Never fear! I’m working on A Babe in Winter. I just had to adjust the story’s priority because honestly, I wasn’t too keen on telling Mouse’s story at all, much less wrapped up in a quest. And I didn’t want the quest to become a series of vignettes, side-quests, and other such clichés. But now that I have abandoned Mouse back to his own mind, I can pick up where I left off in Black as Knight.

But this post isn’t about A Babe in Winter. It’s about an idea I had in 1996 and put away. And the idea I had in 2016. And the two in 2017. And the one in 2018. And the one in 2019. I doodled, knowing Idea 1996 would be essential to each of the others, which could exist independent of each other. But then I got to thinking: What if I put all of them together? Intertwined them? Set them in my favorite city with my favorite themes?

Fairy tales, myths, urban legends, angels, demons, gods, demigods, theology, philosophy, medicine, and science all coming together and conflicting, where they live in a world that views them as a little off, forced to coexist and live under the same bureaucratic restrictions as humanity, with twists and turns made possible because bureaucracy is unyielding.

Now, look. I don’t read fantasy or scifi. I could be reinventing the wheel. I could be trampling all over genre conventions. However, to me, this is a challenge: To write a world that may or may not have been written, explored, or hinted at with absolutely no regard to what’s been done.

It’s a world where the quasi-immortal mortal sorcerer isn’t the chosen one. He’s the help.

He came to Kansas City during Prohibition to get a decent shot of whiskey without having to sneak around. He couldn’t go home for it. Europe was at war. He only went to South America for one reason. He didn’t want to make the trek to Asia, Oceania, or Africa. So he stayed in the U.S.

He stumbled over a magical creature, then found an entire underground community he never knew existed, one that was starting to have legal and bureaucratic problems with the rise of the IRS and social security numbers: Papiere, bitte. He was asked to become the intermediary.

He wasn’t doing anything at the moment, he was happy to find a community that could expand his magical horizons and enhance his power, he was dating a beautiful lawyer for the mob and wanted to make his next family (#5) with her, so he agreed without too much thought to the long-term ramifications.

So now a hundred-plus years later, he’s a lawyer, stuck in a place he’d never have chosen to stay, becoming the locus for magical and mythical beings who need his help. There’s nothing magic about Kansas City other than Warre & Locke, PC, established by Wolfhart Tadius in 1930-something. He employs so many of the magical and mythical that his practice’s nickname is The Island of Misfit Toys. His only living son is ninety-something and sliding into memory care. His only living daughter is eighty-four and pissy about the fact that he’s forever thirty-eight, but she moves back in with him anyway because she’s tired of being the matriarch of her family. His mortal colleagues are starting to wonder why he doesn’t age, and everybody wants to know the mechanism of his youth and vitality, and where he goes about every sixty or seventy years.

But Hart’s not telling. That’s one secret he’ll take to his grave—when he decides to need one.

His current concerns include finding a missing Christmas icon because the Krampus is afraid her counterpart won’t be found in time; helping a newly widowed ex-faery godmother whose mortality is starting to catch up to her in the form of Machiavellian godfae politics; dealing with a frumpy middle-aged perimenopausal vampire with no guidance and no idea how she got that way or why; sniffing out a budding evil mage who’s tearing up the D’n’D world; keeping his community out of 4Chan and Reddit sleuths’ crosshairs; and struggling with a billionaire surgeon because of his tendency to exploit anything if he can make a profit and puts ketchup on well-done steaks. His grimoire is sorely neglected, his magic isn’t sentient so it can’t index them, and he trusts no one to transcribe his voice notes.

That’s not to mention the delightful and beautiful conservation and restoration librarian who specializes in medieval and renaissance alchemy texts, the first woman to intrigue him since his last wife died in 1960 and the first one to whom he might be able to divulge his secrets.

And worst of all, he still can’t conjure food that tastes right, even after over four hundred years.

He could leave anytime, but he won’t. Because he’s not an asshole.

Part 1.

Can we stipulate that people die?

In any negotiation, one must define one’s terms. The day after Bros #1 & #2, Paul and Nick, went to visit Aunts Susie and Millie, which reception was hostile to begin with, to ask about liquidating Mom’s portion of the house, and got a very hostile response, then left in a state of gasted flabbers, we tried again.

