Sapphic Romance & Me

Recently, I revealed that I am going to start focusing on sapphic romance. What is my relationship to sapphic romance? Am I a beginner? An outsider looking to write something artificial?

I should start by saying that I am a sapphic person. I am a queer fem. I sometimes even describe myself as a queer woman.

So, why did I spend all this time trying to write a straight romance? Honestly, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe I wanted to do something mainstream. Maybe it's because my mother assumes the romances I write are straight, lmao.

In a sense, I am a beginner. While I have written novel-length works with queer themes before, I've never written something I'd be happy to publish as my first sapphic romance novel. That's about to change.

I am going to take some sensible advice I heard today: I am going to write the sapphic novel I want to see in the world. While I'm still not sure exactly what that means, I am excited to get started.

So, where do we begin? Do I start writing a romance with two women leads? Or a romance with a nonbinary fem lead? Actually, the starting point is going to be quite different. Thanks to yet more sensible advice I've received today, I am going to start with emotion before I get to identity.  Instead of attempting to write some kind of sapphic archetypes, I am going to start with characters that are deep and whole and I'll make them fall in love with each other. The fact that they are women and/or fems will come later.

Someone I interacted with today says they write entire first drafts without nailing down the gender and orientation of their characters. I'm not sure I'll go that far, but it's an interesting idea. It's something to inspire me.

So, this is where I sit, at the beginning of an exciting new adventure in sapphic romance. I'll have to tell my mother.