Except that didn’t happen. Not even a little bit. Also, I think if I’d said the phrase “build our brand” in Cara McKenna’s direction, she would have barfed on me. And Serena really hates barf, references to barf, and books that contain or begin with barf, so she’d have been out, too.*

In fact, Wonkomance grew out of a loosely curated thread of tweets. I think? It’s all kind of fuzzy. I remember that Cara coined the term, and that the website itself was a random impulse one day, possibly Serena Bell’s – There should be a blog! I’m going to buy the domain name. – and an email list of author friends that I put together off the top of my head.

We had no particular plan. The notion of our being some sort of an influential or admirable group, with some sort of a brand, was (and still is, sort of) laughable.

And yet here we are, more than a year later, posting these posts and talking with all you fine people.

To the extent that we’ve built something here that is coherent with Wonkomance, I think it’s because we were pushing back against a gestalt of online romance blogging, or possibly against a shared experience. We were,  in a mild, cheerful sort of way, collectively against the notion that there is a right way. That there is real romance, an ur text, a core story that all other stories must / should / do emulate, or don’t / oughtn’t / fail to emulate. That there are books that people want to read and then those other ones, over there, that are bad and wrong and doomed. Also, shame on you for liking that one with that thing in it that was SO abhorrent. You hoor.

Our manifesto took aim at this whole idea that there is a center, or ought to be, to the romance genre, and if we wanted to be properly successful writers, we needed to learn how to shoot our authorial arrows at it.

Start with the meet. Don’t make your heroine a bitch. Don’t make your hero weak. Don’t let them be ugly or short or fat. Also, please no body hair, puking, or condom disposal. No one can poop. Children shouldn’t be in the book, but if they are, they should be very quiet, and they should nap as though comatose. No cheating, ever. No gross words or gross sex acts or grossness, please, of any kind.

Make sure there’s tension! On every page! In every paragraph! Sentence by sentence, ideally! And also, don’t use exclamation points. But make it bigger! And everyone must have a goal, motivation, and conflict at all times. Think huge! But write what you know. And make it all seem real. Oh, and if you write historical, don’t get anything wrong, ever. The duke’s pantaloons must be historically accurate.

Also, I just remembered, there has to be a dark moment. It has to be awful. The conflict should be impossible to fix. But then you must fix it realistically, with no hail-mary nonsense. End with a grovel! Only don’t forget that everyone hates grovels. There should definitely be a proposal or a wedding, but no clichés. And an epilogue where everything is perfect and everyone is happy, but it shouldn’t be too saccharine.

So, yes. Just do that, fledgling writer. Make your book like that, as though that is something one just does, or would even want to do in one’s spare time. Because let’s face it, it’s not as though anyone’s going to pay you for that first one. Or the second one. Or probably the next four.

Oh, and I almost forgot — be sure to make your book different from everyone else’s books! Not too different, though. Exactly the right amount of different. Then you’ll hit the sweet spot, and an agent will pick you up, and your book will sell, and then . . . actually, you know what? Here’s another blog post. Now You Are a Published Author. Surprise! There are another four hundred things you must do.

I like to think we started this blog because all of that, up there, is a bunch of crap.

Write books. Read books. Love the book you’re writing, if you can manage it. Read things you love.

Those are the actual rules.

Recently, I was at the RT Conference in Kansas City, rooming with Del, Cara, and our beloved Christine d’Abo (who really should be on this blog, and is certainly here in spirit). I met a lot of readers and writers and had a whole big bunch of excellent conversations with people who like to talk about romance novels. It was great. There were so many awesome women (and a few awesome men) there. So much enthusiasm. So many outfits. There was a lot of hugging, and a dose of scandal, and a few tedious parts, and also I had too many gin and tonics that one time.

There were no rules. I think enthusiasm kind of crowds out rules, so there’s no room left for them. You’re too busy saying things like, That part was so fucking great! and Oh my god, Kellllllyyyyyy and But do you read Brenda? YOU MUST READ BRENDA OR I WILL DIE and Holy man, that part with the butt plug! I completely lost it and I haven’t been the same since.

Among a phalanx of enthusiastic romance readers, you’re too busy being alive and in love with the fact that you’re not at home in a quiet office that you haven’t left for days. Much too busy to worry if you’re important enough to be sitting at this particular table, sandwiched between Brenda Novak and Julie James. (Probably not. But whatever! You were invited. Your self-doubt can suck it.)

You’re too preoccupied swapping marital sex horror stories with your friends to consider whether you are, in fact, doing any of this author stuff right.

Writing is a weird job. Like, every single thing about it? Weird. The way you work (alone). The way you get paid (late, and usually not all that well, and also the amount on your check will be a surprise! every time! whee! why are you not saying ‘whee’?).

The way your performance is reviewed by anyone who feels like it, at any time, in whatever mood they’re in, and sometimes in GIF form, is weird. The way your worth is judged by six hundred different metrics, most of which don’t make sense, is weird. The way publishing itself is either transforming or not transforming or perhaps exploding? quickly? or maybe slowly? is weird.

The way you acquire a sense of belonging to a coherent professional group is — ha! Good luck with that! And also, the public is going to mock you for your job. So there’s that.

Other weird jobs: Editing fiction. Marketing fiction. Agenting fiction. Reviewing fiction.

Maybe it makes sense that there is so much urgency to the impulse to find the center and write our way toward it. Maybe we feel like when we get there, we’ll know what we’re doing. Properly know. And we’ll feel safe and understood, and also everyone will like us and all of our books will be universally beloved. We’re human, after all, and most of us are women and thus culturally conditioned to avoid disagreement. Approval feels good. Approval feels like warm oil massaged into our feet by our preferred masseuse in our exact preferred locations.

Ahhh. Approval. We love you.

But that feeling I described up there? The one we’d like to get from writing?

This is not a thing.

It’s terrible, but it’s true. There is no middle. There’s no arrival, no moment when you feel that you properly know, and no writer whose books are universally loved with equal enthusiasm by everyone, everywhere, ever.

On the other hand, there is here. This blog. Conferences like RT, where fourteen people who are loosely connected via Wonkomance can get together for dinner and drink wine and flirt with our lesbian waitress and think to themselves, Damn, this is a pretty great group of people around this table. I would like to put this moment in my pocket and keep it for always. Also, some of this cheese, for later.

There is knowing who you are, what you’re good at, what you love, what you want to do better — and writing in that direction. Writing toward the love instead of toward the middle.

Because, oops, there is no middle.

But it’s good out here, too. And I have to say, the company is fantastic.

Turns out this is YA. Good thing I didn’t know that because there’s very little chance I would have read it. It’s kind of awesome. So unique and immersive, about these teens trapped in the mafia underworld.

I’m reading and stumble across this:

“Even though Beatrice married someone else and died young, Dante loved her his entire life. The love was a part of him, because to him, Beatrice was the ideal. He barely knew her, had only met her twice, but yet he truly claimed to love her. Can anyone tell me why?”

