This might be the most personal thing I’ve ever published online, at least since like 2016 when I blogged very honestly about the poverty I was experiencing at the time.

I have a book scheduled to be published in 2026 by Alex Parker Publishing. It’s an adult fantasy novel called Seed of the Black Oak, and the core of the story is two women in love.

I like the love story in my book. (Obviously, I wrote the damn thing.) It was the thing that “hooked” me about the story from the beginning–a “save the princess” narrative where the one rescuing the princess is another woman instead of a knight or a prince.

Actually, I’d already written such a novel (set in the same universe) but in that one the relationship between the heroine and the princess was platonic. That novel is a 250,000 word trunker that is way too long for traditional publishing, so I put it aside and used the lore and worldbuilding I’d developed through the writing process to write Seed, a much more focused, constrained novel.

But Seed was always a romance.

I don’t necessarily call it romantasy, although certainly the term was on my mind as I wrote Seed. The romance was central not only to the protagonist’s motivation but also, in my opinion, the emotional core of the book and directly tied to the resolution of the plot. It’s integral to the story, not a subplot.

Still, the book doesn’t really follow the structure of a romance or romantasy novel (and yes, I’m actually a big romance reader). So it’s a “romantic dark fantasy” or “sword and sorcery with a romance arc” (I’ll leave such classifications to my publisher).

I have to confess to some trepidation when I started querying Seed. First of all, it’s an LGBTQ+ novel entering the world at a time of increasing attacks on and erasure of the LGBTQ+ community.

But moreso than that, it leaves me feeling a bit exposed.

See, I’m AMAB (assigned male at birth), and I anticipate some…raised eyebrows at having written a novel about two women in love. And, given the history of Sapphic/lesbian/WLW literature and imagery being fetishized and commodified (largely but not exclusively by cishet men) I think those raised eyebrows are valid.

Well, I rationalized, Lots of cishet women write almost exclusively about gay men. Look at the existence of yaoi. And, like, yeah, that is a real thing, and probably more pervasive than cishet men writing about lesbians. I knew quite a few writers like that when I studied fiction writing in college. While it’s possible and perhaps even likely that they weren’t all actually cishet women, a significant amount of them absolutely were.

But is that really the same?

I actually don’t know. I’m not writing this post to defend myself or my book or start discourse. I guess I’m writing it to sort through my own feelings on the matter.

Because the reality is that, for the last several years, most of my protagonists have been women, and several of them have been in relationships with other women.

This wasn’t always the case–of the first seven novels I ever wrote (none of which have been published so the details don’t matter), five had primarily male protagonists. The next one, my novella The Cold, Dark Night (unfortunately now out of print), was my first to actually be published, and starred a teenage girl. Since then, every new project I’ve finished (three novels) and nearly every unfinished project I’ve started has had a female protagonist, or in the case of ensemble casts, weighted towards women and girls as protagonists.

I think there’s a simple reason for this. My story ideas almost always start with character ideas, and I find women more interesting than men.

The reasons for that are where things get complex.

I grew up absolutely drowning in male heroes in the fiction I loved, from books to movies to games. Spiderman, Rick O’Connell, Spyro the Dragon, Harry Potter (ugh), Luke Skywalker, Bilbo Baggins, Aragorn, Aladdin, Tamwyn from the Great Tree of Avalon series, Roland Deschain, Robin Hood; these were the heroes I read about, played as, looked up to, and just generally thought were awesome as a little kid. And even outside my favorite stories, need I even say that the vast majority of protagonists of action, adventure, fantasy, scifi, and thriller stories are men/boys?

The Hunger Games was a revelation. I was 16 when it came out, just like Katniss Everdeen, and Katniss rocked my world. She was an archer, my favorite weapon (I took archery lessons at that age) and she was emotional and heroic and badass without being one-note or one-dimensional or basing her entire personality and motivations on Peeta or Gale, while still having a complex romantic life. She was exactly the kind of hero I’d always loved, but a girl.

Even looking back now I can remember what a shot in the arm that series was, what a breath of fresh air, for me. I felt like so many possibilities for different kinds of stories were now open to me, and it wasn’t long after that I created my first real heroine, a teenage girl named Dawn who went on a multiversal adventure to save the world with some magic swords she found.

Was it a good book? No. But it was different than anything I’d written in the past.

Writing a girl main character was fun. I had to think more deeply about her than I’d ever thought about a character before. I had to sheepishly ask the girls in my life questions about certain things to make sure I was getting them right.

It’s not like I stopped writing male protagonists, but the gender balance of my heroes’ gallery started to shift, and sometime in the mid-2010’s it tipped decisively the other way.

Is that the weirdest thing ever? No, not at all.

But there’s more to it than that.

Romance (and Sex)

Nearly all of my novel-length stories have some kind of romance arc or romantic element to them. If they’re for adults, or it’s a short story where I don’t have time to develop a whole romance arc, there’s usually at least sex.

No, I don’t put in sex or romance just for the sake of having it–I just write stories about characters for whom that’s a part of life. Because both of these things are important parts of my life.

I don’t know if this is normal for all kids, but I remember being in kindergarten and having borderline-obsessive crushes on girls in my class. I thought about holding hands and kissing and marriage (and after I saw Titanic, about S-E-X (that’s another illustration of how much this mattered to me as a kid, actually; I would never have admitted it to the boys on the playground, but Titanic was my favorite movie)).

When I started writing fiction at the age of 12, it was a way for me to create people and worlds and situations I wished I could inhabit. I was a teenager and I desperately wanted a girlfriend, so I wrote about teenagers with girlfriends and dramatic, passionate (melodramatic) romance arcs.

Every adult relationship I’ve had–and I am not saying this as an unqualified positive–has been a whirlwind of passion. I love fast and easily and I always hunger for more. I get my heart broken; I break other people’s hearts. Then I do it again.

