Who is Worthy of Love?

 The Romance genre is a perennial topic of discussion online. Both writers and readers have opinions, and the only guarantee is that someone will have a "hot take" that has gone past hot to overcooked to burnt-to-ashes. 

Romance is the money genre. It has a huge and hungry reader base, and current economy notwithstanding, they have a book budget to burn. It is also the one that gets the most criticism and outright hate. It's shallow. It's bad for women. It gives young girls the wrong expectations. It's not "real literature". It has people with bits touching other people's bits, and we just can't have that! 

But along with giving readers something they want (a guaranteed happy ending and warm fuzzies along the way), every Romance novel is also social commentary. I'll note that commentary is different from critique. Some Romances critique social norms and rules, but not all. Every one of them is a study in who is worthy of love and what is able to be loved within a person. 

I'm going to pick on Disney. The House of Mouse can take it. 

We have all sorts of princesses. Blonde. Brunette. Redheaded. We've had a bit of color added to the lineup (how effectively is up for discussion). Little girls all across the US have grown up watching different Disney Princesses dance and sing their way to a Happily Ever After. My sister used to talk about waiting for her prince, and she's certainly not the only woman who did or still is. I pointed out to Teen 1, my college-age daughter, that I was never a Disney Girlie. I knew a prince wasn't coming for me, because princes came for slim, beautiful girls, and I was neither.* (I was actually a healthy weight, but it was the 90s. Anything over a 2 was too big. If we couldn't see our ribs, collarbones, or abs, we were hopelessly fat.) Disney had sent the social message loud and clear: only beautiful, skinny girls are worthy of love. 

No wonder I'm a Don Bluth Girlie instead. 

That isn't meant to garner sympathy or shame anyone who did identify with a particular Disney Princess. It is an example of how Romance stories, whether on-page or on-screen, tell us who deserves love. That is both the basis of the genre and the commentary on society found in every book or movie that centers on a romantic couple. Just as important as who is shown to be lovable is who isn't shown at all. For a long time, there were very few mid or plus-size female main characters in major romance books. Many subgenres still featured a FMC who is white, thin, and heterosexual, and the absence of anyone who is not those things sent a message: our society doesn't think they're as worthy of love. 

Is Romance fun? Can it be fluffy and sweet and make you kick up your feet? Absolutely! But it's never less important than any other genre, because it's telling us who and how to love. 

*I didn't find my prince, but I did find my Gomez Addams, and really, that's so much better.

How Did We Get Here?

 I'm a writer who didn't write for ten years. Even to me, that's a little unbelievable, and I lived it. 

My first teaching position was middle school English, which meant teaching prepositions, sentence structures, punctuation, and capitalization. It wasn't the most exciting part of language arts. There's only so much fun you can have with the parts of speech (not much at all). But I enjoyed writing, and over the course of five years, I wrote and rewrote a sprawling mess of a high fantasy.

I joined writing groups (this was pre-Facebook, so they were bulletin boards). I read agent and editor blogs, researched markets, wrote my query letter, several synopses, and set my glorious first novel into the query trenches.

It did have partial requests (surprising, since it was long). The full manuscript never made it farther than my hard drive (deservedly so). I'd racked up more than my million words on it. I'd learned quite a bit about how books go from idea to publication. I should have turned around, put my hair up, and written another book, but like many authors who spend years on one idea, it was hard to write another. The first one had been swirling through my head for years before I started writing it. I couldn't detach.

I also had a high-risk pregnancy that nearly killed me, followed by other struggles. Writing wasn't a priority when I was in new-mom survival mode while still teaching 13-year-olds how to use semicolons. I set writing aside. I picked it up sporadically, but as we planned and had more babies, and I decided to homeschool, I switched from one busy lifestyle to another. There wasn't much left for writing.

One morning, when my fifth (yes, fifth) baby was not-quite-two, I was at the pool for swimming lessons. While #5 played with another toddler, I struck up a conversation with the child's mom. I'd pulled out some old ideas I'd jotted down over the years and played with them, but I wasn't sure where I was going, or if I wanted to commit to a novel again. But this mom also wrote, and she also couldn't make it to the town's writing group, and along with our toddlers, we had other children who were similar ages. 

We started meeting at the park and exchanging pages. That was five books ago for me. I wrote a high fantasy "Stand-alone" that grew to a trilogy and then a quartet (that story is for another post). I wrote several short stories for indie anthologies, then started on another novel, which is now in the hands of my publisher. 

I sometimes look back with regret on all those years I didn't write. Logically, I know my head wasn't in the right place for it. They weren't wasted years, because I spent them reading various nonfiction topics while also teaching my children (we're up to six now, although we've put them in public school (also another post)). We're all neurodivergent here, which means I've had to learn about all the types of ADHD, the ways autism presents, how to teach reading to people with dyslexia, and math to those with dyscalculia. 

I know myself better than I did all those years ago, and that's essential for writing. I'm not the youngest, showiest new face in writing, but I know what I like, and that's what I write.