No one spoke up. Carmine sighed exasperatedly. This lesson was becoming frustrating to sit through. “Because he really loved the person she made him. It has just as much to do with how he felt as it did with who he was.”

And because I like to pretend I know everything, I was like psshhhhh, yeah. But then I thought about it and I was like huh. NOW I understand The Great Gastby, Heathcliff, Odysseus and even fucking Atlas Shrugged and basically every single old-ish book that has a love story wherein the hero and heroine barely speak to each other but are madly in love.

Because, while I’m not sure whether we’re calling these “in the romance genre” or not, the love story is important and sometimes central. Yet the interactions between the hero and heroine are at a minimum. How the hell is that love? Related: What the hell is love?

When I was in middle school, the song How Do I Live by Leann Rimes came out. So I’m hanging out with my best friend at the time. Her idol was Captain Janeway from Voyager and she once dressed as her for Halloween. Seriously.

So How Do I Live comes on the radio and she’s like, “Ugh! How stupid! What kind of dumb girl can’t live without a guy?”

I was like, “psshhhhh, I know, right?”

But secretly I was like oh-my-god-I’m-so-stupid. Because I’d liked the song and thought it was a sweet sentiment and not really literal anyway but hey, I wanted to be a smart girl. And independent and not desperately reliant on men for my happiness. RIGHT??? *cries*

The idea stuck with me, the question of how much you had to give up to be in love. Whether it would be worth it. Carefully weighing things with logic and career and feminism. It manifests in big and small ways, like if I get to write fiction for small amounts of money or write code for lots of it. Like whether I can do things like workshops and conferences when my hubs has to take care of the kiddo.

Awhile back I went to one such weekend workshop by James Scott Bell. He said that every novel is about death. Impending death, and the protagonists goal is to not die. There are three types: physical death, professional death, and psychological death. I think emotional death would be a better descriptor.

A romance novel, by this definition, is all about emotional death. The hero and heroine are trying not to die. And that’s what Leann Rimes was talking about, I assume. And now I understand why a cover with a gun, blood and a flower is so compelling. It’s more than shock value, it’s exposing the guts of the book right on the first page.

I know for sure I like books where sacrifice is a major theme and I feel like that’s a counterpoint to some of the posts I read about feminism in novels. Because, okay, a lot fictional women have had to sacrifice stuff so maybe that gets annoying, but I’ve had to sacrifice stuff in my marriage, so what’s up with that? Am I doing it wrong? Related: This is the only way I know how to do it.

I’m still wondering, how much do I have to give up to be in love? Or like Dante and his Beatrice who he loved from afar, do we gain something instead? I know sacrifice sounds like a loss, and it is, but it’s an optional one when we do it for love, I wonder if it’s also like a trade. Like if something was sacrificed for love, then it’s proof something was gained after all.

In our post-Fifty Shades world, it seems like the lines are blurring more every day, and the whole business seems worthy of investigation in the hope that we might be able to nail down the tent flaps a bit — or at least amuse ourselves trying. Thus, I’ve conducted a “wonko weigh-in” on the subject, asking the Wonkomance contributors and a few distinguished guests to share their opinions and personal flow charts.*

So, without further ado, a group interview / weigh-in, with contributions from Wonksters Del Dryden, Serena Bell, Mary Ann Rivers, and Shelley Ann Clark and guest wisdom from agents Courtney Miller-Callihan of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates and Laura Bradford of Bradford Literary Agency, as well as Ellora’s Cave editor-in-chief Kelli Collins. (I’ve included brief bios for each of our guests at the end of the post.) I jump in here and there to sort of guide the discussion along.

RUTHIE: How do you define “erotic romance,” as distinguished from a romance that has open-door sex scenes but is NOT an erotic romance (and would probably be called a “mainstream romance”)?

DEL: I think this distinction gets more hazy all the time as mainstream romances become more and more explicit. However, I think some “tells” remain. One is the language. While they’re certainly not immune to euphemisms, characters in an erotic romance are really unlikely to think of their ladyparts as “down there”, or the gentleman’s manly unit as his “manhood” or such. Standard naughty-bit terms for erotic romance are pussy and cock, with some wiggle room (heh) for usage of “dick” or “prick”. In an erotic romance a clit is usually a clit. Sex may even be referred to as (gasp!) fucking. Also, certain acts (anal) are pretty common in ero rom but almost never seen in a mainstream romance.

An erotic romance is also more likely to focus more on the main characters’ sexual relationship than their out-of-the-bedroom relationship. They get to know one another via sex. Most of the plot and character development is played out in that arena. Sometimes it comes down to a question of proportion. When you achieve a certain critical mass of sexytimes in relation to non-sexytimes, you leap over into erotic romance.

LAURA: In general, mainstream romances have gotten more explicit over the last 5+ years and I think that a romance can be pretty spicy in terms of the language, the acts, the sheer amount of sex and still qualify as a mainstream romance albeit a really, really sexy one. I think the defining characteristic of this group is that the relationship between the hero and heroine is, well, ROMANCE driven (as opposed to sex-driven) and it stops short of really getting heavily into what would be considered kink. . . . I really don’t think the presence of a certain word (or words) automatically turns a mainstream romance into an erotic romance. And I don’t think the presence of, say, handcuffs in a sex scene automatically makes a mainstream romance an erotic romance. There is a decided difference between a scene in which the heroine uses a pair of joke pink fuzzy handcuffs she got as a doorprize at a bachelorette party one time and a scene where the heroine is manacled to the wall in a sex dungeon designed for D/s play. Nor is the difference defined by anything as simple as the number of sexual encounters in a book. If a character in a mainstream romance uses the word “pussy,” that does not change how I would classify the book.

COURTNEY: For me, the key difference between “erotic romance” and a romance with explicit sex scenes is whether the sex is really central to the storyline. A sex scene should ALWAYS move the plot forward and further the relationship between the characters, but in non-erotic romance it’s often possible to imagine those scenes taking place “off stage,” or dialing down the heat level (as in an inspirational romance), without doing damage to the central story. But in erotic romance, the way the characters relate to each other physically and sexually is so central to the story that without the sex scenes, there’s no story at all.

KELLI: [At Ellora's Cave], we’ve long defined the difference thusly: If you can neatly cut the sex scenes out of your book, just remove them wholesale without any other changes to the manuscript, and the end product still makes seamless sense? You do not have an erotic romance. You have a romance (maybe) with sex.

In erotic romance, all parts of the relationship, including the sex and the (oft-overlooked) sexual tension, is an integral part of the conflict. Just as a hero needs his heroine (or another hero, or both) to find fulfillment, an erotic romance needs sexual content to be complete. Let your sex scenes inform the readers, reveal subtle things about your characters, reveal facets of their personalities we wouldn’t otherwise see, and directly or indirectly help drive the plot toward a satisfying conclusion.

