You Have to Love It

I really believe that no matter what you do in life, you have to love it. When I had my first inclination that I wanted to write, erotic romance was the genre I was most interested in. I was a huge fan of Angela Carter and Pat Califia and a number of other incredible authors. I felt that the genre could  push the envelope, that it was  important to assert one's sexuality as a woman. I wrote a few stories and some even got published in anthologies. It was an exciting time.

Then I drifted away from it and wrote other stuff. That stuff got me attention and a relative amount of prestige or respect amongst a small gang of writerly folks. (In my "serious" alter ego, I am very obscure. I like it like that.)

What got me started up in erotic romance again was actually quite traumatic. I don't want to get into the painful details. Let's just say I lost a lot. The world around me felt unstable and I knew that if I wasn't careful, I could sink into a deep depression. In my time of need, I turned to what I love the most. It's funny how that works. When life throws shit at you, you really figure out who your friends are and what matters most. I fell out of touch with quite a few of the above-mentioned writerly types. I also stopped reading "serious" fiction and nonfiction. When the big sad wolf comes a-calling, the last thing you need is to be beat over the head with some politically charged 'important' work. Eff it. Give me a Reese Witherspoon movie or a novel by Nora Roberts. I have always loved romance. I'd just neglected it for a while.

Anyway, I wrote All I Ever Wanted in that first challenging winter and it really cheered me up. Every day, I woke up excited to find out what would happen next. I was thankful for the distraction my characters gave me. It was a form of self-care to write. I wanted a happy ending between these two and I worked toward it. I didn't know exactly what would happen along the way. I was thrilled that Totally Bound accepted it. My editor was actually so supportive that she wanted me to write another novel about the best friend of the main character, whose story is the subplot. That novel happened in the spring. It was equally fun and rewarding to write and it's about to come out. Won't be long now. And, appropriately, it's called Worth the Wait.

These days, I'm over the bad stuff that happened a couple of years ago. Romance helped me move forward. My characters gave me plenty of great stuff to think about and that's what you need with the going gets tough. We all crave happy endings. It's human nature, at least for optimists.