Girl on girl hate has become a ubiquitous theme in romantic comedies, novels, television shows and nearly anything catering to the pre-teen, thus creating a never ending cycle of vicious gossip, bullying and tormenting. Modern romance fights that tide.
The discussion is ongoing, but the panel was insightful, educational and full of actionable steps that authors, readers, and industry professionals can take to further a fully inclusive, fully intersectional romance genre.
If romance makes the changes that should have been made centuries ago, if romance opens its publishing houses and agencies and offers the same opportunity to authors of color as it does to white authors right now, we take away the excuse that it won’t work.
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?
Romance novels create a utopian relationship, critics often squawk. There aren’t any real men like this. Every reader or writer of the genre has heard the refrain in some way, shape or form and there’s a reason for that.
It’s called sexism.
We’re still here.
A year after the RITA awards were acknowledged as problematic and promoting of a biased system, we are once again, as a romance industry, fighting for inclusivity and equal opportunities for all authors.
The discussion is ongoing, but the panel was insightful, educational and full of actionable steps that authors, readers, and industry professionals can take to further an fully inclusive, fully intersectional romance genre.
It wasn’t until I got older that I realized that promise, that paradise of women working as directors and doctors and lawyers, comes with strings attached
If you haven’t seen the controversy stirred up on Twitter, The New York Times recently released an article in their seasonal roundup section about the romance world. At first, we rejoiced. Despite the powerful impact romance has on best seller’s lists, including that of the Times, commercial fiction is often ignored or scoffed at by New York’s literary elite, and the romance world was pleased to find representation in a major newspaper.
Until we read it.
I first published my senior year of college, early in 2014, and let me say that there are a great many things I have learned about writing, romance, desire and business since then. Here are just a few.
Holland Rae, Writer 