SERENA: To me, “erotic romance” is a story otherwise classifiable as a romance (love story w/HEA) where the primary goal, motivation, and/or conflict (GMC) for the hero or heroine (or the story goal) is about sex. There are loads of possible examples — the heroine is trying to become sexually responsive in the wake of abuse or rape, the hero is determined to win the heroine over to a kinkier way of doing things, the hero wants to win the heroine’s love but has an erectile dysfunction issue. Contrast this with a story where the primary GMCs are about other, non-sexual things, like dealing with a dying parent, learning to trust, winning a boating race, or prevailing in some kind of heroine-against-hero conflict, like if one of them wanted to build a shopping mall on the other one’s grandma’s grave. (Dibs on ED and grandma’s grave stories. I know. You can’t WAIT.)

I’ve heard people describe it as a story where you can’t “close the door on the sex scenes without taking away from the story” but to me that’s a necessary but not sufficient condition–you shouldn’t be able to EVER close the door on a sex scene in a romance without taking away from the story, if you’re doing it right, because every scene in a romance should develop the romance and add to the growing intimacy between the characters.

MARY ANN: To me, this distinction is made, to use a sort of writerly shorthand, via the conflict/goals/motivations of the characters. Erotic romance establishes conflict with the sexual relationship–either the sexual relationship itself is a conflict, or other action in the story exerts conflict on the sexual relationship. Further, the goals of the characters are to achieve resolution of their emotional arc as well as love through the erotic action of the story. And not that sex isn’t a kind of foundational motivation, but in erotic romance, I see that the characters are pushed to pursue their goals via erotic opportunity.

Thinking about it this way, I can take the explicitness of the scenes off the table. I’ve read romance with very explicit scenes — Elizabeth Hoyt comes to mind — that are romance because even if erotic opportunity twines with other action to move the character, other internal and external forces for the character are at play. Erotic romance keeps the focus on a particular moment in the characters’ life where eroticism and sexual communication underpin almost all of their choices.

Sexual development is an incredibly complex aspect of our development as people. Neither romance with explicit sex or erotic romance will provide the reader with more or less breadth or depth when it comes to story satisfaction. There are thin romances, and thin erotic romances, and the reverse is true, as well. I think it was Cara who said once, and I can’t remember where, that a book is looking at a specific story, a space of time, of THESE characters. The assumption is that these are fully lived and developed characters ALL the time. As a writer, we can choose to tell the story of those characters at a time when sex and eroticism was defining their choices, or at a time when sex is an important part of their lives but other, competing forces are at work.

Mainly, this is how I think about it because I feel it is important to remove explicitness as a rubric for categorization. I feel that the level of explicitness is tied to characterization, or to the energy of the scene itself. Ruthie, for example, in the same book, will have very explicit scenes focused on the erotic energy of the moment, and also near closed door scenes that have other external pressures or elements of characterization that are more important that describing the sex. In fact, it’s this, right here, that can frustrate me as a reader–when every erotic scene is written explicitly, even when the scene doesn’t call for it or even argues against it, and the reason seems to be so that the book is categorized as erotic romance.

The very best and most effective writers, I find, are often difficult to categorize because they write the scene, not the category.

SHELLEY: When I’m wearing my writer hat, I’d say that “erotic romance” explores the development of the hero and heroine’s relationship primarily through their physical encounters. A sexy romance novel may use sex scenes to do this, too, but the difference for me would be the primary focus.

As a reader’s advisor, however, I’m likely to look at heat levels/taboos/what kinds of sex acts are depicted and how explicitly when making a reader recommendation. The last thing I want to do is recommend a book that someone will either find boring or will be horribly offended by.

RUTHIE: Interesting — there’s a lot of agreement here, but also a certain amount of circling. Notice how language and heat level are important in some definitions and denied importance in others — but then we find Shelley’s perspective as a librarian insisting that from a practical reader advisory standpoint, heat level, words, and sex acts all matter in categorization.

Okay, here’s where things get tricky for me: how do you differentiate “erotica with a happy-ever-after (HEA) / happy-for-now (HFN) ending” from “erotic romance”?

LAURA: Erotica is the easiest to define. It is a sex-driven story that lacks the characteristics that define romance. There is no requirement of a happily-ever-after. It does not need to be relationship-centered. It needn’t have a romantic heart.

RUTHIE: What I find so interesting about this definition is its “not-ness.” We can say what erotica is not, but not what it is, perhaps?

COURTNEY: I’d draw a line between erotica and erotic romance in terms of the emphasis the author places on the growth of the characters’ relationship over the course of the whole story. You sometimes see erotica with a HFN that seems to come out of nowhere, rather than being an arc that’s more carefully traced over the whole storyline.

SERENA: In my personal book, erotica is a synonym for sexy story. If it’s a sexy love story with an HEA, and if it doesn’t break too many other genre rules, then it’s ALSO a romance.

Of course, I’ve totally begged the question of what constitutes breaking “too many other genre rules,” which is one of those eye-of-the-beholder things. We’ve mentioned before on Wonkomance that romance has few “hard” constraints — love story + HEA–but tons of soft ones, such as the preference among readers for there to be no adultery, or the constraint that once the hero has kissed the heroine, he doesn’t mess around with anyone else. Whether something feels like erotica or romance to me ultimately boils down to how many “rules of romance” get broken–and how critical those rules feel to me. I think this HAS to vary person-to-person. For example, I can read triad love stories and to me, those are romances (often erotic), because, well, they’re love stories with HEAs. But I know there are readers — and editors — who still feel that one hero, one heroine is required for mainstream romance. (Pffft.)

I love HFNs but if something has an HFN, I don’t usually classify it as romance. (I make exceptions for novellas and other shorter works). If I read something that looks like ero-rom but has an HFN, I’d call it erotica.

DEL: For me, erotica is first and foremost about the characters as sexual beings. The sex may or may not be a metaphor for some deeper truth about the character, but the terms in which the reader sees him/her develop, growth and change are explicitly sexual. The story is actively about the sex, the plot centers around it, and whether it leads to a happily ever after isn’t as important as what the main character learns about him/herself during the course of the book as a result of the various sexual events and his or her response to them. The sex and what it means for that character is the point. All other elements in the story serve that point. I think Cara McKenna’s Curio series is one of the finest examples of this available.

In an erotic romance, the romance is the point, and the story serves the romance. The sex serves the romantic relationship, rather than one character’s individual development. From the beginning we have the same expectations any romance reader has, that the couple will find happiness together by the end of the book, but that until then (even if they’re going at it hot and heavy in the meantime) there will be conflict keeping them apart. Even though a lot of the story plays out in the bedroom, it follows the usual progression of a romance in terms of the characters’ emotional progress toward becoming a couple.

