I’m back!
Some time ago (what even is time?), a thing went around the site formerly known as Twitter. One of those fun little meme-questions that’s supposed to be a game. Except for me, I read it, and suddenly started to question my entire writer-life.
The idea was to list the things people would fine in a You-branded book. The elements core to your writer identity, that people could expect every time they picked up a book with your name on it.
I played along. I started listing things. And realized…
None of those things were in the books I was working on.
Somehow, for no reason I could articulate, I was not writing books I would describe as being elementally me.
So I sat with that a while. Reconsidered everything. And started working on new books. Some of those books are now ready to be released into the world! I’ll have more on those soon—covers, release dates, all kinds of goodies.
But in the meanwhile, I wanted to talk about my answer to that game.
I have a lot of stories I want to tell. So many characters to introduce you to. Many different settings. Even different genres! But these are the things you will be able to expect to find whenever you pick up a book of mine.
- Big stories. Stories that take multiple books to tell. Stories that start seemingly simple until you start to pull away layers and layers and find that everything is complicated.
- Stories with magic. Wizards. Dragons. Spaceships. Demons. My books have always embraced the fantastical, and that isn’t going to change. Not ever.
- Kissing! I love reading romance. I love writing romance! I love big feeling and sweeping passions and just because we’re saving the world doesn’t mean we can’t find love along the way.
- Secrets. Unreliable narrators. Histories constructed by the winners. Truths that must be uncovered. I love nothing more than that moment of discovering things are not as they seem.
- Queer characters. Characters representing every letter in the acronym. I love my queer family, and everyone should get to fall in love (or get a happily-ever-after friendship, because I see my aro-ace siblings too!)
- Shadows and spiders and things that go bump in the night. There’s always going to be a little bit of horror in my writing. In some books, that touch will be light. In others, it will live on every page. But the world is a scary place, and that’s going to be present in my writing.
One more special note— the Happily Ever After!
Although everything I write is going to contain romance, not every book will be tagged as being in the romance genre. However, I promise you, if I am labelling this book as a romance, no matter how horrible things get, it will be all right in the end. Even if it sometimes takes a few books to get there, love WILL triumph. That’s a Barbara guarantee.
