lisa rabey writes stuff issue #12 50, Midwest. Creative. Married.

May 17, 2023

Dear Internet,

There I was the other night, lying in bed looking for my next read. I pull up Libby (the Libby app connects with your library’s ebook collection to check-out, manage, and organize your ebooks) to see what I checked out. I typically go by due date first but sometimes I’ll go by what I hunger for. I was feeling for a good romcom so I pick a title that fulfills that criteria and settled in.

25 year old. New York City. Only child of a single mom. Creative. Dating disaster.

My eyes glazed over.

I read five pages and returned the book post haste.

Then I bitched on Twitter how done I was with this tired storyline.

Why, why, WHY must this always be the formula?

Last week I ruminated on the ages of romance readers. I did some more digging. RWA has different stats that I first found. To sum, per RWA, the average reader is ages 35 – 39, but skewing younger. Romantic suspense, erotic, and historical are the top genres. But something seems off. What about the older readers? Nielsen stats skew older than what RWA reports but the interested genres remain the same. Duke’s research skews even older but again and the interest areas remain the same.

And all that research agrees that what the readers want is stories about mid-20 women who are creatives in NYC and are looking for love. And if it is erotica or paranormal/fantasy elements, even better.

Why?

This could go down a rabbit hole that I’ll never recover from so let me move on from there.

Thank you for reading Lisa Rabey Writes Stuff. Share me with your friends and not friends.

Many decades ago, I read romance with shame. It wasn’t Bronte, Dostoevsky, or hell, even Tolkien. Contemporary authors didn’t do it for me and classic lit bored me. I couldn’t get into big thinky books. With romances, however, I could be a dashing duchess or a hardboiled PI or a gangster’s moll on the wrong side of the tracks. No matter what the story line, there was always a HEA or at least a HFN.

I loved reading those stories but I felt like I was too smart to read romance. I should read big thinky books to stimulate my brain. But, again, big thinky books bored me and felt over blown.

Then two things happened simultaneously: I started working at a bookstore and I got turned onto Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

I concluded: reading romance is feminist as fuck.

Romance is a billion dollar industry written by women and for women (as well as stories from marginalized communities like LGTBQI+ and BIPOC). And while the definition of a romance is a HEA or a HFN, the plot and storylines varied widely from erotica to fantasy and sci fi. Anything can be a romance and a romance can be anything.

During library school (MLIS), we are taught the five laws of library science. Law two and three are poignant:

Every person their book
Every book its reader

I didn’t have to read big thinky books. I’m not their reader. I found big thinky books superfluous and too flowery. I like clean concise writing that gets to the point. I like characters I can either relate to or get into. I like stories that offer a bit of everything without being ham fisted. I also love a play on tropes and interesting takes on tried and true plots.

Romance fits that bill.

(I do read widely outside of romance. I recently finished Death of a Bookseller about a misfit bookseller obsessed with true crime who stalks a colleague when discovering said colleague’s mother was murdered by a serial killer. It’s a great book. Another example is The Midnight Library about a woman who gets a chance to live the different lives if she had made a different decisions. Also, a great book. There are no romantic elements in either one. They are considered as general fiction. I also enjoy contemporary fiction, mysteries, pulp fiction, history books and biographies, as well as cozys and general non-fiction.)

I’m currently reading Legends & Lattes. Per the blurb, it’s a high fantasy with low stakes. It’s about an orc who is battle worn and decides to settle down and open a coffee shop. I typically don’t read fantasy (but I do love Terry Pratchett) but the idea is intriguing: a battle worn orc who opens a coffee shop. What prompts Viv, the orc, to open a coffee shop? What does she expect to get out of it? What kind of people is she going to meet? This premise seems interesting so I want to read it. This blurb pulls me in. I’m so enthralled with the book that I was up Monday night until 2:30 a.m. reading. (By this newsletter’s publication, I’m either done or almost done. A second book in that world comes out in November and you better believe I pre-ordered that sucker.)

Taking all I have laid out, let’s go back to my original fury:

25 year old. New York City. Only child of a single mom. Creative. Dating disaster.

With so many great plots swirling around across all types of fiction, especially romance, why do I keep finding, and why do they keep publishing, the same romance shit? As I earlier pointed out, readers are reading books with younger characters, which if fine, by why NYC? What about the Iowa, Chicago, or Seattle? Why creative? Why not a lawyer, farmer, or in the medical field. Hell, even a scientist. Why only child of a single mom? What about a single dad? What about parentless? What about both parents with relationships either good or bad? Dating disasters, what about young widows or jilted brides (either his or her reason)? What about down on the luck women who just can’t seem to find a date not because it’s a disaster but it just doesn’t work out? What about women who are physically disabled, mentally ill, or deaf or blind? You can still have younger (or praise be, older) women going through all these changes and still fit the bill that readers want.

So many fucking options to play with and yet we keep getting the same shit in contemporary romances. I don’t get it.

Last week, to sum, I described Aubrey from Aubrey Jones Gets a Life: She’s a burned out tech worker. She’s a big girl (size 18/20). She’s in her early 40s. She’s been in relationships but her career always came first. A relative dies and Aubrey finds herself quitting her job, filling up her old Volvo, and driving to N. Michigan to make sense of her life and maybe find romance. And if the romance unfurls, it’s someone younger than her.

I was concerned about following tropes, overthinking things, making it more difficult to write. The story has all the elements of something traditional but has enough twists to make it fresh. I was curious about what I was going to do with Aubrey, now I know, and I hope people enjoy reading her as I do writing her.

A Most Unreliable Narrator

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