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You know something I love? Driving home at night and seeing the warm glow in people's windows. These many strangers, just living their lives, eating dinner, watching TV, getting ready for bed, all of us separate but together.

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our lease (moving in with the fiance for the first time) starts on TUESDAY and I? Haven't even started packing

what the hell is my brain

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Link to original

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🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦 Pride march was held in Kyiv, Ukraine for the first time since the beginning of full-scale invasion. It's dangerous for big crowds to gather for a long period of time due to potential russian airstrikes, so the event was smaller and shorter than usual, but still important and powerful.

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[girl who would like to take a break from being a person voice] yeah no I'm just a little tired today

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🫛 you have time, the peas said so…

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“if you’re sensitive to sounds when sleeping, just use earplugs!” i cannot stress enough that the sensory feeling of having my ears fully blocked AND now being able to hear my own heartbeat and breathing and every other sound that’s happening inside my own body is a million times worse than whatever ambient noise may be keeping me awake

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Faces carved into the walls of the Paris Catacombs

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every time you make freezer food for dinner instead of buying takeout like you actually want you should earn two hundred dollars cash and a round of applause

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head is pounding. eyes do not want to work. my job for the next 35 mins is to sit here and try to help people who walk in the door. i am not capable of anything else. because of the PAIN

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my spouse and i disagree

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love downloading a pdf to never read. just in case. like lol. you’re coming home with me

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I was working on a post about "cozy fiction", but then I realized I needed to take a step back and talk about the Romance genre, because I've come to realize that a lot of people in fandom don't have as much experience with it as I used to think.

(I'm capitalizing "Romance" here to distinguish it as a genre from the concept of romance-as-in-love-stories, hopefully that will be clear going forward.)

Traditionally, Romance has been a strictly defined genre with rules that were partly convention and partly publisher-imposed. For instance, there were two types of romance novel: short and long. The longs are those thick mass-market paperbacks that used to have painted clinch covers, written to stand alone or possibly as a series of fewer than ten books by one author. (Lisa Kleypas. Eloisa James. Bridgerton.) These are generally about 100k words. The short books, "category romance" of half the length, would be popped out by a company like Mills & Boon or Harlequin, dozens a month, somewhat disposable, not typically marketed as being by a particular author. If you've worked at a library book sale, you've probably seen at least one box come in that's just stuffed full of these.

Subgenres are very much marketing tools, each with their own readerships and fandoms who use the labels to find out what to read next. Contemporary, historical, time-travel, science fiction, "inspirational" (overtly Christian); LGBTQ+ romance, Black romance, and YA romance are newer additions to the roster. There's both fantasy romance and paranormal romance, the latter usually being urban fantasy with vampires and werewolves and the former being high fantasy. These can be broken down even more into very particular sub-sub-genres, like shifter romance, billionaire romance, etc. And then there's "erotic romance", which can in theory be any of these but is particularly characterized by having longer and more detailed sex scenes. (The level of detail we typically get in E-rated fics, basically. Despite the reputation Romance has for being "basically porn"/"porn for middle-aged straight women", the sex is usually not that porny.)

The expectations for each subgenre can be very strict, depending on the publisher. For instance, Mills & Boon's "True Love" line requires a "relatable heroine", a hero who is strong and successful, an aspirational feel in glamorous, modern locations, and sex that's hot and emotional; they even list appropriate tropes for True Love series novels to be based on, like marriages of convenience, secret babies, friends to lovers, and "falling for the boss". But even outside of this kind of literal requirement, there are all kinds of informal ones -- what the reader expects, based on common tropes and clichés.

In Romance, the main plotline must be the romance. That sounds obvious, but please think about it a moment! That diagram you remember from English lit class is supposed to be filled in with plot beats that relate to the progress of the relationship: the inciting incident relates to the couple's chemistry, the rising action is their increasing intimacy, the climax is the point of greatest tension and release in their love story, and the denouement shows that they stay together and have a happy ending. (There MUST be a happy ending. Literally must. There have been many fights about this in Romance fandom, the occasional new author thinks they're doing something clever by not having them be together at the end, it causes drama and yelling every time. HEA is a requirement.)

There can be subplots relating to external issues, but ultimately these must serve the development of the romance rather than simply being an interesting story. Working on the mystery gives the couple reasons to be alone together, solving it inserts an obstacle into the relationship or resolves the misunderstanding. The female main character's family's financial troubles give her a need to get married and a secret she has to keep from the male main character so that he can think she's lying about something else later, but it's still not going to be a book about an impoverished gentry family's path to solvency.

And to some extent, it just comes down to a formula. The main characters need to be introduced within the first couple of chapters, if not the first chapter. Both romantic leads need to have their own point-of-view chapters so that the reader can get to know them equally, see how they like or dislike each other, and have a front-row seat to the misunderstandings in their heads. There is no official declaration of where the first kiss should be, or the first sex scene, but if you read enough of the same subgenre, you'll see that these things tend to happen around the same time in each book.

Romance is a wildly successful industry. I don't know the statistics, but I've heard that it helps to subsidize other branches of publishing. Romance fandom is much like other fandoms, but in my experience they treat the books themselves the way other media fandoms treat fic: where I might post, "hey, does anyone have good recs for OFMD fics with fake dating and mutual pining?" (ie with a specific fandom), Romance fans are more likely to ask on Smart Bitches Trashy Books or r/Romance "does anyone have good recs for Regencies with enemies to lovers?" The individual characters don't matter too much, though reccers might note specifics that readers might find objectionable, like "at the beginning, the duke is really insulting and you might have a hard time with that" or "fyi, the marriage of convenience in this one doesn't happen until two-thirds of the way through".

And, possibly because Romance is so successful and its fanbase is so strong, this is starting to bleed into other genres. The invention of "romantasy" is fascinating to me! Nobody can 100% define it, but my go would be that it's fantasy fiction with a plot that focuses heavily on romance, but that if marketed as Romance would probably get reviewed negatively for having too much non-romance plot (and as fantasy is still going to get some fantasy fans complaining that there's too much romance). I could also talk about stuff bleeding in but that's really another issue altogether. And this bleeding-out is where we're starting to get that culture clash of people being irritated with book promo that focuses on the tropes within the story. In Romance and now romantasy, where it's understood that the plot of a book is at base "two people meet, fall in love, struggle, then finally confess to each other and have a happy ending", the tropes in who the characters are (wallflower, rake, single mom, cowboy, admin assistant, billionaire) and how their romance goes (enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, cinderella story) are crucial to figuring out what you want to read. With people not used to Romance, or not realizing that they're being shown books that are based on the romance formula, the tropes appear to be shallow gibberish.

And I think this is enough to set up my cozy fiction post, thank you for reading. Next time on "Cassidy lectures people in a longpost ..."

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Happy pride month to my dad. When I came out as bi to him, this man googled what it ment, look at me and said "ohh. Yeah. You get that from me. You'd have far more siblings of I only shaged women." And went right back to his work emails.

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Relaunching my online shop TODAY!

I wanted to see more art, stickers, and wearables that promote acceptance of schizo-spec/psychotic people such as myself. While I do plan on making more designs in the future featuring different topics, fighting sanism is near and dear to my heart as a schizophrenic person.

Support your local madman -- get a sticker :-)

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