Why I write m/m romance, or anything else

Female authors in this genre are frequently asked why we write m/m romance. I find the question a little annoying. If it is so bizarre and inconceivable for a straight woman to write something as mundane as two men falling in love, I really wonder why nobody has ever questioned my ability to write serial killers, organised crime, complex magic systems, giant rat death, alternate worlds, or a Victorian nobleman punching a ghost in the face – also things of which I have no personal experience.

The corollary of this question is, now I have a few m/m titles under my belt, people are asking why my next book is m/f. Permanent change? Temporary change? Why that?

Well, here’s why.

I wrote a couple of unpublished novels a few years back. I loved writing, wanted to do more. Then life happened, in a big way. I had two kids in close succession, the second of whom didn’t sleep for more than four hours consecutively for fourteen months. We moved house. We were unpleasantly burgled. My son was hospitalised. I lost my job. There was other bad stuff, a lot of it. It all sucked.

And I wanted to write, I really did, but with two kids under two, when you’re so sleep deprived you can’t see in colour any more, when you’re scrabbling not  to go under in the roiling stress, it doesn’t happen. Even when I did claw out an hour of time, I couldn’t do anything. I’ve a folder of false starts, from paragraphs to pages, none of them going anywhere. It felt like I’d never write again.

Then I had an idea for a fantasy. It was a Victorian alt-world about a man with an inexplicable link to magpies, and a plot against his life, and a magical underworld to be explored. What it was not was a romance, of any kind at all. I hadn’t plotted it out, wasn’t remotely up to that yet: I was just writing from an idea of a first scene. I wrote a foul-mouthed nobleman, and his equally foul-mouthed manservant, and then the crucial sorcerer character entered the room, and…oh my.

I did, actually, attempt to ignore the sexual tension for a while, because I wasn’t writing a romance, but it didn’t go away. (This is the kind of thing that really annoys non-writers of my acquaintance. ‘How can characters do what they want without your volition?’ they say. ‘You’re making it up! You decide what happens!’ Yes, well, all I can say is: it doesn’t work like that.)

So I looked at the plot, and the mounting tension between the characters, and I thought, ‘It seems that I’m writing a gay romance novel.’ And then I thought, ‘I meant to write a fantasy novel. Do I want to be writing this?’ And my conclusion was, basically, ‘Who gives a damn for genre labels. This is a book that works. At last.’

That story became The Magpie Lord because it worked. I wrote the sequels, A Case of Possession and Flight of Magpies (out in October), because the characters were too much fun to stop playing with. I wrote another m/m, Think of England, which is coming in July, because the entire plot arrived in my head, special delivery, in one glorious fully formed thought. I also wrote a m/f contemporary thriller, Non-Stop Till Tokyo, which comes out next week, because it was another story I had to tell.

So basically, my answer to ‘Why do you write X?’ is ‘Because that’s the story I have.’ Gay or straight, Victorian London or contemporary Tokyo, sweet or bloodthirsty or downright weird. (Possibly all of it is downright weird.) I’m just grateful I’ve got my stories back, and I’ll keep writing them as they come.

The Magpie Lord and A Case of Possession are out now from Samhain. Non-Stop Till Tokyo (m/f) is out on 29 April. Visit KJ Charles on her blog for more.