Then dropped into a private Goodreads Group – cannot give link since you need to be a member to read.

My biggest act of subversion so far was writing a paranormal where one of the guys (Kevin) was dead at the beginning, and didn’t get better by the end. [wry smile] I thought the ending was properly positive and hopeful, but a few people seem to have disagreed. Messing with the HEA/HFN is one of the things that can still get you into trouble no matter where in the romance-umbrella genre you are. My story was more of a, “Wait a little while, then in the future be happy together FOREVER” and I thought the “forever” part would make up for the wait. Now I know better, LOL! Not that I’d have written it differently, even knowing; it’s still my favorite of all my published stories.

But I wrote a sequel, showing that during the wait, the guy (Josh, who was still alive) met someone else (Jeff, a nice bisexual widower) and got married, and he and his husband got together with a lesbian couple and had a daughter for all of them to raise, and they had grandkids eventually. The point being, though, that he didn’t just sit and pine, looking sadly out the window at the sad clouds and rain for the next forty-some years, which is what would probably have been expected of him if he’d been a she and I’d published this on the mainstream het side.

One reader, commenting on the sequel, was all, “But wait, what about Jeff?? And Beth? [Jeff's dead wife] You need to write another sequel — four-way in heaven!!” [giggling facepalm]

Maybe some day.

Angie

Angie

Erotic romance and m/m both are both relatively new (at least on the commercial side) and have both grown up in relative isolation, apart from mainstream het romance. We have our own rules and tropes, yes, but they’re different from those of the mainstream, and there aren’t as many of them. If I want my protag to meet the Other Guy, then have sex with five other guys before he and the Other Guy (who’ll end up being his True Love) actually get together and form a stable couple, I can do that on the m/m side and no one will pop a gasket. Not so on the mainstream het side. If you want to write about a woman who has a lot of sexual experience with a lot of different men, but then meets Her Guy and falls in love and gets married, without regretting her past or beating herself up over it, you can do that. Not so on the mainstream het side.

The readers will accept more variation in character values and behavior in our chunks of the genre, which is one of the reasons I love writing here. Within the boundaries, mainstream het can produce some wonderful stories, yes. But it’s like wanting to write poetry and being restricted to only sonnets; sonnets are beautiful, but I want more. M/m and erotic romance gives us, as writers, that “more” — the extra freedom and elbow room to create without running up against barbed wire and flamethrowers.

Angie