This time it involved a phone, Nick, me, and Mom in a hospital room. We called. Nick was doing the talking, and he asked the profound question and current familial meme that should be the first go-to in any situation where one is tempted to prolong the suffering of a loved one (including animals) because you can’t let go and you’re just that fucking selfish. Yes. Yes, you are.

Can we stipulate that people die?

It took them way too long to answer that question, which, for a 79-year-old and an 83-year-old, is pretty damned weird. It also creates a philosophical/theological quandary:

If you believe in a loving God and a pretty awesome afterlife even before Judgment Day, why are you afraid of dying?

Do you not believe what you profess to believe?

Where is your faith?

There’s one dead giveaway your content was written by ChatGPT. It’s not the tone, it’s not the phrasing, it’s the em dash.

No normal, non-seasoned writer writes like that.

Sure, there are people who definitely use it. But 99.9999% of the population has never even heard of an em dash before. Let alone use it in their content.

Go die in a fire.

“What does it matter what I think as long as I’m polite and kind to the person?”

“Because it’s not real. It’s not genuine. It’s performative.”

Yes, I was being judgy. I reserve the right to be judgy. We’re all judgy. You can call it “discerning,” “discriminating,” “pattern recognition,” “resentment,” “outrage,” or “vile mean girl,” but we all do it. We may or may not relay our opinions to anyone, but we have them—about things, people, thoughts, beliefs, matters of taste, and behavior. The only difference between your judgment and my judgment is that you don’t agree with me. Humans being humans, you feel you have the moral high ground because of course you do. I guarantee if we agreed, we’d be sitting on the couch gleefully reinforcing our mutual opinion and possibly spilling hot tea.

So I looked at this person who objected to my judgment, completely confused.

“Politeness is performative. That is its entire point.”

The discussion had to end there for external reasons, we never got back to it, and then life intruded in a way that made it irrelevant, but the only real requirement in life is to be kind. If you can’t manage that, be polite. If you can’t manage that, walk away.

But if you are pushed to engagement, go big or go home.

Look, figuring out how to get what you want is the easy part. Figuring out what you want is the hard part.

I thunk up this bit of wisdom for Magdalene (The Great Mormon Novel) when I was rasslin’ with this concept way back in 2011. A perusal of my hard drive tells me I’ve been cogitating on this since at least 1998.

Here’s the backstory:¹

I have a Vomit Book. It’s where I dump my brain. I stand at the threshold of my brain and look at its Neckbeard Nest-ness and take a deep breath. Then I start to my right and go around the folds of my gray matter picking up the trash. Then I go back and do a rough sort of like with like. After that I refine.

I fill up a TOPS JEN Action Planner.² It takes however long it takes. I’m on Book 14 since 2011. Before that, I used AT-A-GLANCE DayMinder Executive Weekly/Monthly Planner from 1999 through 2008. I scanned those and Vomit Books 1-4, then destroyed them.

So, I just write. Dump. Vomit. I tried mind-mapping for a while. That didn’t work. When I’m overwhelmed, I just write words, words that come to mind like the die in a Magic 8 Ball. There is no point. I’m just taking out the trash.

I use it for everything: narrative, to-do, dun-did, wins, losses, health/medical, affirmations/quotes, kids. It’s all color coded,³ I also have a template to copy/paste typewritten thoughts, then print, cut, and tape it into the book.

When I get to the end of one Vomit Book, I go back and read what I wrote, and, in the fresh Vomit Book, I recap. I distill sticking points in black, and note my current thoughts in green.

Although a lot happened, Vomit Book 13 took 2-1/2 years. I filed it away September 1 after I recapped.

Now, I’m a creature of habit. I write the same thing year after year, and I have since 1998:

• What do I really want?
• Why am I so angry?
• What brings me joy?
• Why do I feel so hopeless?
• Why am I such a perpetual fuckup?
• Why do I eat?
• Who am I?
• What is my purpose?
• Why do I think I can have success without sacrifice?
• Why am I so lazy?
• Why do I ruminate on past events only I remember?
• Why can’t I remember the good things that happen?
• Why am I fearful of success and fulfillment?
• Do I have any goals and what are they?

