As I type ‘The End’ on another book, I started reflecting on the past week. I released a book I love, but it’s a bit of a niche genre straddling the line of romance and Sci-fi. It didn’t do as well as I’d hoped it would. Something I think every writer experiences. I knew it would be taking a chance for me, since all my other books are queer contemporary and this was straight and Sci-fi. I completely ran away from my normal audience. (Fine I sprinted.) Not because I don’t love queer books, be assured this book has queer characters. I couldn’t write a book without them. But this book was m/f. It was still suspense like the rest of my books, but the plot could not have happened in a contemporary.
I love Sci-fi for so many reasons. I was raised on Sci-fi. It was my first love. It’s one of the ways I stay connected to my father, who put Asimov in my hands along with Harry Harrison and Douglas Adams and so many others. Those books fostered my love for reading and soon after, my need to write. At eight I filled notebook after notebook with insane stories. (All of which my mother still has.) From Sci-fi, I branched into fantasy, and the books from my teen years were filled with gender ambiguous characters, creating an escape for myself. I’d actually never written anything contemporary when I started to write the Bound Series. It just happened, I submitted it and it got excepted. From there I stayed in the contemporary kick, not on purpose, but because it was where my muse decided to camp out until Ever So Madly hit me from left field.
I set out wanting to write a woman who saves herself, which has been a feminist thing I’ve been fascinated with for sometime. I won’t give away details but next week I have a guest post on Heroes and Heartbreaks about wanting to see more women in romance save themselves.
I guess, with all this rambling I’m really trying to justify my out of left field book to myself. Next time, if I ever write Sci-fi again, I’ll have to make it queer as hell with tentacle porn or something so it sells slightly better.
Comments