*With just two weeks until the release of my first f/f Romance, I’m retracing my twisting path to becoming a queer Historical Romance author.
I jotted down my first outline for a Romance novel after an extra-depressing meeting with my line manager. It was the mid-teens and I was teaching history at a university in the South West of England. After another game of ‘let’s spin the wheel and see if we have work for you next year’, I was longing to think about something other than the lottery of funding allocations and how my fate was out of my hands. I wanted the opposite of all those bureaucratic limitations and enforced passivity.
I wanted… I wanted open waters, sweeping coastlines, and my ship under full sail. Romance had always been an escape for me, but, this time, I didn’t just want to just visit a world where anything was possible. I wanted to create that space for myself by myself. So I went back the bedsit I was renting and I jotted down a page-long premise about a flame-haired Regency spinster named Emeline who discovered a handsome castaway on her Cornish beach. French brandy, smuggling, and moonless nights were no doubt involved.
While Emeline and her pirate lover will forever languish as 2-D sketches on my old HP Pavillion, there was never a doubt in my find that if I finally decided to just go for it and write a Romance novel, it was would absolutely be an Historical. Sure, I had plenty of other doubts: Who was I to write fiction after training for so many years to write hard-headed history? Wasn’t it terribly impractical when all my focus should be on a real job? What would my academic friends say about my writing that least prestigious of genre fictions?
When I finally said screw the doubts and decided to just DO IT, my blueprint was the big, brash historical epics of my youth. (My Book Club is basically a love-letter to these clutch-cover classics.) I wanted the outsized characters with their unfashionably long hair and improbably perfect scars; I wanted the far-fetched premises and the promise of far-off places; I wanted suspicions of lunacy, insolvency, and piracy.
I wanted all of it… I just wanted it to be Queer too. Also, not so classist. You know, all those devoted servants whose #lifegoals are polishing silver, boots, and horse tackle. Also, plenty less White. But, before any of that could happen, I needed to imagine something I had never actually read: an Historical without a cis het pairing. Sure, there was plenty of gay Romance. But from the m/m bestselling romcoms to the Indie Romance stronghold of #LesFic with its ice-queen surgeons and bad-girl soccer stars, it seemed to me that queer Romance’s power base was in the present day. Carina Adores, the LGBTQ+ line of Harlequin’s digital imprint, was just launching. Contemporary only.
I now wish I’d ferreted out the f/f and menage queer historical Romances published with smaller presses in the last decade by authors like Megan Mulry and Jesalin Creswell. But I confess I just didn’t dig deep enough. So my survey of the market revealed that – at least as far as major publishers were concerned – queer + historical = m/m Regencies by Cat Sebastian. I’ve since become a devotee of Sebastian’s country vicars and cat burglars, but I hadn’t read too much m/m at then and felt ill-equipped to write them.
The next year, sapphic star Olivia Waite published her first Feminine Pursuits novel with Avon and the f/f historical became a thing that would float. But, by then, I’d already mapped out three m/f romances that I could pack with a queer and diverse cast of secondary characters and started the very strange apprenticeship that is writing your first novel. You’re really apprenticed to yourself, so you won’t meet your teacher until a year or two after you start when you read through your early first drafts and cry. The trilogy was a journey I needed to take – I’m still on it! – I just didn’t want to wait until its conclusion to start writing queer Romance with a capital Q.
“Editor’ Wishlist… a trans Scarlet Pimpernel.” I was instantly intrigued. Central to the pimpernel conceit is a hero whose disguise lets him act out his truth, and to woo the woman he loves. What about a trans hero whose mask lets him reveal his real self? Suddenly, I had a very vivid image of a masquerade ball, a dandified chevalier in a white wig and mask, a dance with an old friend under wholly new circumstances… and only the haziest idea of a political plot. I jettisoned the French Revolution and whipped up a Christmas Eve costume ball in Victorian England. This lush masquerade ball would become the cornerstone of my first holiday novella, The Christmas Chevalier. Actually, why couldn’t I have an whole holiday series centring on masks, mistaken identities, and Christmas magic? And why couldn’t all of them be differently queer?
…TBC
You can pre-order A Highland Homanay now from the publisher https://ninestarpress.com/product/a-highland-hogmanay/ It’s everywhere else 23 November.