Occasionally, there’s something new, like menopause and how it changed me in fundamental ways. With my mom’s ordeal earlier this year, a new thought entered my brain: I am useful, but not valuable.

September 1, when I recapped the previous Vomit Book and retired it, started out no differently. Same colors, same format, same complaints, but this time I did something new. I noted things that I wanted to explore further because I had new, tiny, vague epiphanies, the first of which was “What do I really want?”

I’ve been asking that question for at least 27 years, and I finally realized that that is the wrong question, and of all the questions I’ve been asking, I had never distilled my despair to its essence and defined my terms first:

• purpose
• fulfillment
• success

where I had to determine what I thought I should want/think/feel versus what habits I actually have. You don’t work to change habits you don’t really care about. You keep the habit because it does something for you.

PURPOSE

Useful, but not valuable.

My church teaches that one’s purpose is to serve others. You know what? I don’t like serving others. It stresses me out and I get zero joy out of it. In fact, I resent it, the work, the time, the effort. I get panicky and then once I’m alone, I melt down. Or I can throw money at it. I’m okay with that.

I don’t have a purpose. Never have had a purpose. No calling, no life’s work.⁴ I could take that as a sign that I should try harder, but that only makes me flagellate myself more.

Then it occurred to me: Do I have to have a purpose? Is having a purpose something I thought I should find? How many people actually have a purpose? How many people just go about their lives trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table? How many people go to high-paying jobs, slog through the day, go home, and mow the lawn with the occasional vacation here and there ad infinitum?

FULFILLMENT

I had noted that I was fearful of this. I don’t remember feeling this way, but I wrote it down in early 2023, so I did a deep dive on that. After some thought, I was surprised to learn that what fulfills me is so simple:

• listening to music that speaks to me
• looking at pretty things
• making pretty things
• making pretty ebooks out of complex print design
• listening to AI-generated stories read by AI-generated voices while I work
• laying down thousands of words in one long writing session
• walking in the grass in spring
• putting things in order (e.g., filing, computer file reorganization)
• solving problems (e.g., computer issues, plot/characterization blocks, WordPress, HTML/CSS)⁶

That’s it. That’s what I enjoy doing. When I drifted away from what I thought I should want, which were grandiose ambitions, vestiges of a time I wanted to earn my parents’ approval and only recently realized I was never going to get it, to contemplate what I look forward to doing, I … changed.⁷

It took me a minute to figure out I’m already fulfilled. I’m in my happy place when I’m doing whatever I would be doing anyway.

SUCCESS

Most people define this as winning and/or having a lot of money. When one wins, one is usually competing against something else. Except … I don’t like competing. It’s too much effort and risk and not enough payoff. I’m a sore loser and I do want to win, but winning doesn’t do anything for me. No dopamine hit, no feeling of fulfillment or success because what’s the purpose?

Money is a tool. Or, as Giselle puts it in The Proviso:

Money doesn’t solve anything. It just makes surviving less difficult.

It dawned on me that I don’t really care about money. It never occurred to me that the only thing I want money for is my basic needs, take-out, some inexpensive wants,⁸ an emergency fund, and maybe to be able to take off on a road trip at a moment’s notice. In short, not to be in survival mode in perpetuity.⁹

So this is where we get into the weeds of should want versus really want, and again, this is a vestige of what I thought my dad and/or the world viewed as success.¹⁰

I had to redefine success for myself, which was what my teenage and young adult self really wanted:

• to be a published author
• to get married
• to have children

Thus, by that measure, I’ve succeeded.¹¹

But you see, I never looked beyond those things.

• What happens after I get The Call?¹²
• What happens after the wedding?
• What happens after I see the positive pregnancy test?

It’s been 15 days now since I started looking at my life in a whole new way, and I feel free. Free of the burdens of expectations I don’t even know if others held. Free of expectations I thought I should fulfill or thought I wanted to fulfill. Free of expectations going forward. Free to enjoy puttering around. Free to have a job and not a career, and enjoy just having a job that pays for my basic needs. Free to know happiness.