RUTHIE: Del’s distinctions regarding the meaning of the sex (the “argument,” perhaps?) and Serena’s regarding genre “rules” are both persuasive to me, and are distinctions I rarely see made in conversations about erotic romance and erotica — perhaps because they cut so fine. They are categorizations you could only apply to a story ex post, when it seems to me that the whole purpose of having these categories is to be able to slap them on up front. I wonder what use such a definition of erotica vs. erotic romance is to someone like Shelley, or to a bookstore owner trying to decide what to buy. On the other hand, I think these distinctions are of great use to readers, who frequently have strong preferences for erotica over erotic romance or vice versa for very foundational reasons: They require the happy ending, they want the relationship-driven-by-sex story, they want the personal-growth-driven-by-sex story, they want the “rule”-breaking of erotica, and so forth.

Which leads me to the next question . . .

Do you think readers by and large understand these categories? Do they care? Are these just tools for agents / editors / authors to use among themselves?

COURTNEY: I think there’s a real spectrum of awareness. Some readers do a lot of self-educating, spending time on Goodreads and other sites for readers to gather to talk about books; probably people who subscribe to RT and attend conventions, or those who follow their favorite authors on Twitter or Facebook, are better-informed on average than those readers with a more casual relationship to the publishing industry. Similarly, people who make an effort to shop at a bookstore rather than picking up books at the supermarket/Target/Wal-Mart are probably more likely to know exactly what they’re looking for.

The genres and sub-genres are intended to help readers know what they’re getting, and there’s no question they’re useful for agents and editors (as well as authors!) in making decisions about how and where to market the book, but the categories are worthless if the target audience is totally unaware of them. However, it’s worth noting that the category printed on the book (or listed in the Kindle/Nook/etc description) is not the only way we communicate to the reader what the book is about. The cover is absolutely critical in giving a shorthand visual cue about the book’s “flavor.” It’s not an accident that Sylvia Day’s Bared to You series looks so similar to the Fifty Shades books; the covers are communicating to the reader that these are the same kinds of books.

It’s like the difference between lowfat and full-fat yogurt. You’re going to notice a difference, even if you can’t quite put your finger on what’s different, and you’re likely to have a strong preference for one over the other, too. And if that’s the case, you’ll probably find yourself checking the labels more carefully the next time you’re in the supermarket.

DEL: I do think readers use these categories when searching for new reading material on, say, Amazon or Goodreads, and that’s important to consider because the term “erotica” is very loaded for a lot of folks, and carries a history of shamefulness and secrecy. Some might be willing to follow the trail of fiction–>romance–>erotic romance, but not the trail of fiction–>erotica (or vice versa). Even in these enlightened times, I know the range of people I’d recommend erotic romance to is a lot wider than the range I’d recommend erotica to. There’s a difference between saying, “Here, I think you’d like this romance…and it’s extra-smutty, woohoo!” and saying, “Here, I think you’d like this book. It is about sex.”

MARY ANN: Most reviewers, including readers who also review but don’t necessarily have a formal platform for it like a blog, include “heat” level in their review. I think this communicates that readers do care, probably because they’ve found books they’ve loved by paying attention to this aspect. Like any category that you can judge things by, it fails. However, most of us can look at our reading history and find a larger portion of books slotted in one of these heat level categories. I know that there are readers who have minimum and maximum heat level requirements, as well — so such a reader will find ways to figure this out before they read.

I think, too, if you’re a reader concerned with how satisfyingly a book argues for its story, you will take into account the motivations for these story and for these characters. Understanding from its editorial category that the book is a HFN erotica will necessarily direct your attention in the argument to how well the characters discover themselves and develop along an interesting arc as they make decisions that are erotically motivated. I find that Cara and Charlotte are particularly skilled at this, and so their categorization is important, and even presented in very nuanced ways by their publishers.

There is a way in which, ideally, as a writer, you want your categorization to be somewhat invisible. If it is, it means you’ve taken the reader on a very full journey with a great deal to consider. Here is where I think of both Amber [Lin] and Serena [Bell] — their work incorporates a great deal of external force on their characters. The heat levels are high in their work, but the engagement is on multiple levels and so that erotic categorization is invisible.

SHELLEY: From my perspective, the categories matter when it comes to collection development. Some libraries — usually in more conservative communities — have collection development policies that explicitly state that they do not carry erotica. So, a book that ends up labeled as erotica rather than romance might have a harder time finding its way to library shelves. There’s a certain amount of concern a librarian might have about purchasing a book labeled as erotica even if the collection development policy allows it. Dealing with book challenges is part of our job, and it’s usually pretty unpleasant. Add in the fact that lots of erotica publishers are e-only, and there’s an additional layer of complication to the question of access. Collection development policies will often allow for purchases of best-sellers, award-winners, or books that have been well-reviewed in Library Journal or Booklist, regardless of other content, so if an erotic romance receives that kind of recognition, we’re more likely to buy it. (And notice how even in this answer, I’ve conflated erotica and erotic romance. Complicated question, indeed.)

LAURA: How a book is actually categorized as romance versus erotic romance with a publisher depends on that publisher. Some publishers draw very clear lines between each classification, some have words that are not allowable in their mainstream imprints etc. Once I had a client’s book published as erotic romance because one of the characters worked in the sex industry, even though the actual sexual content was fairly tame. I wouldn’t have defined that book as erotic romance in any way but the publisher felt that that element of the hook made it more suitable for an erotic romance imprint. Another time a book that I thought was absolutely erotic romance — in terms of the language used, the explicitness of the description, plus there was also some mild bondage, anal sex and sex toys — was published in a mainstream romance imprint. In that case, the story had a very strong emotional core that had nothing to do with the sexual content so the publisher felt it could be published as mainstream. The thing is, I think the very best erotic romance ALWAYS has a strong emotional core so to me the presence of that (or lack thereof) is not the defining characteristic of the category.

RUTHIE: Some great food for thought here regarding how readers find books, how publishers classify them, how libraries acquire them — and how all of that might or might not have anything to do with the erotic content of the story, which can itself be looked at from a number of perspectives.

Thanks to everyone who weighed in! I’d love to see some lively discussion in the comments, so have at it, brilliant Wonkomance commenters!

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About Our Guests

Courtney Miller-Callihan is a literary agent with Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. She represents romance, women’s fiction, and young adult novels, as well as an eclectic assortment of nonfiction. She blogs (sometimes) at agentcourtney.blogspot.com, tweets at @millercallihan, and lives with her family in Southern California.

Laura Bradford established the Bradford Literary Agency in 2001. She considers herself an editorial-focused agent and takes a hands-on approach to developing proposals and manuscripts with her authors for the most appropriate markets. She is a member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR) and Romance Writers of America, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and she is an RWA-recognized agent. Connect with her on Twitter @bradfordlit.

Kelli Collins is editor-in-chief at Ellora’s Cave Publishing, which specializes in erotic romance. Find her on Twitter @editmethis.

Everyone knows that The Princess Bride is a love story. But when I revisited it,  I found that the love story between Westley and Buttercup is only one among many. The first love story, introduced even before the romance, is between Fred Savage’s character and his grandfather, who reads him the story while he’s sick. There is something utterly touching and beautiful about an older man reading a story about love to a little boy; so often our culture seems determined to chase all thoughts of affection out of boys’ minds as early as possible instead of embracing and nurturing their ability to love and be loved. Notice, for instance, the grandson’s opposition to “kissing scenes.” The grandfather tells him that “some day he might not mind them so much” instead of skipping over them or agreeing with him. In all my years of working with children and books and literature, I have very seldom seen an adult acknowledge a boy’s future potential for romantic longing.

