It’s not glamorous, not yet. I work too hard and I’m stressed about deadlines, but I don’t go into an office, I don’t dress up every day, I don’t have a thankless position somewhere. I’m my own boss, I set my own office hours and I write for a living.
This is the only industry where those who don’t have to be nice, are.
We have somehow squeezed an incomparable number of dukes, earls, marquesses and barons from nine short years of English history. And to that, I have to ask, what about literally all the rest of time?
Romance novels have now gone from a treat, to the best form of research in the world. The more I make an effort to dive deeply into this industry, the more I realize that it’s really fucking big.
I think that the ongoing debate of pitting e-books and print books and audiobooks against each other in some fight to the death misses the point of reading entirely. Which is why I’m not going to pick a favorite, but tell you a little about why I love each one.
And in knowing better, and understanding that romance is both subversive and aggressively feminist and forward thinking, I now hold it to a much higher standard than I ever did in the past.
Why aren’t these books marketed as romance novels and why do so many stories have love-story plots or subplots but scoff at the ones that do so intentionally?