I’m not going to ask myself why it took me so long. I’m just going to enjoy it.

In January 2025, my mother lay dying.¹ She was mostly asleep, but when she was awake and willing to speak, her mind was all there. She doesn’t remember any of it because her IQ was doing the heavy lifting. That’s how brilliant she is.

She went in on a Saturday. Sunday evening, she asked me to come back to the hospital so she could give me her final wishes, as I’m her DPOA, POA for healthcare decisions, and executor. It was a rehash of everything she’d ever pounded into me, but I recorded the whole thing.

One thing Mom (81) told me, very clearly, was not to let the house that she co-owned with her sister, Susie (79), go for anything less than $400,000. It was 3000 ft² on 5 acres with a barn. She and Susie lived there with her other sister, Millie (83), and had for 13 years. They could barely take care of themselves, much less each other or a property that big. The ward did most of the work of keeping it up.

So, yeah, the house would have to be sold. It would have had to be no matter which sister went first. Don’t worry, Mom. I’m savvier than to let it go for less, but I had no reason to worry about it. I knew my Aunt Susie would do the right thing and sell the house because half of it didn’t belong to her and honorable people don’t keep what’s not theirs.

My brothers arrived from Orlando and Seattle, respectively, and we worked like a well-oiled machine to get shit done. The usual stuff. You know. Funeral. Interment. Estate settlement.

But before I tell you what kind of family drama went down in a family I didn’t think could have family-rending drama,² I need to explain how my brothers and I were reared with the concept of death and why.³

My father’s family is/was prone to heart disease and early dying. My grandfather died at 63. Heart attack. My father’s first cousin died at 42. Heart attack. My dad died at 51. Heart attack.

He knew this would happen. But you know, I was born in the first wave of GenX to the last gasp of Silent Gen parents, who were the children of the Greatest Generation. My parents’ families were old when I was born, we kept company with them frequently, and then they started dying. By the time I was ten, I’d been to more funerals than I could count, seen more well-casketed dead bodies than I’d seen babies, and I liked collecting flowers at their grave sites to remember them a little longer. I was well versed in death.

My dad made sure of it.

It was a part of life. An inevitability. A furtherance of one’s eternal progression (although he never couched it in those terms; my child’s mind took it to its next logical step). Nothing to fear.

He talked about life insurance, last wishes, mortgage insurance, getting twenty years in with the city so my mom would have his pension, and the business of taking care of business when someone died. He often joked that we were a family of late bloomers and early diers.⁴

Why was this such a frequent topic of dinner-table conversation?

Because his father refused to speak of it at all, much less prepare for it, and left his mother pretty much destitute.

Then … his cousin Bill died. At 42. My dad bought life insurance. Then he went to the doctor. (In that order.) Learned what he expected to learn. And waited.

Waited for the day he’d call in sick because he didn’t feel quite right, then keel over in the back yard. At 51.

Well, we got through it with the acceptance and pragmatism we’d been taught. We grieved. We cried. It didn’t hurt any less for being prepared and having a solid understanding of the afterlife. At that point, my mom made me her DPOA and healthcare POA and executor. She explicitly recorded, with a notary and everything, that she was a DNR and drilled it into me that I was to make sure it was respected.

When my mom lay dying, we children, who had been reared to deal with death in an accepting, pragmatic, and forthright manner, dealt with it in an accepting, pragmatic, and forthright manner.

And that’s where the fights started: with her PCP,⁵ her sisters, and about half the members of the ward—all of whom were so terrified of death that they refused to accept that my mom was dying, but I and my brothers were going to make sure her DNR was respected.

Her PCP and her sisters hounded her relentlessly to do this, that, and some other thing to extend her life even though they could clearly see she was in agony, knew that she had been wanting to die for a while. My brothers and I fought them. We argued. We yelled. They ignored us and her legal documents and got in her ear and bullied her until she acquiesced to dialysis which she had explicitly stated she did not want in front of a notary and everything.

They called us “ghouls” and “greedy” and that we were “trying to kill her so they can get her money.”

They would not listen to us:

• These are Mom’s wishes.
• This is what we’ve been reared to believe, think, and do.

