Someone asked me the other day, ‘why don’t you write heterosexual romances?’*. The answer is that I do sometimes. I write romances, sometimes they are the traditional Mills and Boon style innie-and-outie romances, sometimes they aren’t. The reason I don’t have any published, is that I write kind of rubbish traditional romances.

I mean, I don’t think so obviously. I think that everything I write is dripped golden in my ear by the Awen (well, sometimes I think that). Other people don’t always agree. Back when I was trying to break into the Mills and Boon market, my female romantic protagonists tended to be described as closed off, prickly, difficult to warm to. Like I said, I don’t see what’s prickly and hard to warm to about a hawk-nosed, one-handed apostate who is using her lover as much as he is using her in a post-apocalyptic world…

OK, possibly she is a bit of a hard sell.

Generally, though, I find that my writing tends to fit better in romantic conjunctions where there aren’t so many expectations about the assigned gender roles. I’m not saying that there are no examples of non-encultured gender roles in traditional role, there obviously are. Equally, I’m not some special honey bee writer, I’m just a bit of a weirdo personally and that tends to be reflected in my characters.

It’s just that as a writer, and a reader, I feel that nontraditional gender presentation – whether that is a character on the GLBTQA spectrum or a female lead that’s not that nice – is easier to explore with Torquere or Dreamspinner.

Maybe it is because the romantic leads have already stepped out of what used to be the traditional romantic paradigm. If you have two male romantic leads or a polyamorous relationship, the HEA in thats story doesn’t come with an already socially accepted framework. It gives the writer, and the reader, room to look at all the options they have and why they pick the ones they want. Instead of, like, every other Mills and Boons during the 90s, where a woman who’d dedicated everything to building up her career jacked it all in to go and live on a farm with a cowboy and his cowbaby*.  Even if the only difference is it’s a lawyer jacking in his career to go live with a cowboy (nothing wrong with cowboys).

There’s also more leeway in the gender performance of the characters. Maybe your lesbian romantic lead is just this acerbic, impatient, ambitious woman….who doesn’t change! She just becomes an acerbic, impatient, ambitious woman in a relationship. Isn’t it awesome for the shrew to just stay a shrew? Equally, we could have the romantic lead in an M/M romance who is a confident alpha football player, that really enjoys being the pursued partner in a relationship. Or maybe your closeted alpha hero is the one who falls hardest, is the most emotionally open, while his sexually confident partner is the one who maintains a shell of reserve.

One of my favourite characters EVER on Emmerdale (UK soap) is Aaron Livesy, who’s the sort of lad that had asbos instead of birthday cards. He’s the product of a broken home, he doesn’t get on with his parents, he’s a mechanic and a petty crook on the side. He’s also gay, and there was a scene that I still love where he had his first date with a guy. He lit candles, he put some sexah music on – he blew out the candles, he turned the sexah music off. It was just this moment of intense, liminal confusion as he tried to work out what romantic overtures carried over from him wooing women, and what didn’t.***

That’s the sort of character I love to write about (if any of my characters were ever as powerfully written and popular as Aaron, I would be chuffed), and read about. Characters who didn’t get the rulebook for the gender/orientation when it was posted out. That isn’t to say their gender or orientation isn’t important, that they don’t care about make-up or they aren’t politically active for equal rights. However, those details aren’t just assumed because the character is a (insert description of choice).

Like I said early, I don’t think that Riptide and Loose Id are the only places that these ideas are welcome, but it’s less exceptional here. The encultured ideas about gender, orientation and society are just…less encultured here.

*to paraphrase.

**I may be exaggerating a little, but I used to read my Gran’s Mills and Boons and I have a lot of very grouchy memories along the lines of ‘she makes more money! why doesn’t he move to live with her! Send the cowbaby to a great boarding school!’

*** I can go ON about Emmerdale. Don’t even get me started about Ross, I have not yet come to terms.