Familial love is evident in Inigo Montoya’s story as well. When he shares his need for vengeance atop the Cliffs of Insanity, the story is about a boy with a deep and abiding love for his father. And when he asks for his father’s help finding The Man in Black, once again, love saves the day, guiding him to the dungeon’s secret entrance.

The relationship between Fezzik and Inigo Montoya is a love story, too. Not only do they share an obvious easy companionship while in service to Vizzini, the look on Inigo’s face when he realizes that Fezzik has arrived to save him in the Thieves’ Forest is pure joy.

Look at that face! Look at the joy!

My personal favorite of the love stories, though, has to be between Miracle Max and Valerie, his wife. When Max nearly refuses to perform the miracle required to raise Westley from mostly dead, Valerie berates him in the way only a spouse of long-standing can. “I’m not a witch, I’m your wife! But after what you just said, I’m not sure I even want to be that anymore. True love, Max, he said true love!”

What I think my husband and I look like. . .

. . .What we actually look like.

And of course, there is the love story that gives the movie its title: that of Westley and Buttercup. Before my recent re-watch, I hadn’t watched the movie in years. What lived loudest and most distinctive in my memory was the dynamic between Buttercup and Westley. I recalled her tormenting him as the farm boy, and his acquiescence to her demands with only an “As you wish.” I remembered him falling in love with her precisely because she tormented him. I remembered him insulting her, and her insulting him back, and Buttercup shoving him off a cliff leading to his “as you wish” declaration of love after he returned as the Dread Pirate Roberts. I remembered him suffering in a dungeon for her, and dying, and waiting for her in her bed.

As I wish, indeed, Farm Boy.

 In short, I remembered a sort of fem-dom fantasy that gave me permission to like the idea of a man who liked being under a woman’s control. There was a reason I liked the farm boy better than the pirate.

So, with this memory living so vividly in my mind, I was disappointed to see that Buttercup becomes a nearly silent character through most of the movie. I wondered why, exactly, Westley loved her.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe that was precisely the point. In the world of The Princess Bride, love has no “why.” It merely is. And love is the most important, powerful force in the world, according to this movie. Love allows Westley to survive the Dread Pirate Roberts and return to Buttercup. Love allows Fezzik to find Inigo when he needs him most. Love allows one man to bring another back from the dead. Love solves impossible problems.

And the movie ends with the love between a boy and his grandfather, a grandfather who believes in love strongly enough to read this story to his grandson, to pass that legacy of love down to a child, to teach him that love makes even kissing scenes worthwhile.

[Extra bonus love story: My husband's and my first date was to a Halloween party. I went as Buttercup. He went as Westley. Shut up. We were only 18.]

He thought for a moment, then said, “Oh, you’d like this song.” He took out Buckley’s Grace CD (yes, those days) and cued up “Hallelujah.”

If you have never heard Jeff Buckley perform “Hallelujah,” it is time. Your best bet would be a really expensive stereo system, but if Nick isn’t in your neighborhood, you can listen to the original studio version on YouTube.

The song starts with Jeff Buckley exhaling—a half-desperate almost-sigh of release and relief. I think my heart stopped. Then the single haunting guitar notes floated out, wrapped themselves around some previously unknown part of my anatomy, and tugged out emotions I didn’t have names for. I didn’t weep or speak, just felt this expansive lightness in my chest, a sensation as new and brilliant as the first time I had an orgasm.

This is apparently not a unique experience, because “Hallelujah” has become a strange anthem, almost a hymn in our culture. I bring this up because I’ve been reading a book called The Holy or The Broken, by Alan Light. Light talks about how Leonard Cohen wrote “Hallelujah” and nothing much happened, and then Jeff Buckley produced his version, and all of a sudden crazy-amazing things happened, and the song broke out and became not just a mainstream hit but something embedded deep in the American consciousness.

The thing I found most interesting was that even if you separate out the vast differences in the ways they’re performed, the Cohen version and the Buckley version are not the same song. The lyrics are different.

Cohen’s verses, the ones he has performed, are quite spiritual. The Cohen version might be a hymn, the sort of thing you would rationally choose to play in the wake of 9/11 or after the Newtown school shooting, both times when “Hallelujah” was performed in the public eye. Light writes about how Cohen composed about ten million different verses, only a few of which he ever performed. The way Alan Light describes it, Cohen was almost plagued by this song, and he kept scribbling down versions of it, desperately trying to get it right. It was like he was channeling something but couldn’t quite hear it.

And then Buckley latched on and somehow all the pent-up meaning Cohen couldn’t quite grok came roaring down the pipe. Buckley’s verses are overtly sensual, a paean to sex and orgasm, a sad human love song. And yet despite having taken a much less lofty path, somehow Buckley managed to channel whatever Cohen was having so much trouble with. He managed to get across something transcendent and universal, something that was trying to speak through Cohen and having trouble. And it’s only since Buckley translated Cohen’s struggle (Light tells us) that the song has caught on and become such a universal expression of angst and loss and hope. It’s Buckley’s expression that became the hymn, not Cohen’s.

Transcendence is a strange thing, and even something as earthy as physical love can be the conduit for it. You can listen to the Leonard Cohen version of “Hallelujah” ten million times without getting half the buzz off it that the first ten seconds of the Jeff Buckley version gave me. And of course my opinion is not universally held. There are plenty of people who think that Leonard Cohen did it right and Jeff Buckley messed it up. But when I read about the song’s history, what had happened to it over time, I couldn’t help but think that somehow even though he was writing about orgasms, Jeff Buckley got at something more emotional and more fundamental than Cohen had been able to.

In fact, the way I choose to look at it is that “Hallelujah” was such a big thing trying to break through into the world and be born, that one man couldn’t do it on his own—Cohen tried, and he paved the way for Buckley, but it’s absolutely a collaboration. And it’s not just Cohen and Buckley who’ve done the work. It’s all the musicians who —despite the song’s overexposure—have been driven to express the sense it gives them of having access to something larger than themselves. And it’s all the people who have chosen at moments of great duress to make the song be a hymn. They’re all midwives of sorts, trying to guide the ineffable into this much more dark and concrete plane of existence.

Anyway, you should read Alan Light’s amazing book. You should listen to both the Leonard Cohen and the Jeff Buckley versions of “Hallelujah.” And all the other versions, too, the ones that reflect so many musicians’ deep need to use the song to shout their own grief and pain and joy.

Then when you’ve done that, you should look at the Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley lyrics, and you should think about why we as a culture publicly deride sex as small and dirty even as we admit at certain moments that earthy, broken, human, physical love stands in for shattering and reconstituting the soul in a way that nothing else can.