But my brothers and I listened to Susie’s and Millie’s desperate arguments and it slowly dawned on us they didn’t give two shits what Mom wanted—even though they knew as well as we did. They wanted what they wanted, and what they wanted was to not have to give up their living situation and all go on as if they were all going to live forever.

Mom did not die.

At the point we all realized this, we had to start thinking about long-term care. One place we were sent quoted us $13,000 a month. We were shitting bricks. How were we going to pay for this?

She had one asset: Her portion of the house.

Cool-headed Brother 1 (Paul) went to Aunt Susie with hot-headed Brother 2 (Nick) and politely asked her how we could liquidate Mom’s portion of the house, and Susie said, “I’m not selling this house! This is MY house!”

That was not what Paul asked. My brothers didn’t quite know what to do with that, so they left.

The next day, Nick called them up again. Harsh words were said.⁶ To me, this is the important part:

Two days later, we filed suit to force the sale of the property.

“I am in my prime. Professionally. Financially. Intellectually. Not sexually. All things considered, my sexual prime came in the back of a 1970 Nova and went out the door of a judge’s office three months later.”

I crack me up. I really do. Yesterday, I randomly tweeted the above out of one of my books that I thought was one of my better lines. That’s Finn Marston,¹ from Lion’s Share narrating the circumstances of his shotgun wedding at 19.

That’s funny (yes, it is; fight me), but the real story is in Lion’s Share’s opening line.²

In 1998 (I think) my mom, brother, and I set out on a road trip to Salt Lake. I cannot, for the life of me, remember why. I stayed in Provo with an internet friend, who was getting divorced from her asshole ex-husband, and her two single-digit kids. She was broke, her soon-to-be-ex wasn’t paying child support, and she didn’t have a job so she was on assistance. We had a couple of late-night heart-to-hearts. She had re-dedicated her life to Jesus, in non-Mormon evangelical Christian parlance. She was going to church, paying tithing (on her meager income), and had just gone to the temple to take out her endowment (fornication and adultery are verboten). She was wearing her garments appropriately and faithfully. She was focused, determined, locked in.

Fast forward a year or so. We were in a Mormon singles chatroom, and we were in DMs, chatting about her life. She was still broke. Ex still wasn’t paying child support. She was doing well with church and she was dripping with new zealotry.³

I had noticed that in the general chat, she was flirting with this guy from a state somewhere far northeast of Utah.⁴ I remembered his deets,⁵ and as far as I could tell, he was a very nice, decent, hard-working, spiritually upright fellow who loved his kids. Said his ex cheated.⁶ There were no warning bells as to his person. However, there were some warning bells as to how life with him would be:

• divorced
• paying a shit-ton of child support
• lived in a broken-down mobile home in a broken-down mobile home park in a broken-down small town (bonus points for honesty!)
• didn’t have a job
• didn’t have a trade, marketable skill, or defining occupation

Keep in mind: You don’t go to any chat room looking for a sugar daddy. Men with money aren’t there, they don’t want women over thirty and/or divorcées with eight kids, and moneyed Mormon men aren’t single anyway.⁷ I didn’t care what anybody else’s motives were, but mine was to find a nice, decent guy to marry and have children with.⁸

So she was chatting with this nice (I’m sure) gentleman, and I asked her very delicately WTF she was doing talking to a down-and-out dude when she was also down and out.

“He’s nice.”

That was a plus, but I thought she should be looking for someone a tidge more solid. Say what you want about a woman’s material target-seeking, but love does not conquer all, especially at the beginning when you’re thirty-five, broke, and have at least four kids between you.

I left her alone about it because it was not my business and she was a big girl and she was going to do whatever she wanted to do regardless of any wisdom I might throw her way. Free advice is almost always worth what you pay for it.

Over the next few weeks, she regaled me with the wonderful gestures this dude made. She was in luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuv. Nobody saw that coming, nosirreebob.

Then one day, in the general chat, this happened:

Well, that was alarming. I immediately opened DMs.

Oh boy.

