Dear Reader,
It has been an odd couple of weeks. I wrapped up my old job at the start of this month and had a nice send-off lunch with my former coworkers.
Now I’m working on getting used to being unemployed writing full time. So far the strangest thing about being unemployed writing full time is … well, that it kinda doesn’t feel like anything in particular.
That might be because my work-from-home routine hasn’t changed much, given that I dove face-first into writing. So far I’m about sixty pages1 into a first draft of the book I’m working on. Turns out that means that I wrote about ten pages that I was definitely expecting to write, plus about fifty pages that just showed up while I was trying to figure out how to get the characters from A to B to C, and now I have to come up with another fifty? hundred? however many pages where I’m genuinely not at all sure quite how this is going to go. But also, I’m totally enjoying the story as it shows up, and now I have to keep going with it because I’m seriously curious about what happens next, not to mention how it all wraps up in the end.
A few folks have asked me what I’m writing, and now that I’ve written a good chunk of it, I’ve finally realized that it’s basically a romantic comedy. Just, you know, a very queer one. This shouldn’t be a surprise to me because I’m not really a serious person. Indeed, I’m a deeply silly person with a profound enjoyment of the absurd. I’m sometimes so struck by amusement in dreams that I actually wake myself up laughing. So I don’t know if anyone else will find it humorous, but I’m sure amusing myself.
I’m also getting kind of a better handle on what interests me most to explore with the story, which circles back to some really fundamental questions about what romance is and does, and how a story works and why.
There have been some really good observations made about romance as a genre that center on the way that somehow books about relationships with happy endings are treated as less meaningful or less artistically valid than books that are… not that.
One of the key features of romance is that, well, love wins. Love is victorious. The characters claw their way through whatever obstacles are thrown up by the story, and it’s not merely that the main characters end up happy together. It’s celebrating that we as human beings are happier and stronger and better when we exercise our relational intelligence and figure out how to care for each other. And it’s also a common theme in romance novels that the main characters’ friends or family or coworkers are part of the story, or the backstory, and play a role in how the main characters grow. The theme of relational intelligence is multilayered. Often main characters end up also being a better friend or colleague or sibling / child / etc., or maybe they find a way to heal or let go of past relational trauma with those other characters. So, again, romances do typically have happy endings, but it’s not even exactly that romance wins. It’s that love wins.
The other thing about romance is that it tends to involve some degree of gender fantasy. That is, how gender shapes character, what’s expected, what pushes boundaries; the roles characters can hold, and how they interact with each other; how gender shapes the way characters view themselves and their relationship with the world. It could be implicit and unexamined, or it could be explicit and done with a critical eye. This is true in m/f romance, and it’s true in queer romance, and it has additional layers when you get into paranormal / urban fantasy / horror / sci fi subgenres, and it’s a whole next level of true in omegaverse romance. And while exploring the fantasy of gender is a pretty unifying theme, unfortunately I don’t think you could say that romance is necessarily all that gender-triumphant.
Love wins, but gender normativity might still kick you in the teeth.
As a for-instance, I’m currently reading (don’t you judge me) a sci fi / omegaverse-ish trilogy set on an unnamed alien planet that features a stranded human space soldier dude and two hot alien dudes (I said don’t judge me), and I’ve stuck with it because there are a lot of things that I find original and creative about these books, but also there’s a whole bunch of really gratuitous weird misogyny that shows up for no reason at all. Literally no character in these books is a woman. Space solider dude has gotten stranded on a planet with an indigenous population that is entirely “male” in that everyone has a dong but also has males who are “omegas,” capable of making babies. Supposedly their language doesn’t have a translatable word for “female” at all. But, ok, doesn’t this raise some really fundamental questions about language and gender? If there is no such thing as “female,” then you wouldn’t have the concept of “male” either, would you? If “male” isn’t distinguishing gender, then what does it even mean?
And meanwhile, the human space solider is living in a far future where being gay is no big deal because human sexuality has gotten waaaay more exotic than that since our horny and insatiable asses started interacting with alien races. Yet also the author has given him a bunch of hang-ups about being perceived as girly or unmanly or being treated like a princess. Which his new alien lovers are fundamentally incapable of doing because they have no concept of “girly” (no girls!) or “unmanly” (men are just people!) or “princess” (no royalty, but also no female anything). Space soldier dude is trying to reject unequal, pampering treatment from his partners, but why is he using gendered language to do it? And if you’re perhaps wondering, the author is a woman. For what it’s worth, I’ve never read a romance written by a man or a nonbinary person that engages in this kind of hand-waving casual misogyny. (I mean, maybe it’s out there, but I haven’t read it — while I’ve read a lot of it by women, so I’m not going to name names with this author in particular. She’s not a worse culprit than many others.)
Anyway, circling back to my own writing, it turns out that I’m just as interested in the exploration of gender as I am in the love story part. I’m just endlessly fascinated by all those questions of who we are and how we accept or push back on the world’s perceptions of us. How culture intersects with gender. How our understanding of ourselves evolves over time. Also, all the many things that make up one’s sense of self that have nothing at all to do with gender.
What else have I been up to? I also made time last week for a couple of little embroidery projects and have plans for more. Started a bit of knitting as well, but that seems to have quickly fizzled. Baked some 3-ingredient peanut butter cookies2 and managed to not eat all of them immediately. That's about all my news.
It’s getting cold here, and I think I see a few scattered snowflakes starting to come down outside. Hope you’re warm and well.
Love,
Beas
“Pages” being the most notoriously murky measure of productivity in the writing world — look, let me keep a few mysteries, ok?
Combine 1 cup peanut butter, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 1 large egg, mixing until the dough is uniform and sticks to itself. There’s no flour in these, so you don’t have to worry about over-mixing. Roll into small balls and press onto lined cookie sheet, using the back of a fork for the classic cross-hatch pattern. Bake at 350F (175C) for 12 minutes or until the dough is puffy and golden. Remove from oven and let rest on cookie sheet for at least two minutes (they’ll deflate a bit as they cool), then move to a rack to finish cooling, or just leave them on the pan to finish cooling if you don’t mind it taking slightly longer.
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