You can never have too much Data.

Not so very long ago, our beloved Mary Ann Rivers knocked all our Wonkomance socks off with her post on using classical appeals to back up your wonky love story. This post, which involved Shakespeare, Aristotle, and Star Trek: The Next Generation, was so brilliant that I had to read it three times.

“I want to lean against a marble column and talk about this in just a little bit more depth than the six elements of poetics,” Mary Ann wrote, “because this is where I begin to suggest a complex and useful craft tool for writing and responding to successful wonkomance. Namely, that a story can be epically, immensely wonked and be satisfying to an extremely wide audience of readers, possibly for hundreds of years, as long as it forwards a winning argument.”

Then she said a number of clever things about logos, pathos, and ethos that mostly went over my head, but I didn’t mind because I was soothed by the Data and Picard photos.

Then I promptly forgot and went back to bashing my head against a novella I was trying to write.

In due time, and with a lot of hand-holding and loving nudges from Serena Bell and Mary Ann both, I finished the first draft of this novella and then started thinking about how to revise it. I read it and filled my Scrivener document with questions and imperatives. “What is this scene even about, anyway?” “Make this make more sense.” “This chapter is all over the place. Fucking hell, woman!” Times four hundred. Serena asked me some very smart questions. I had no idea what the answers were.

I hate this book I hate this book I hate this book, I thought. I sent Mary Ann an email that was mostly like this: “? o_0 :-( !!!” She wrote back, “Remember that you had an argument? Maybe look at that.”

Beams of rainbow light broke through the cloud cover and washed the prairie in glorious brilliance.

Like this

An argument! Right! I did have one. In fact, this was a story that I’d written for the express purpose of making an argument. This was a story I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about writing, that I’d badgered my agent and editor into letting me write, that I’d blogged about and daydreamed about, synopsized and planned, and yet somehow I had forgotten all of that, because the act of writing it had clobbered me over the head so hard that my brain fell out.

But once I remembered that I had an argument, everything fell into place. And I mean that. EVERYTHING. I sat down, wrote out my argument longhand, wrote down what the evidence was for my argument, and then went through my Scrivener file and answered every single question I had asked myself, easily. All in the course of about two hours.

It was miraculous. Easiest revision ever.

Then I went and read Mary Ann’s post again and understood it more clearly.

So let’s look at this argument business a little more closely, shall we? Because it turns out to be an interesting way to think about not only writing but also reading and wonkomance.

To make a winning argument, Mary Ann / Aristotle suggests that the author has to

1. make a convincing chain of evidence to support it (logos)
2. appeal to the reader’s emotions so that they will either feel good about accepting the argument or feel bad about not accepting it (or both — this is pathos), and
3. appeal to the reader’s sense that the author — or a major element of the story — can be trusted (ethos).

So one of the first things that occurred to me, once I started thinking about argument, was that category romance is really good at argument.

Yes, even this, she will do. The poor woman.

I recently read Maisey Yates’s Heir To a Desert Legacy, which is a sheikh book in which the heroine is a graduate student in physics who’s recently given birth to her half sister’s baby. The heroine agreed to be a surrogate, partly from love of family and partly because she needed the money. It just so happens that her half sister was married to the ruler of one of those made-up Harlequin Presents Middle Eastern countries, and it also just so happens that the half sister and this ruler died in a car accident on their way to pick up the baby. So the story opens with a very angry, freshly minted sheikh knocking on the door of the heroine’s Portland apartment to retrieve the heir to his throne (whom — it just so happens — he wasn’t aware existed). And the argument begins immediately — both literally, in the sense that the heroine won’t give him the baby, and figuratively, in the sense that Yates starts telling us what this book is going to convince us of or die trying.

The argument of the first half of the book is about love and how it changes the heroine. It goes like this:

(1) It is difficult not to love a child who you’ve grown inside your body and cared for from birth.

You can tell yourself that you’re just in it for the money, you’re just caring for the baby until you figure out what’s next — but the truth is, even though you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re tired and fat and your breasts are leaking, you would rather stab a stranger in the eye than let him take this baby from you. Which is how you begin to figure out that you love him. (The baby. Not the stranger. That part comes later.)

(2) Once you fall in love, all your priorities change.

You’ll follow the baby to a made-up Middle Eastern country, even if it means disrupting your doctoral work. You’ll pose as his governess. You’ll even enter into a marriage of convenience with a difficult, assholeish sheik, if the alternative is to have to leave the baby behind. (You saw that coming, right?)

(3) Once you understand how love can change your life for the better, you will seek love instead of living in fear.

Even if you’ve spent most of your life avoiding risk, love can change you–very quickly–into someone who’s willing to go toe-to-toe with the angsty sheikh and demand that he crack himself open, turn himself inside out, and refashion himself into a lovable man. And also that he have sex with you.

Now, this is just half of the argument. Part II is the sheik’s part, but I’m not going to go into that, because I don’t want to bore y’all. (Not that the sheikh is boring. He’s terribly broken in that way that Yates does so well.) My point is that the argument drives the whole story, and everything serves it: the action, the characters, the emotion, the turning points, the sex. Category romance is an efficient argument-delivery machine.

What’s so interesting to me, here, is two things: first, the idea that I might love an author’s work, love her characters, but hate her argument so much that I can’t even read her book. (Not the case here, but it happens.)

And second, the idea that I might dislike an author’s writing and her characters, her plot, and her style, and yet find her argument so fascinating, so convincing, that I can’t put her book down.

Both of those things happen to me, as a reader, on a pretty regular basis.

(It also helps to explain how entire lines of category romance don’t work for me as a reader. Category lines tend to promote clusters of arguments — Blaze books make arguments about sex, for example, while other lines might forward arguments about the value of sacrifice for love — and if I don’t want to engage with the arguments, I’m not going to like the books.)

The other way in which argument interests me is that it gives me a tool — again, as both reader and author — to pick apart a story. As a reader, I might say, ”I love the argument and the emotion, but I could never trust the author after she slut-shamed so virulently in chapter 1.” That is, the ethos was off: the author lost my trust, and there was no way to get it back. This can happen, say, in a book with an infertility plot where the heroine miraculously gets pregnant at the end. “Fuck you,” many of us say, closing such a book. “I will never trust you again.” This is an ethos-based reaction to an ethos-rooted failure. The argument falls apart when the ethos fails the reader.

Or, say, “She’s trying to argue that true love can reform a bad man, but when he sleeps with the prostitute during the dark moment, she completely undermines his reform and sinks her own argument.” That’s a logos problem. You can’t build a chain of evidence and then take a giant pair of chain-cutters to it in the final third of the book — not if you want to keep your readers. The evidence has to be there, and it has to make sense.

In the case of Yates’s book, I’d say that I bought the argument but I wasn’t as affected by it as I might have been — the pathos wasn’t quite clicking for me, and I think this was because I needed more grounding in the heroine’s professional/social world in order to understand emotionally what she was giving up to be with the baby. She made me sniffly, but she could have torn out my heart and stomped on it, and if she’d done that, I’d have been more convinced and loved the book all the harder.

