Tag Archives: romance

The Reclamation of Meaning

I’ve always been a linguistic descriptivist, which is to say, I was entirely unbothered when literally gained a new definition. The fact that said new definition is opposite to its existing definition did not bother me, I was delighted with the addition of a new contranym to my lexicon.

The sturm and drang of complaints and general irritation did get old, especially because the venn diagram of people griping about how words have meanings, and people who say “I could care less,” is a circle. Words are for communication, and they mean what we understand them to mean when we use them between ourselves. The potential complexity of that is a beautiful thing.

One of my favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold, will straight up make up a word to describe very particular feelings and it’s always done very naturally, the sort of effortless that people spend hours refining. Between context and the bouba/kiki effect, I’ve never had any trouble assigning meaning to those words, and it doesn’t slow me down at all.

Of course, socially, this does mean that words can attain unintended meanings, especially when one side of the conversation has a different understanding of the word than the other.

This is what happened to me with the word smut.

I’ve always felt that it was a fun, playful word, used to describe books that contain sexual content for the purpose (not necessarily the sole purpose) of titillation. This book has sex in it, and it’s fun! It’s smut!

I did not participate in online book discourse until very recently. Like… five months ago recently. The Milo Winter thing popped up on my YouTube and I got sucked in. My Instagram? Started in like February. I was approximately aware of BookTok, but I pronounce it like your grandma reading the word over her bifocals at arms length.

So when I casually described my books as smut and was promptly dumped into several conversations with very strong opinions about the word, I almost hopping my happy ass right back off of social media to continue being happy. The “Smut is valid” camp and the “Smut is porn” camp were both entirely predictable, and not really a problem. You can’t make art and be precious about it, so they didn’t bother me.

What snuck up on me with a club and a burlap sack was the romance -> smut -> erotica continuum.

Now, I’ve pieced this together like an anthropologist, so for the love of everything, do not take me as an authoritative source on the subject, but there is a very loud contingent of folks who keep crossing my feed who seem to feel that using the word smut is dismissive of sexual content in books, by assigning it a cutesy little word, and that for a book to contain smut, the sexual content needs to have no value within the story.

And, to me, that sounds an awful lot like the folks who were so upset about the new definition of literally.

Because personally, I like smut, both the word, and the content. I think it’s a fun, descriptive word, and can be as important to the overall work of fiction as any other scene.

And I’m not terribly interested in the rest of the discourse.

Recent Writing

He missed a step, was away from his body for a moment, and then was back and struck, as though by a fist, that she had asked him a question and he was supposed to say something, answer her, anything, but all he was capable of was admiring her eyes. And, eventually, breathing, he was capable of breathing. Not much, but it would have to do.

You even get a snippet from a smutty bit. Took me a minute to find one from my most recent writing session that wouldn’t violate any terms and conditions.

Next time, let’s talk about my current projects.

Do good friends.

The Great ReWrite

As promised, let’s talk about the book, huh?

So when I wrote the first book, the one I am now querying, I hadn’t really planned anything for it. I had an idea, I wrote it, and that was that.

Except that there were just a few too many loose threads for me, you know? I had introduced several things that didn’t get satisfying resolutions, and I wanted to follow up on them.

So instead of writing a direct sequel, I took a side character who was in one chapter, and I wrote her story. Also a romance, but it introduced a lot more about the world, the magic, the hows of things, not just the whats. And when I got to the epilogue, I wrote in a hook that leads to the same place as the epilogue in the first book.

But I wasn’t ready to write that story yet, I needed to fill in some gaps, which meant a third book, to connect the dots from “I need a favor.” to “How do you feel about regicide?” so I snagged another minor character from book one, and wrote book three. Also a romance. It fleshed out the overarching conflict, the thing in the background of the first two books that was the root cause of the things that were happening.

These books are all a continuous story, but it’s happening in different places, and follows different characters. Book four brings them all together in one place.

Now, I wanted book four to be a romance, too, which meant centering one relationship. And I happily wrote the first 48k words, having a grand old time, and then I came to a chapter that was POV one of the main characters and I just wilted, because I had decentered that relationship from about chapter 3 onward.

Writing the characters from the previous books was like wearing comfy shoes and the new shoes are nice, and I love them, but man, once those boots are properly broken in, it sure is hard to justify wearing anything else, you know?

So I wasn’t writing a romance anymore, and I wanted to be.

And that meant that I had to go back from the beginning, and look at every chapter and see if I could rewrite it from the perspective of one of the mains. The main doc gained 4k words. My scraps doc now sits at 12k.

It sucked. There’s a lot in the scraps doc that I’m very proud of. Some of it has made its way back into the main doc in one form or another, but most of it is tucked away like a backstory. And that’s fine. The main conflict is between these two idiots, so what the rest of the cast is doing in the background can be implied, for the most part. I’ve kept POV chapters from the mains of the previous books where either 1) the events were too plot-crucial to leave out and neither of the mains were present, or 2) the POV character’s perspective is adding to the interpersonal conflict between the mains.

Of course, I’ve complicated this by needing to resolve the dangling conflict between each of the first three couples, and I’d really like it to end up shorter than 100k. There are other things I can do in this world, but this story needs to be done.

Mostly because I’m super duper over it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my babies, and I want them to be happy (and they will be! Looking at YOU, S&S!), but I’ve got a gaslamp fantasy slow-burn romance about justice and revenge lurking just around the corner and I want to get to it.

A recent writing

Katie smiled almost fondly at the memory. “It was scary shit. You know, you can’t put an IV in shifters unless you also dose us with silver or aconite, and those aren’t long term solutions because of the toxicity, which meant that we were dosing her on the half hour to keep things level, and even then, the first few times she woke up already on fire.”

Next time, I’ll tell you about my attempts to make friends with the local corvid population.

Do good, friends.