She’s just been laid off from her job as a magazine writer and buys a one-way ticket to Italy to take a pasta making course. He’s the only son of the chef at a restaurant in Orvieto who wants anything but to take over the family business. She’s the jaded children’s book editor who doesn’t want to read another story about talking animals. He’s the abstract artist she wants to commission to illustrate her best-selling writer’s next work, except he doesn’t believe in commercial art. She’s the underpaid tattoo artist with dreams of opening her own studio, he’s the banker who turns down her proposal for a loan. And on and on and on!
I have always been wary of rom coms because of the tropes. Tropes are huge in the genre, so much so that now even readers know their names, not just publishing people. Enemies to lovers. Second chance romance. Normal person celebrity. Only one bed. Competence porn. Forced proximity. And of course, fake relationship, the one I hate the most of all. I never saw the point in reading a book in which I know the ending, and in romance every single one ends in a HEA—a happily ever after.
I always accepted that I would read one here or there, but on the whole, they weren’t for me. The readership is huge and ravenous, and tends to be pretty insular—people who read romance read only romance and a LOT of it.
That is, until last fall, when indie publisher 831 Stories put out a call for pitches for romance novellas. The thing is, I’ve always had a rom com idea in my head because of the way in which my boyfriend Matt and I met sailing around the world. Everyone is always telling me to write about it, and I of course don’t want to write about myself, BUT I could write a similar story and make it fiction.
So I wrote a pitch and sent it to 831 Stories, we went back and forth on edits for a couple of weeks, and they passed on it. Booooo. Until a couple of months ago when I decided I wanted to take a crack at writing it, since my other projects (I’m a serial book drafter) were feeling kind of stale. And in order to write it, I felt like I needed to do some research.
So I became a romance reader.
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