So those are good tools for reading and reviewing, offering one more way to think about what works and what doesn’t work in a story. As an author, moreover, I can give myself some emotional distance from feedback — and thereby use it more effectively — by asking myself “What part of the argument wasn’t working for this person? Is this an evidence problem, an emotional support problem, or a trust issue?”

And, as Mary Ann pointed out to me in an email conversation, argument is a great drafting tool. When you’re just trying to get words on the page, overwhelmed by everything you don’t know or don’t think you know about your book, it helps a great deal to know what it is that you’re trying to argue.

Looking at a romance from the point of view of argument rather than genre convention allows you to skip over all the crap about what characters are supposed to do, how they’re supposed to behave, what readers will and won’t tolerate. All you have to do is make a good argument. That’s it. Show me a clear argument, a logical chain of evidence, emotional support, and a trustworthy author, and I will show you a successful story — wonky or not.

So play with me here — can you analyze a recent reading or writing experience using this perspective? Does it open anything up that you’d missed the first time?

Oh, and I’ll share the argument of my upcoming novella in the comments.

I mean, you’ll live a whole lifetime in a 12 hour shift, and you’ll be hungry at some point, and completely nauseated at some other point. At least once you’ll enter a flow of competence that will abandon you so suddenly you’ll want to shut yourself in the med room and weep, but won’t be able to because there is a code. Or patient who was supposed to be discharged but is now a pre-op, or a fire alarm. More than once, all of your patients will need something STAT all at the same time, and you’ll run, and you’ll worry, and you’ll wish it wasn’t July because it means all the fucking residents are brand-new and one of them is going to kill one of your patients if you’re not there, right now, to stop them.

You won’t eat, or pee. You’ll watch your patients take their meds with their giant jugs of icy water and be so thirsty it’s tempting to snatch the straw from their mouth and take a drink.

You’ll be filled with so much tenderness when your most difficult patient, who you know wasn’t trying to be a jerk but was just in too much pain, finally falls asleep that you’ll put your hand on their leg for a moment and look out the hospital window at the streetlights turning on and instead of thinking it was 7 a.m. when I got here, and now everyone is getting reading for bed you’ll think of this patient’s daughter or wife or husband or sister, whoever sat bedside with them during visiting hours. You’ll think of how they looked at you when they had to leave, fearful and grateful, and you’ll think about how glad you are that they won’t ever have to read this patient’s chart, the hopeless puzzle of it that can only be solved one tragic way.

Twelve hours is a lifetime that only a nurse and a patient understand. Only the nurse and the patient share that time, its routines and its chaos. How it locks the doors against the rest of the world and distorts how long it takes for an hour to end.

When we meet Erin Coffey, she’s still in the rest of the world, standing right outside the doors to her first 12-hour shift as an LPN in a psychiatric hospital. She’s perceptive and aware of the boundary, her training and her role as a caregiver to her grandmother has infused her with a great deal of respect for the boundary and what lies on the other side of it, but we find her on our side of it at the beginning of After Hours, and this is important, because Erin’s our only guide through this transfiguration wrought from unnameable moments of fear, long stretches of boredom, unbearable empathy with patients, and most unlikely, the discovery of love with the most unlikely person possible.

Some of you know that I’m not a stranger to the 12-hour shift. I’m a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner as often as I am a romance novelist and there is less of a boundary between the two than one might think. Not because healthcare introduces some particularly fertile ground for romantic entanglement, but because two people finding each other opens up the experiences of two lives to the other in such a way that the intimacy can be painful and dangerous feeling. Likewise, in healthcare, in caregiving, I am invited into some of the worst days of a family’s life and some of the best (first newborn exam!) and there isn’t a time, still, that I’m not overwhelmed by that intimacy and trust. I spend my days mired in the consideration of intimacy and caregiving and love.

Kelly Roback is an unlikely hero not because he is a physically imposing, bossy orderly with rigid worldviews, but because he prefers the world inside the 12-hour shift because of what he can offer to it and his patients. He recognizes that his physical strength and rigidity provide powerful comfort to his mentally ill charges and he is relentless and tireless in what I would call decentralized care—he wears the colors of the patients’ scrubs, he approaches the patients on their terms, and he remembers, first, that they are individuals with individual needs. It is so easy for patients to lose their humanity when they are hospitalized and so reduced to their diagnosis and most basic parts, but Kelly Robak’s real strength is that he protects them from that dehumanization. He has to be as big and as strong and as rigid as possible to do so. He stays strong for them, for these shifts, for the world inside the walls that holds his patients.

His worldview extends to his approach to Erin, which is to offer her what he is—which is primarily someone who is strong and who knows what he is and what he wants. I told Cara some time ago that I had this very singular experience watching Kelly and Erin’s romance develop in that it was incredibly visual for me. Their world in a post-industrial, post-urban Michigan is washed out, used up. Larkhaven hospital is colorless and bulky, indistinct. The entire novel is a canvas of institutional colors—the pale blues and yellows and grays of scrubs. The beige of linoleum and cinderblocks. As Kelly and Erin approach each other and scrub through all the ways they’ve been painted over like a cinderblock wall, they rise out of this canvas in stark, black relief. They sharpen, and find their edges.

They sharpen, too, as they discover the intensity of their feelings outside of and inside of the walls of Larkhaven. Inside, they share that hopeless tenderness for their patients that those who truly care for them cannot help, and they respect it in the other. This depiction of mutual professional respect provides a great deal of depth to a romance that in other ways is very dark. Because they also negotiate first, a sexual relationship that is urgent and explores power dynamics to the very edge of their comfort, and then their pain associated with increasing levels of intimacy and trust.

The marks their love story makes, against the unrelenting stretch of institutional canvas behind them, are monochromatic but beautiful and rich. This is fiction that takes up realism and characters that are tethered to our world, and it builds the world with devices that we are all so familiar with that we sit with a kind of pleasurable ache when we read and think about this story. Wonkomance guards the possibly of romantic love inside of a story like this and After Hours is evidence for such a mission.

I told Cara, too, that LPNs and orderlies and nurses and mental health patients and single moms (Erin’s sister) are not characters closely associated with romance, at least not when they are in their proper settings, facing the twelve hours in front of them. But this book makes expansive the limited settings and reflects the emotional atmosphere of the characters back on the world. When Erin is raging, she is driving the long, empty streets. When she’s considering and mulling and watching, she’s inside her workplace, locked in. This world and breadth of emotional palate is made with clean, spare language that belongs to the characters.