The plan: She would fly to his state with her kids, who would effectively be their chaperone. They would meet in a hotel by the airport, as it was some distance away from his home. They would have 2 hotel rooms, one for him (I can’t remember if he brought his kids), and one for her and her kids.

Uh huh.

Ooooookay.

So she and her kids got there. He’d filled her room with balloons and flowers and just all-around romantic goodness. Normal getting-to-know-you IRL-post-internet stuff ensued … for about 1/2 hour. The kids got put in the other hotel room so they could make out. That was all it was. All clothes on, everything above the neck. I nodded approvingly.

“But then it just slipped in.”

… … … “BECKY! THE FUCK?!”

“Twice.”

I waited for years to be able to use that line in a story, but it never fit. Then one day I had a dream about a widow getting together with her widowed-father-in-law-turned-BFF, woke up, said (out loud) “Oh, that’s an interesting idea,” forgot about it, went about my day, which included a stop at Young House Love DIY blog, and an idea was born.

And fuck me if I wasn’t going to start that out with

but habitual readers will learn something, even if it’s a masterclass in what not to do.

I don’t know when or where formalized trigger warnings started in earnest (not the rare “The following film contains scenes that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.”), but I first saw them on the e-publishing sites in the mid-aughts.

Some took themselves very seriously and come from a place of concern (but this is not on the Kindle buy page):

This series deals with parental loss and terminal diagnosis of a loved one. I’ve been through it myself, so I hope it is dealt with appropriately – with real sensitivity and empathy.

Some could marginally be classified as spoilers:

This is a dark romantic suspense and psychological thriller of 80,000 words, featuring a main character with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Trigger warnings for abuse, self-harm, CSA, pregnancy-related issues.

Some were cheeky extensions on the blurb:

CAUTION: This title contains the jarring and bizarre juxtaposition of explicit sex and overt religion. As an added bonus, there’s quite a bit of libertarian/objectivist philosophy, politics, money, and cursing—the really bad kind. I also threw in a smattering of violence, nude art, the criminal use of mint chocolate chip ice cream, rampant armchair psychoanalysis, a slew of shoulda-coulda-wouldas, and a cat named Dog.

There are arguments for and against, of course, and I am firmly on Team No in terms of warning about problematic or disturbing content.

For one, if they serve as spoilers, there is no point to reading the book if you know what happens before you can click BUY. Whether you turn to the back of the book before you start reading is your problem, not the problem of a potential reader who resents being spoiled without warning.

For two, and this is my biggest WTF objection, don’t read what is clearly marked and shelved HORROR and then complain about what you get.

Somehow trigger warnings spread to academia and classic literature, including Shakespeare, riding on the coattails of safe spaces.

Students in America have been asking for “trigger warnings” to be included on works of literature which deal with topics such as rape or war.

That’s not new. Book banning is a trigger warning on steroids.

I’m not going to go into how people should handle their trauma because that’s not my business. I don’t care about your trauma and you don’t care about mine. That’s as it should be.

I’m also not going to tell you to suck it up. I’m going to tell you how not to suck it up and why you should suck it up.

AVOID IT

SUCK IT UP

If you’ve done the above and you choose to read Book Title anyway, that’s on you.

HOWEVER.

“Trigger warnings” (and I use that phrase loosely) do serve another purpose: Marketing.

That thing you don’t want to read? Somebody else is actively looking for it, so it behooves an author to take that into account and arrange their words accordingly.

This

is not a trigger warning or spoiler. It’s a product description. The readers who pick up this book already know what it is and they are actively looking for it. They want precision as to their taste in tropes.

THE FLIP SIDE.

Calling it “clean” romance instead of “sweet” is damaging and kind of derogatory

It always really grinds my gears when people call it clean romance when it is closed door, fade to black, no mention of sex at all, etc. It implies that sex is inherently dirty or wrong in some way. Calling it sweet on the other hand doesn’t have the same connotations, just that the book isn’t steamy or spicy. It’s also putting down those who might like a different kind of romance.

Emphasis mine.

That’s a you problem.

I don’t love the word “clean”, either, but it has one thing going for it: It’s a very efficient term. [ … ] “Closed door” and “fade to black” only apply to certain books, since some books have no reference to sex at all. I guess “no steam” would work, but I feel like “steam” is slowly becoming less popular than “spicy”, so I’m not sure if it will hold up long term. TLDR I’m okay with “clean” because everyone knows what it means.

