#i'm gonna wake up tomorrow and barf about being vulnerable

[boyswanna-be-her]

publishing gay romance novels really unreasonably often for so many years completely warped my view of like... what is fun and funny and hot. like i am decent at writing a life-affirming, largely unproblematic romance that won't get me hate reviews and that's valid. and i think that's a pretty reasonable reaction, as a creator, to the bizarre takes on my fiction that i've dealt with (I'm sure everyone in my field deals with it) and vitriol that exists on the internet and goodreads and whatever platform for anyone who dares to present gay stories that aren't stock standard, ready to be produced by the hallmark channel and distributed to a chikfila audience.

but like. hm. to be writing that MESSY shit again. incredible. give me those goblins making bad choices. i cannot wait to ponder over how to write their setpiece Incidents in the most exquisitely uncomfortable ways. i love to watch them chew the scenery in my imagination. cannot say the same for my sweet, sweet lovingly rendered mass-appeal characters whose most compelling aspirations are to get me lots of nice reviews where nobody is calling me a [redacted lol] writing a "guide for [REDACTED FOR LEGAL REAONS WHY DO PEOPLE SAY THIS SHIT HOLY FUCK!!!!!]" i was really shaken by some of the horrific shit that people put out about my absurd books and it's taken me a long time to understand how to ignore it and--even harder--digest what i had already internalized and believed about myself as a human being based on book reviews. reading reviews is NOT the same as having an editor, and hater input was poison to my confidence in a way that i wasn't actually secure enough to acknowledge until the last few years.

im having a lot of emotions around writing again. im having a lot of emotions around most aspects of my life presently, and that of course channels nicely into creating some thinly-veiled fiction.

i'm glad i was allowed the luxury of taking some years off from publishing. i had completely stopped thinking of myself as a writer, despite the fact that i have 17 titles under my belt including a dozen hugely overlong novels written just by me. the last five years have been a pretty consistent ego death--not that i'm complaining, the vibe is now immaculate--but it is of course a lot to deal with. At the same time, the past DECADE of... trauma and growth and death and growth and total fuck ups and growth... has also casually wrought a sort of ingrained queer fury and strength in me that won't be quenched until my body kicks the bucket. I'm finally as old as I've always felt and I've got nothing to lose in writing some incredibly indulgent and polarizing fiction

anyway i don't really know how to blog anymore. i stopped sharing for so long, edited my sharing, overshared, undershared, begged for input, ignored all input. i'm making all of this shit up as i go along at this point. i'm excited about the way that my life experience is currently guiding my fiction. i think that's the essence here. but also 420 smoke weed every day jesse pinkman was right all along