I know there are things to do in life besides play Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, but I don’t care to do them. 🎮
Finished reading: Dreams of a Dark Warrior by Kresley Cole 📚
This one took me a little while to get into but once I was in, I couldn’t put it down.
To quote @cheribaker@writing.exchange:
Don’t wish us Happy International Women’s Day. Instead, help to vote out the ghouls who deny women’s agency and treat us like walking wombs. Ask your male friends to do the same.
That would make me a happy international woman indeed. 😎
Finished reading: Demon From the Dark by Kresley Cole 📚
I really enjoyed this one and tore through it. Give me a sad, traumatized couple of people who find a new family in each other and I’m happy. 😍
New glasses, same as the old glasses except they actually fit.
Finished reading: Pleasure of a Dark Prince by Kresley Cole 📚
I really liked, maybe even loved this one. The back half is all adventure, super cinematic.
🔖 Read The “Disney adult” industrial complex by Amelia Tait (The New Statesman via The Rec Center)
The grown-up Disney superfan has become a much-mocked phenomenon online. But creating these consumers was always part of the corporation’s plan.
I’m a second-generation Disney adult deliberately mixing other culture into my kid’s life. I appreciate this critique written by a fellow Disney adult.
Finished reading: “Untouchable” in Deep Kiss of Winter by Kresley Cole 📚
📚 Why am I obsessed with romance fiction right now?
Last May, I read Mr. and Mrs. Witch by Gwenda Bond, and it made me so happy that I decided to try exclusively reading romance for a while. From May to October, I read 16 romance novels. In October I took a break to read some gothic but quickly came back to romance, finishing out the year having read 22 romance novels and one romance anthology. This year, I continued the pattern. So far, I’ve read 17 romance novels this year. I talk about romance and think about romance a lot of the time. So why?
First, social factors:
Last June, The Good Trade published an article called What Romance Novels Taught Me About Taking Pleasure More Seriously and then in December a follow-up, How to Get Started Reading Romance Novels. This led me to the podcast Fated Mates and I joined their Patreon and Discord because I needed people to talk to about romance besides two of my friends and W.
But that was after I’d already started to read romance more heavily. So why? Why romance?
The obvious reason is that it’s an optimistic genre. Even in dark romance, the author or publisher has, by virtue of calling the book or story romance, promised that the characters who fall in love will end the book either living happily ever after or happy for now. Any problems on the horizon at the end are problems you know they will solve together. (And if you read something that the author or publisher has called romance that doesn’t have this feature, please let everyone know, so they won’t pick that book up expecting a HEA or HFN.) The world is big and scary and full of bad, and it can be comforting to know that you are going into a story where the people will end up with someone(s) who will support them.
Another reason is that romance contains an immense variety of subgenres, which means if you’re a mood reader that you can probably find something you’re in the mood for. You’ve got contemporary, paranormal, historical (with its own subsubgenres based on period and geography), dark romance, fantasy romance, sci-fi romance, romantic suspense, romantic mystery, and many more. Likewise, romance is full of tropes that give books a flavor that make it easy to know if you’re likely to find it interesting: friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, billionaire, forced proximity, sibling’s best friend or best friend’s sibling, second chance, fated mates, fake dating, and again, many more.
It’s also because, like sci-fi and fantasy, romance lets you tackle difficult topics in a way where you know that characters will be supported in working through these. Here is an incomplete list of difficult topics the romance I’ve read since last year has touched on:
- anxiety
- depression
- gang conflict
- family illness
- chronic illness
- homophobia
- truly awful parenting
- arranged marriage
- transphobia
- top surgery (difficult because of medical processes described in detail)
- war
- anti-Muslim harassment
- well-meaning people being casually super prejudiced
- the cost of a bad reputation
And I tend to read stuff on the lighter side.
And then there are things that are unique about romance: its focus on interiority and emotion, on women’s and non-binary people’s pleasure, the way it places relationships at the heart of stories.
I’m sure there are more reasons, too. Do you read romance? Why?
🔖 Blogging is the medium of incomplete stories
I love this. I often feel that blogging is the most natural medium for my writing, which makes sense as I’ve been doing it for over 20 years. Maybe this incompleteness is part of why.