Emphasis mine.

THE SOLUTION.

If you’re an author who doesn’t like trigger warnings, but still need to be precise for readers who are looking for exactly what you’re selling, the solution is very simple:

It’s efficient.

Just … don’t be this guy:

One of my earliest memories is my dad holding my coat out for me as a gentleman should, and saying, “I can do it myself!” with all the irritation a three-year-old (or thereabouts) can muster. His feelings were hurt and he got mad and punished me with the silent treatment.¹

Then later, maybe I was about ten or so, because reasons, he was calmly discussing my attitude, which concerned him: “Elizabeth,² no man is an island.”

Oh, I understood what he meant immediately. It wasn’t like he hadn’t hinted at it before, but there were two problems with this advice: 1) the guy giving it thought he was an island, so WTF Dad, and 2) he really didn’t understand that from the very beginning, being offered help was saying I have no faith in you or You’re too stupid to do this yourself.³ I didn’t have words for this when I was three and I had no concept of social niceties because I was three.

Having to ask for help was even more humiliating: You were right to have no faith in me and I am too stupid to do it myself.

I started writing Dunham (that wasn’t its title back then) with a lone female pirate captain who got there on her own, and was the sole authority on her ship. She was a loner. She did everything alone. And she was a virgin because of course she was.

Anyway, life tossed me around somewhat and I started to see something: Those with power, money, or even people who just had their shit together, had support. Sometimes, lots of support. They had help along the way, from generational wealth and grooming to catching a glance of a homeless guy down on the corner that one time who gave you an approving smile and a good piece of advice. Nobody got there alone.

I spent 23 years doodling along on my lone female pirate captain who did it all on her own. But every year that passed, problems kept popping up, logical fallacies, plot holes.

How is she supposed to be educated when she just randomly plopped out of some hoo-ha with no guidance? How is she supposed to get a ship when she doesn’t have a pot to piss in and she’s “too moral” to steal?⁴ And, wait. If she’s too moral to steal, why’s she a pirate? That’s what pirates do, isn’t it? How’m I supposed to square that circle?

Meh, it’s my story, I can do what I want. I am going to shove that very big peg through that very small hole, and I’m going to do it by myself.

However, shit happened and by 1996, I’d stopped doodling on my pirate captain. It was a vestige of my past, my immaturity, my inability to bring my vision to paper because I knew I didn’t have the chops for it and had to keep writing books to acquire them.

In 2002, I got married to a wonderful man who helped me pretty much without me noticing, and by the time I did, I realized he did it out of love, not because he had no faith in my ability, intellect, or general existence. I acquired children. My interactions with other parents were … well, less than effective and pleasant. I learned. Mellowed. Maybe I softened. Learned how to pick my battles. Or maybe I was just tired of everybody’s shit and decided almost none of it was important at all.

In 2007 wrote The Proviso after an epiphany that I was going to have to chuck my idea altogether and rewrite it, which I did to my (mostly) satisfaction. Gutting all that gentleman thief, unworkable premise, stewpot thinking made my world and my writing so much better. So I very carefully opened my pirate captain files to reacquaint myself with the work. I had a vague vision, but I didn’t know how to fulfill it, and what I had already done would not work.

One day, I sat my ass down to read a romantasy wherein the main female character, a warrior commander of some military force was captured, leaving her troops in a complete mess. She had a second-in-command, but he was ineffective. This was addressed sort of, but only tangentially to point out that she was a wartime leader, but not a peacetime one. When I was younger, teens, mid-twenties, I would have felt satisfied, complete, whole. Yes, this is how it’s supposed to be. Yeah, so what if she’s not a peacetime commander? Those guys are pussies anyway.

It got me to thinking: What would happen to my pirate captain’s life’s work if something happened to her that didn’t actually kill her, and she was disabled or had to start over?

Oh, and then came the weevils.⁵ It was eye-opening. What’s this?! Pirates engage in subterfuge to win? They don’t just slug it out head-on like honorable men?⁶

My time living life, having a husband, having children got me thinking: We are a product of our time and circumstance. We do what we must. We don’t get anywhere alone.

