ideal love story looks like. That might be the dreaded term: “polarizing.” I love talking about “polarizing” books. I don’t understand why many readers specifically avoid books that have less than 4 stars on Goodreads, or whatever. To me, the most lasting and transformative books I’ve read are the ones that challenged my assumptions, that devastated me, that showed me a new aspect of a relationship.

If I can create a book that does that, I’ll feel creatively fulfilled. But how can I do that if I feel like I need to preemptively apologize for a contemporary romance having a freaking third act breakup?

As an author, I want my books to provoke discussion. As a Romance author, the idea of provoking discussion scares the shit out of me.

I’ve been through a lot of therapy and I know myself pretty well and I know that I will never be able to write characters who fit the standards of likability. Which is why I’ve doubled down on my next book, which features two characters who are so unlikable that they meet in literal hell. (Hell is a decommissioned Margaritaville cruise ship.)

And after that, I’m not sure what I see myself writing. Maybe it’s not “romance.” That doesn’t mean I won’t be writing love stories and obviously you can pry the smut from my cold dead hands—but the pressure of marketing my books within a genre that seems to get more and more prescriptive…that takes a weird toll on my mental health. That’s sad for me because I fucking love romance. But in my gut, I think I’d reach more of the readers who would really enjoy my work if it wasn’t marketed as romance. When I promote my books, I genuinely feel like I’m tricking people into reading things that won’t meet their expectations.

And I’ll be honest, I’m tired of the drama and endless, toxic romance publishing discourse on social media. It reminds me of the dynamics that develop when fandoms go off the rails.

Life’s too short to spend it worrying about publishing drama and which author got invited to this event or whatever.

Romance is personal and emotional and vulnerable. It does seem more tied to identity than other genres. The way we write about love and intimacy (and the things we particularly enjoy reading about love and intimacy) says something about our inner lives. I feel like people who resonate with my books understand me, the person, in a very deep way.

That’s a powerful connection to share with a stranger. I don’t take it for granted. And I know that when I’m sitting at my laptop trying to bang out another thousand words, I want those words to mean something real and honest. I want them to cut to the heart of some human truth.

And now I step on my soap box…

Ironically, romance writing—with its big feelings and irrational human emotions—is going to be increasingly vulnerable to AI. We cannot depend on the traditional “gatekeepers” of publishing to keep AI books at bay. They will be publishing them and stocking them on shelves and hoping that their customers won’t mind the uncanny valley storytelling, synthesized from millions of stolen words, remixed into combinations that add up to nothing.

We (the actual readers and writers) can’t treat our novels like disposable products tied to an algorithm. That’s how tech overlords see romance books: a handful of tropes and vibes that follow a predictable pattern. Easy to mimic, easy to promote. The entities that create this “content” are also going to be perfectly positioned to market it to their own consumers with AI-generated trope graphics and character art that will (somehow!) sit at the top of all of our feeds. Hell, they’re probably making AI booktok accounts right now.

I’m sorry I have to be a pessimist, but we are approaching something sinister. Listen, AI is great for generating boilerplate business jargon BS in a slide deck. It’s great for Olga Tokarczuk. It’s great for delivering the most mediocre version of everything.

It’s terrible for setting up the tension between two fictional characters in a way that gives you, the real human, butterflies. That’s a magic trick. And only people with a lifetime of regret and unrequited crushes and bad first kisses can pull it off.

And preteens on Ao3. They are also really good at that magic trick.

The point is, it’s even more important that we, as authors, continue to imbue our work with soul. We need to consciously take risks that would never occur to Claude and ChatGPT. Romance books are more than the sum of their tropes. We are about to let some billionaire tech bro’s Earth-killing data center use our stolen words to imitate the most human experience possible: love.

I’m not sure what’s next for me, but the one thing I can promise is that I will only be putting out books that could never be written by that bitch Claude.