Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

The stigma of romance…

As a fulltime writer, I tend to live in a self-made plastic bubble most of time. I work from home, so I don’t get out and socialize a lot. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not quite a hermit (I don’t have the ZZ Top beard or anything yet), but I am a rather solitary creature. Other than the many people I chat with online, and my husband, I don’t talk to a lot people on a daily basis.

Recently, I had a nice bout of cabin fever. I wanted to get out the house and do something, even if I wasn’t sure what. Unfortunately, this was also in the middle of the week. Most of my friends have day jobs or children who are out of school at the moment, making it impossible to break away for a girl’s day out.

Instead of waiting until the weekend, I got it stuck in my head that I needed to break out of my bubble and meet some new people. Well, let me tell you, that’s a lot easier said than done. I quickly figured out that it isn’t easy to make new friends, when all you want is to be friends. Worse, it seems like every time I mentioned what I do for a living, people ran away from me. Now it wasn’t quite as literal as people running down the street and screaming their heads off, but it felt that way. Rejection of any kind is never easy or fun.

As soon as the words writer and romance came out of my mouth, especially when I added the m/m bit, my phone quit ringing. It was like I had the plague. One person actually asked me if I only wanted to be their friend for “inspiration” for my work. As if I go out looking for hapless victims to base my stories on. I plainly said no, that my imagination supplied those details, but the end result was the same — no new friends for the dirty, dirty erotica writer.

Now a lot of people would say “just don’t tell them what you write”, but I’m proud of my career. It’s a large part of my life. I spend upwards of sixty hours a week writing romance or thinking about it in some form or another. I can’t sweep it under the rug like a dirty secret, nor would I want to.

So, who else has experienced some sort of hassle over the romance genre? Whether you’re a writer, or reader, share your romance woes. I know there must be someone else out there who has been looked down on for their love of the genre.

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Amanda Young
Romance Without Inhibition
www.AmandaYoung.org