Hello, darlings. A couple bits of business, first off:

Romancing the Vote is raising money for voting rights orgs for a 6th year. You can bid on a signed copy of A Lady for All Seasons plus two nonfiction books I read for background research while plotting the book, sticky notes still intact. Bidding ends today!

I’ll also be at B&N Union Square's Festival of Authors, July 25 @ 1PM in beautiful NYC.

Congrats to all the finalists and winners of the Lambda Literary Awards. A Gentleman’s Gentleman did not win, but we love to see our colleagues shine bright. This is not a flex, I legitimately had drafted this email before the winners were announced and didn’t think there was a shot in hell that Gentleman would win. So that’s cool. Also, in case you missed it, there was a cover reveal for Love and Lake Monsters, out Feb. 9.

Now that Pride month is over, I will have a lot more free time. The invitations to events and speaking opportunities will slow to a trickle. Which is FINE, I’m not bitter, and I need to start drafting something new for the first time in almost a year anyway. It’s something I’ve been noodling with for almost as long and I cannot wait to start getting it on the page.

This project can’t really be called romance, although love is a part of the story. I still enjoy writing romances, but it’s time to try something new for a lot of reasons.

Here’s the thing I want to say, though, about moving on from writing in the romance genre for now. And I want to say it very loudly and very clearly so everyone hears me: writing romance is way harder than any other kind of book.*

*With the possible exception of nonfiction; I don’t know her at all.

Look, I’m not an expert or anything, I’ve just written stuff all my life. All kinds of stuff, though love stories always fascinated me. And now that I’m working on other kinds of stuff, I think romance is more challenging simply because it has a more rigid structure.

Lots of genres have a defined structure and an expected endpoint. Any marginally savvy reader knows how a mystery ends, right? You find out who done it. The answer is revealed. The killer is unmasked, the jewels are recovered, and Holmes gets to curl up in front of the grate with his slipper full of tobacco. Horror and thrillers are similar in that the reader expects to be taken on a ride, to be frightened by various threats, and for some resolution to be found in the end. The family escapes the haunted house; the final girl survives; the big thorny question of what the fuck was happening for the last 300 pages is answered (sometimes vaguely, sometimes unsatisfyingly, but answered). Romance isn’t the only genre where you know what shape the ending will take, and critics who don’t know what they’re talking about will say that’s what makes all genre work—but especially romance—dull. “Ohhhhh, it’s the same story over and over,” they say, I assume while shoveling dry white toast into their mouths.

YEAH MAN. It’s people working to create things that are, on a surface level, of a similar nature, with skills and artistic choices differentiating individual pieces. THAT’S ART. Do you go to the Met and look at the things on display and go, “Uggggh, the Incas kept making the same gold dishes over and over” or “Ohhhhh, these painters sure did run bowls of fruit into the ground, eh?” Do you get mad if you hear a comedian tell a joke to make you laugh because the last comedian you saw had a similar goal? Do you think one song about partying hard was enough and we should have just stopped there? You make yourself look like a fool when you talk about art that way. Art is about trying to communicate something, and different disciplines are just different languages with their own structures and nuances. Certain genre languages are naturally going to touch on some of the same things. Just because you don’t speak a certain language doesn’t mean it’s worthless.

(An important note: sex and sensuality, if portrayed in strictly rigid heterosexual ways, is acceptable to the patriarchy. As long as it’s enforcing the system, the system will support it. This is why asexuality gets the same kind of hate as allosexual romance novels. Anything that shows a person can live outside of the system is a danger to the system, whether it’s celebrating romantic love or eschewing it. What I mean is, it’s fine to not love love stories! But it is worrisome to hate them simply because you hate any emphasis on “soft” or “feminine” emotions. Okay? Okay.)

Last month, my wife and I were doing our usual Pride Month movie picks. We decided to watch an interesting double feature: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) followed by To Wong Foo (1995). I’d never seen the former; the latter, I’ve probably watched a million times since the ‘90s.

On the most basic surface level, these two films might look very similar. Both are about a group of three drag queens making a road trip across a country and the triumphs and tribulations they experience en route. Both star some big name actors who were best known for macho roles. Released less than a year apart, both films were obviously in development at the same time. Like publishing, Hollywood does not move quickly, with scripts often being shopped around for years before the actual film ever gets to a theater. Despite this, when To Wong Foo premiered in America, some critics claimed it was a rip-off of Australia’s Priscilla.

Watching them back-to-back, I can’t understand how anyone could make such a boneheaded assumption that one movie is copying the other. They’re such different stories, written and shot with such different sensibilities, reflecting two different cultures. Such assumptions, to me, speak to an inability to distinguish one piece of queer art from another. I experienced a similar issue early in my career. When my first book, Chef’s Kiss was announced, I had quite a few people @ me on social media to say this was an obvious rip-off of the excellent, also-still-unreleased Love & Other Disasters by Anita Kelly. Both books were contemporary romcoms about a woman and a nonbinary person; both involved food in some way; end of similarity list! Yet that was enough to have folks scoffing at the idea that there could possibly be TWO nonbinary foodie romances published in the same year. And that sucked to hear.

It’s very easy to critique art that you refuse to actually engage with—or, in some cases, without the art even being available. It’s easy to say that love stories and queer stories are worthless when you don’t see the value in either love or queerness. It’s easy to ignore a piece’s individual achievements or failings and focus on its broader categorization. And it’s hard to write something that can punch through all that noise and find its audience, which romance consistently does.

I’m not saying romance is the best, most wonderful thing in the world, by the way. I think there are improvements to be made to the “canon” (the S tier of big, splashy titles) and the community around it. There have been plenty of times I have not been entirely welcomed into the broader Romance World. Romance is, for me, still the most challenging kind of writing, which is why I love it so much. I’ve said it before, but it’s still true: it’s easier to make someone cry than laugh. Similarly, it’s easier to make someone sad or angry or scared than lovesick. People are so frightened of feeling tender things that it takes some real skill to draw them out.

I will get back to writing romance some day. Right now pretty much every author I know is struggling, financially and/or creatively. Queer authors are universally finding it harder to sell their books and get publisher support. You’d think that in an atmosphere like that, I might make the decision to switch genres so I could produce work that’s more commercially viable, but alas: I couldn’t write stories about straight people even if I wanted to, which I don’t. Anything could flop for any reason, so I may as well tell the stories that make me happy.

I’ll get back to writing romance books eventually, one way or another. It’s what I’m good at, though I hope I’m good at other things, too. Art is funny; it gets harder the better you get at it. Isn’t it fun to try despite all that?

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Hot summer links sizzle:

bird boy i was not aware of your game

paris is burning is now free on youtube

even picky eaters will love it

quebec zillow is on another level

a fun game that i am bad at