I’m a romance writer.

I’m a romance writer.

People don’t really know what to do with that. 

Most often the follow up question is how did you get into that line of work?

For a long time I was a ghostwriter. And that’s the job title I would give when someone would ask me what I did for a living. I wrote novels of all kinds and sold them at a flat rate. Sci-fi, fantasy, thriller, some mystery, and a lot of romance. Mystery was the hardest for me. It’s complicated to balance character development and plot development in a way that keeps the reader guessing. It’s hard to unravel and wrap up a story all at once. I liked sci-fi a lot, but I knew the least about that genre and I always wondered if my stories were a little hacky. Fantasy and thriller I liked equally. But romance? That was my favorite. 

I started seriously writing for hire in the summer of 2016. One morning I was sitting at my desk at work. I was likely procrastinating washing my coworkers’ dishes, because that’s what I was doing at pretty much any given moment (it still doesn’t make sense to me why the receptionist has to scrape the crusty, microwaved pasta off everyone else’s lunch plates). I pulled up google and instead of typing in “Buzzfeed” or “NPR,” on a whim I typed in, “how to make money using your creative writing degree.” 

You’d think this would have been something I might have googled a decade before, when I’d started acquiring said creative writing degree, but here we were, waiting for the page to load and sipping the stale coffee I’d arrived early to make for everyone.

And there, suddenly, two search results down, was a link to a freelancing website. As I searched the site, I was astounded at the number of people who were searching for writing they could buy and then later sell, re-packaged, on Amazon. People were paying (very little) for any old story I might write and be willing to kiss goodbye. I made a profile that afternoon and applied to at least ten listings that evening. 

Two days later I had my first client. 

I started waking up two hours early to get some words in before work. I wrote novels with my thumbs on the train into Manhattan in the morning and back to Brooklyn at night. (This is not hyperbole. I was desperate for more hours in the day and the google docs app was as good a place as any to write a novel). I wrote for hours after work, stopping only long enough for my husband to put a sandwich in my hand and make me speak human words with my human mouth about my human day. 

I wrote stories set in space, in the future, in the mountains, in parallel universes. I wrote stories about aliens, werewolves, families, heroes, kids, loneliness, passion, fear, anger, intrigue, lust. My client base grew. My rates went up. I started picking and choosing projects. One day, I looked up and realized that I could quit my nine-to-five. 

In order to write full time. 

Because I was a writer…

…who wrote fiction…

…and was paid by the word.

I was a unicorn, baby.

Maybe a year after that, my husband and I were walking home from a party and he asked me why I still called myself a ghostwriter. I was still ghostwriting a lot, but I’d just signed my first book deal (Just a Heartbeat Away, out June 30th 2020!!) with a romance publisher. And if I really looked at the way I’d whittled my project list into shape over the previous months, almost all my projects were now romance. Why not call yourself a romance writer? he asked. 

Here’s the thing. 

People often laugh when I tell them I’m a romance writer. They immediately make jokes about heaving breasts and shirtless men on the cover of whatever joke of a book they assume I’ve written. 

Or, if they don’t make a joke, I’ll watch their eyes start to roam around, searching for someone else to talk to. I tell them my job and automatically become someone who creates drugstore art. Pedestrian and embarrassing. 

The fact that I made good money was neither here nor there. If I wanted people’s eyes to light up with respect at dinner parties, I needed to write in a different genre. 

Here’s the (other) thing. 

I have no interest in writing sad stories. Or stories where people are irredeemable or broken beyond repair or falling only to splat on the sidewalk. I love reading those stories. But to create them from scratch? Wake up with them, dream about them, put them down in indelible ink? Life is too hard, my friends. The news cycle is too soul withering. I love writing because, in many ways, it’s a break. 

The world is not always (or often) a safe and friendly place for a woman. It’s even less safe and friendly for women of color, people of color, trans people, queer people, immigrants, undocumented people. But you know where I was safe? Where the people I care about are safe? Inside my own brain.

And one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever given to myself was to allow myself to escape into the land of my own imagination. And I didn’t just steal moments there. I created universes. I created beautiful places where I would want to live. 

Writing, as a practice and profession, helped me create the kind of life I wanted to live. It helped me leave my job, start my own business. It allows me to be home with my son every single day while still building my career, my dreams, my inner world. 

What I’m really saying when I say I’m a romance writer? I write stories about love. Where the act of falling in love, of vulnerability, of connection, is the most important plot point. I write stories with happy endings. I do it with my whole self, every morning, at my laptop, with my son cooing at my husband in the next room. I write about things I wish would happen, and more importantly, things I’ve seen happen. I write about what is possible between two people. My job as the author is to believe these stories could exist. 

And when I put them on the page, in a book, in your hands, they do.