And fuck me if I was going to allow my pirate captain to have an ineffective pussy as a second-in-command because she can’t stand to rely on someone else and lose everything she’s got if something bad happens to her.

She might be a lot of bad things, but she is not stupid.

While that is true, in general, women’s art is seen with some disdain regardless of what it is, how well it’s done, or in what cultural/societal conditions it’s made, I’ll save you the feminist rant. For now. You’re welcome.

Complaints about genre romance are generally phrased as “romance is trash,” not “I don’t like romance because I think it’s trash.” I’m told these two different phrasings make a significant difference in reaction to some people, but come on. We all know they’re exactly alike.³

While these complaints prick my soul a little, they’re valid. I’m not even going to get into the male wish-fulfillment fantasies of pulp novels and comic books: spycraft, cowboys, space captains, superheroes, anything sporting a Boris Vallejo cover, and sportsball,⁴ because a good half⁵ of what’s classified as⁶ romance is objectively trash.

Now, I’ve tried to write straight-up smut because that’s where the money is and rent’s gotta get paid. The two people who read it said I’d done it very well, had my usual depth, and was very distinctly my voice. It was, in fact, some of my best work, and there’s some measure of very smart, intellectual erotica out there. But it made me feel oogey, and if my own smut could make me oogey when I was 45 and as horny as a 17-year-old boy, it’s bad. So I tucked that away in my external hard drive, never to be seen again.⁷

I even tried to write a clean (no sex) reverse harem book, because that’s a popular subsubgenre (“clean” or “wholesome” is its own thing), but the concept made me feel oogey for an entirely different reason.⁸

De gustibus non est disputandum, sure, but objective truth can be applied to some of it:

• short
• minimal plot
• no characterization
• graphic, unusual sex is its raison d’être
• badly put together because speed is the priority
• many published in a quick timeframe
• may or may not cause problems akin to other addiction problems
• may or may not be used as a replacement for real-life sex

They don’t have to be art. They just have to make money. People who read a lot⁹ will devour their favorite genres and tropes, and go looking for more like it’s meth. Dinosaur erotica obviously must have a wide audience, but nobody’s ’fessing up to reading them, much less fangirling over them outside niche fora.

Then there’s Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey.

These are hotly debated, denigrated, and defended, but, I would argue, somewhere in the middle of trash and not-trash.

I don’t know what’s special about these books, what sparked such devotion to them. I always say people choose a book for its trope (to be addressed in a later post) first and summary second, but they re-read an author for his/her voice, so I have to presume that other than the trope, something about the way Stephenie Meyer and E.L. James strung the words together spoke to them.

Or maybe it was the sex. I don’t know.

Disclaimer: I have not read any of these books except the first Twilight book, which I thought was an entertaining popcorn read, but didn’t spur me to read the rest.

Not-trash:

• long, saga-like
• some characterization, with plausible motivations
• decent construction
• thought and care put into it, even if the author wasn’t terribly skilled at it

Trash:

• cipher heroine¹⁰
• plot is to serve the sex¹¹
• sex isn’t very well written (so I’ve heard)
• caused minor to severe real-world problems akin to other addiction problems

Beyond technical and societal issues, I can’t speak to its non/trashiness because see above de gustibus non est disputandum, or, in more recent parlance, “I know it when I see it.” Even this entire post could be classed as preference, simping, and apologetics, but whatever. I know what I like, and dinosaur erotica is not it.

Although I consider myself a romance author,¹² other people don’t.¹³ However, there are a lot of people find romance contemptuous, are loud about it, and it bothers me that I’ve lumped myself in with the stuff I don’t write, don’t like, and don’t respect.

Long ago, I started telling people I write soap operas, which got the point across (“Yeah, there’s probably sex in it, but it’s a long story with lots of drama.”¹⁴), but that stopped working as soon as I said it to a twenty-something valet when he asked what I do, and he said, “What’s a soap opera?” Eh, people don’t respect those, either.

What am I looking for here, though? What is the point of this post?

Hell if I know.