I’ve been married for 7 years (together for 9) and it’s the happiest and most stable relationship I’ve ever had. We are also (sigh) polyamorous, though, which for me personally as an individual has allowed me the thrill and passion of infatuation and New Relationship Energy while also being committed to a stable, long-term marriage/partnership that we both have to work at. They’re different kinds of love–one is raw and desperate and exciting and a whirlwind; the other requires patience, discipline, compromise, and making the choice day by day, month by month, year by year to continue loving a person.

And I want to write about both of those kinds of love.

So I find myself writing women a lot, and I want to write about them falling in love, having sex, breaking hearts, having their hearts broken.

Then comes the question–with who?

Sexuality…

Let’s get this out of the way: I have had relationships with and been attracted to women, men, and nonbinary people, both cis and trans.

But I am mostly attracted to very feminine people.

So when I’m writing a character as a love interest, I have a natural inclination to write women, or nonbinary people who present more feminine.

I actually think this is a flaw in a writer and I’ve been working to combat it in myself–I should be able to write love interests that aren’t people I personally would fall in love with/be attracted to.

And I can. It just takes more work.

My first male love interests were basically the kind of men that I thought I wanted to be, back when I was a kid and hadn’t thought through my own gender yet. (That’s foreshadowing.) Tough but sensitive, chivalrous and passionate, not overly-macho but still always strong and in-charge.

But I don’t think of myself that way anymore, so the way I think about my male love interests has also shifted.

For years now I’ve mostly broken the habit of thinking of myself as male at all. I don’t relate to these characters in the same way anymore.

…and Gender

I am nonbinary. I use they/them pronouns, and I do so openly in every aspect of my life-personal, professional, and Online.

I also present as very masculine.

Here’s where I publicly state things that I’ve rarely shared openly with anyone. I don’t even want to present as masculine. I suffer from gender dysphoria pretty regularly. 80% of the time I don’t like how I look, at all; the other 20% I try to just not care. 100% of the time I hate how I feel in my body and want to change it.

But, at this point in my life, I feel stuck.

It’s not a great time to be any kind of transgender. It never has been in capitalist society, but it extra isn’t right now. On top of that, while the people surrounding me are generally accepting in a sort of liberal “live and let live” way, many of them are not really affirming. I still have people who refuse to gender me correctly even though I came out as nonbinary years ago and they make being “pro-LGBTQ” big parts of their personality or public/online image.

My workplace is, on paper, very LGBTQ-friendly. We have policies in place to protect queer people. But also, my first year here, I had a non-binary coworker that was constantly misgendered behind their back. People didn’t even realize they were doing it–they just didn’t care.

If I don’t ask people to gender me correctly, I can’t be hurt when they don’t do it, right?

(Not really. But kinda. Except not. But in a way. Ugh.)

(Also, some people at my workplace do know I’m nonbinary, and if anyone asks I tell them. I visibly wear a they/them pin or a nonbinary flag bracelet sometimes. And it’s in my email signature until Trump tells my school district to force us to take our pronouns out or be arrested.)

In a perfect world I’d probably transition. I am working on at least starting HRT (I want to start with T-blockers and see how it makes me feel), but my PCP doesn’t do that so I’m staring at all the medical red tape and trying to gear myself up for it.

There’s more I either do or wish I could start doing, with accompanying reasons/excuses why I’m not, but I think you get the point. I’m not cisgender.

And this matters in my writing because when I write sex or romance into a book, whether between two cishet people, two men, two women, or anything else, I am coming from a place where I feel connected to all of these identities in different ways, but also outside them. Like some kind of gender nomad, I can find a comfortable spot anywhere, but none of them are really home. At least, not at this juncture of my life.

I have lesbian friends who I know would balk at the idea of a man writing lesbian (or sapphic, or WLW) fiction. I also know there are people like that out there who would never, ever see me as anything but a man. Put those two facts together and I realize that there are some people in the world that my book will piss off or offend or at least irritate.

I don’t say this to make myself look like some kind of transgressive trailblazer. I also don’t think I should cater to TERFs or let their horrid opinions bother me. But I do think that I as an author should think about this.

And what I want to hone in on is why. Why do I write these kinds of stories? What do I find interesting, or meaningful, or sexy, or compelling about them? And is it, as the cringe millennials (like me) would say, “problematic”?

I think it’d be a little more suspicious if it was all I wrote. Thinking back to all the cishet white women I knew in college who exclusively wrote (often very explicit) gay male romances, while I don’t think their work raises as much of an eyebrow, it’s still worth criticism. It’s still often fetishistic. And at the very least it too deserves interrogation.

But the thing is, it isn’t all I write. The last manuscript I completed has a heroine who’s probably a 1 or 2 on the Kinsey scale; regardless, in the actual story both of her love interests are men. Jessica Carpenter, the deuteragonist of my crime novel My Last Sunset, was straight.

Plus, both of the female protagonists in Seed of the Black Oak have relationships with men as well.

And, hell, it’s not like I’m pitching any of these as #ownvoices literature.

So at the end of the day I think my trepidation isn’t really because I think I’m being fetishistic or “problematic.” I think it’s really because it leaves me feeling exposed.

Maybe defending my “right” to write this book (as if that was ever seriously in question) is really a way to distance myself from some natural conclusions some people might draw about me. Maybe my hesitation to start actually dressing more feminine or androgynous, or my lackadaisical attitude towards correcting certain people when they misgender me, are defense mechanisms. Maybe this whole article is.

When I started writing fiction as a teenager my protagonists were boys or men and the girls were objects of affection. I was thirteen and desperately wanted a girlfriend and telling stories was, among other things, wish-fulfillment for me.

I wonder if maybe it still is.