Was It Just a "Honeymoon Phase"?; or, My Enthusiasm for Writing Romance Is Underwhelming

UPDATE, THE VERY NEXT DAY AFTER I PUBLISHED THIS POST:

I have resumed working on the romance novel in question. The fact is, I don't hate either reading or writing romance. Usually. But my brain goes in cycles. And because I'm autistic and think at every moment that the way things are now is the way they'll also be, well... the result is thoughts as you are about to read.

There is more to it than that, which I will write about later. For now, suffice to say that the following article is a good illustration of a brain which is commonly labeled with the insufficient and not quite accurate label of ADHD. A good illustration of how the neurodivergent brain can seriously mess with its owners.

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 Ever since I was little, I've loved writing stories. In grade school, where my peers would write a paragraph to fulfill a story assignment, I would write multiple pages. Even as young as third grade. If the mainstream culture bearing down on me had encouraged it rather than cautioned against it, I likely would have gone to school for either a music degree or whatever degree would have taught me how to write quality fiction.

As a sophomore in college, I wrote what I know now was a terrible novella. I wrote a few short stories, as well. When I got out of college, I even shopped a couple of them around.

No takers.

But, no matter, because by then, I’d convinced myself that I wanted a career as an elementary school teacher, and lasered in on achieving that goal.

I was twenty-nine years old before I began writing fiction again. I began with short stories for children’s magazines. After receiving multiple rejections, I decided to try my hand at writing a novel. After all, that was where the real money was. And by that time, I was desperate to get out of the educational system, having realized several years prior that being a classroom teacher wasn’t, and never could be, what I’d imagined it was when I first set out to get my degree.

Other than a fake literary agent who scammed me out of $200, I had no takers for my first grown-up novel, either. However, in 2004 I attended a writer’s conference where an editor of a small Christian publishing house (which no longer exists) encouraged me. Though they couldn’t publish it because they only published two novels per year, he told me that “someone should publish it.”

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?

Though by my early thirties, I was dreaming of living in the country, living a quiet life where I’d spend my days writing novels and communing with nature, my sole motive for getting published at that time was to make more money than I did at my teaching job and thus be able to quit my job.

In other words, though I loved to write, I was writing novels because I wanted to make money, and a lot of it.

A decade after that writer’s conference, having built up a large enough nest egg to do so, my husband quit his job (I’d quit mine when I got pregnant) after we’d spent some time organizing our finances and choosing an amount we believed would finance a frugal lifestyle. But those first years living on five wooded acres, I didn’t trust God to provide, was anxious about what might happen to our investments, so when I learned about self-publishing on Amazon, I returned to writing novels. Romance novels, because those were the kind that sold the best.

In other words, I wrote with the sole motivation of making money.

Are you getting the picture here?

But focus on money wasn’t the half of it.

It might have been that God had called me to write romance novels, but my motivations had gotten skewed. Or it might have been that I had divine permission to write anything within the bounds of His teachings, as long as I was using the writing talent He’d given me.

But if either of those have been true, I'm not sure they're true now. Why?

I haven't enjoyed writing romance in a long time. During the past few years, there have been characters that I fell in love with, and certain scenes that I had fun writing, but overall, since 2018 or 2019, writing romance stories has felt like drudgery. I've also had an increasingly harder time finding romance novels that I truly enjoy reading. Around the time of the pandemic, I began to prefer upmarket, non-romance women’s fiction stories, or intriguing or inspiring non-fiction. By then, I had a bunch of non-romance novel ideas swirling around in my head, as well. The reason I didn’t write them?

Self-published authors struggle to make money unless they write in one of the top genres, romance being at the pinnacle.

Ah, and here we arrive at another big issue: the tug to write a novel for traditional publishing has been slowly growing stronger. Though I've handed the desire over to the Lord several times, it keeps creeping back into my soul, poking at me a little harder every time.

And, quite frankly, I’ve been tired of the self-publishing game for several years. Probably since around 2018. Yet, I've kept pushing myself. I've had no joy in my days because I “had” to finish whatever novel I've been working on within six weeks of starting it.

And most of the time, that novel has been a romance. Which, at the moment, I don't even want to read.

Stronger than the desire to find a trad publisher has been the desire to return to God’s ultimate vocation on my life: as a teacher and encourager. In my head I've been hearing more and more descriptions of nature, stories of my experiences, explanations of how ABC helped problem XYZ.

I've been hearing myself write non-fiction. Essays. Spiritual growth books. And so on.

What it all comes down to.

God has called me to be a teacher and a writer, no question. But, a romance author? And, self-publishing? At the moment, I can't see myself writing romance anytime in the near future. I could be wrong. I've been wrong in making similar statements in the past, but I've never struggled with a novel before as I have with the last romance I tried to write. 

As far as self-publishing, well, I think I gave up on querying literary agents too soon twenty years ago. If nothing else, God has allowed me to torture myself writing romance in order to hone my craft, and that now, I’m skilled enough to create work that has a good chance of getting the attention of a quality literary agent.

I’m not saying I’ll never write another romance. And I could be wrong about the trad publishing thing. But at this stage in my life, romance novels – reading or writing them – do nothing to enrich my life at any level.

It’s past time that I take a few steps of faith and write the kind of books that God wants me to write, not the kind that I think will make the most money.

Which, by the way, have never netted me more than $3,000 a year. That was one time, and that's including all thirty of them.

In case you think it’s easy to make money as a self-published author.