Twelve hours at a time, and the brief snatches of days off in between. These are the hinterlands where Erin and Kelly’s regard and erotic exploration and love are forged. Boundaries are created for each of them to step on one side of and then the other, and then the boundaries are redrawn. There is a way in which there is an incredible sweetness to their story. The mutual professional respect and encouragement to grow is one, their impulse to care for each other after moments of sexual intensity is another. It’s very beautiful and suggests how necessary these stories are to our genre—we need wonkomance. Kelly and Erin are reassurance that love grows from the best that is inside of us and not an ephemeral setting. The world we live in requires such reassurances. We require those moments, in the dark, where we can rest our hand in comfort on another who depends on us even as the world is racing by. We require that tenderness in the face of a world that tells us such tenderness is impossible.

We require such terrible love because it reminds us that we are not terrible.

I’m giving away two copies of Cara McKenna’s book After Hours via random drawing of those posting comments by 8 a.m. EST Thursday, 4/17/13.

CONTEST IS CLOSED. CONGRATULATIONS NICOLE AND KARE_BEAR83! CHECK YOUR EMAIL.

I’m sure there are writers out there who adore social interaction, have vast circles of friends in real life with whom they talk in person regularly, and…I don’t know, whatever else it is that socially active people do. I wouldn’t know, because I’m not one of them. For me, the above description of a typical convention might as well be subtitled “A Visit to Hell”. At least when I first started going to them, that was the case.

These days I look forward all year to events like RT, because I’ve learned to love the Con. I’m a con-vert (sorry, sorry), but I know a lot of people express trepidation or outright horror at the very notion of attending one – sometimes even after they’ve already been. So if you’re happiest in your cave, or are perhaps waffling over whether to attend RT or Nationals, here are some thoughts on how to enjoy yourself and get the most out of your time and money. While these are geared towards writers, I think a lot of this stuff applies regardless of your profession. And there will also be gifs and things! Yay!

Things that help: 

- Buddy up. Seriously. Even if you normally wouldn’t dream of it, consider finding a roommate. I have three (my RT gang includes Christine d’Abo, and fellow Wonkos Ruthie Knox and Cara McKenna).

- Know what you’re there for. Yes, it’s a professional event; but you’re unlikely to see specific return on investment from attending a convention, no matter who you meet or how many workshops you attend. What you will see is professional improvement that’s hard to quantify. Tips on social media that you picked up from a random conversation about Twitter. A new book idea that you and a few other writers tossed around in the bar. Putting faces to names. These are all “soft” results that might not impact your sales directly; but they’re all things that can make you better at your job, which will hopefully redound to your benefit down the line.

- Buddy up. Can’t stress this enough. It is perfectly okay to feel like clinging to a few safe people when you are in a hotel full of strangers. It is okay to make sure you know somebody in every workshop you plan to attend. Having roommates helps with this, obviously.

- Take breaks if you need to. Many of us are introverts and are easily exhausted by social interaction. Set aside time (put it in your schedule, even, if that helps you) to be alone; take a quiet break in your room, take a bath, nap, do some writing, etc. Even if you have roommates they’ll likely respect your need to have a few hours of down time. Sometimes even a ten or fifteen-minute break from the social whirl can help you catch your breath, emotionally speaking. Do whatever works for you.

- Buddy up. You need somebody to eat with and hang out at the bar with. While I’m not a fan of cliques in some settings, Cons are a setting where having a “core group” is absolutely necessary. You don’t have to exclude anyone else – but make sure you have that foundation of a few people as a baseline.

- Did I mention buddy up?

Pros about Cons:

- Introverts! Introverts everywhere! We rarely gather in groups (that’s sort of the point of us, isn’t it?) but when a lot of writers get together they can actually behave like a pack of rowdy extroverts. Don’t be frightened – they’re still just as shy and retiring as ever, really. But meeting an entire hotel full of people who feel just like you can be an exciting and validating experience.

- Most of the people around you probably feel the same way and have the same insecurities. When you were told this by adults when you were in middle or high school, it was bullshit advice. None of us believed it, nor should we have, because it didn’t matter; what mattered was that some kids were able to fake it better than others and if you couldn’t do that you were screwed.

As a grownup writer at a writing convention, however, it’s actually true: most of the people around you probably have the same insecurities. That’s because it is a hotel full of writers. They’ve all had to get out of their pajamas and go out in the sun for the first time in months, just like you. They’re all experiencing computer withdrawals, and they’re all worried they’re going to make somebody’s eyes glaze over when they forget themselves and start talking about their main character’s emotional development. Just like you.

- At a writing convention, though, nobody’s eyes glaze over when you talk about your character’s emotional development. That’s the beauty part. Everyone is there to talk about all the stuff you never get to talk about. Suddenly, having a lot to say about craft makes you an interesting person.

- You get to invent yourself. Some people might see this as a negative, but I think it’s fun (and stress-reducing, for me) to spend a few days being the best version of me I can. We’re all different when we’re around different people, and we all have many “selves”. Work self, home self, self around the family. At a convention, you may want to be that person you are when you’re online; when you’re jumping onto twitter canoes and commenting on blogs (and, for some of us, asking when cocktail hour starts). Don’t be afraid to be that version of yourself, out loud and in person. Because that is you, even if you’re not that way all the time. Remember, you’re also meeting every one else’s “conference self.”

- While there may not be a direct, quantifiable impact on sales from attending a conference, I’ve found them enormously valuable in terms of professional development. Not just the workshops, but the time spent soaking in a solution of concentrated writer-brain. I’ve picked up more useful information and gotten more great ideas from chance conversations while “networking” in the bar at conferences than I have from most writing-craft books I’ve read. Articulating thought processes that you don’t normally discuss makes your brain handle them differently, and can jog a new level of understanding. Sometimes having to talk through a craft concept or the application of that to your book just turns that light bulb on. Even if you think of yourself as working best alone (I do), it’s good for you to mix it up once in awhile and approach things from a different modality.

- It’s only for a few days. You can do almost anything if it’s for a few days and you know the time frame in advance.

Cons about Cons:

- Cons can be overwhelming even for people who don’t have issues with going out and doing things with people. There are so MANY things to do, so MANY strangers, and it’s all in an unfamiliar setting. It can feel a bit surreal at times. Especially when people are in super funky costumes.

- It is SO FREAKING SOCIAL. Conventions are excruciatingly social events, no way around it, and you have to be “on” all the time. Even a “fun” convention like RT is a professional occasion and an opportunity to meet people in your field, so you must be aware of that the whole time. The mix of party and business can get exhausting pretty quickly.

- If you’re already anxious about social situations, a Con is likely to make you quantum times more anxious. While there are benefits also, only you can decide how they weigh against the cost of that anxiety.

- You have to be ready to make last-minute changes in plan, and go with the flow (a phrase that strikes fear in the heart of many of us, I’m sure). Many of those changes will involve choosing to do things you normally wouldn’t choose to do.

Do you really want to go to that workshop you’re not that excited about, or should you go with your friend who is about to hang out with one of her editors in the bar? Hint: probably go hang out with the editor, even though it isn’t on your schedule and you’re not a “hanging in the bar” kinda person. Lunch in the hotel restaurant like you planned, or venture forth into the city with a group of authors, some of whom you don’t yet know, to try this fabulous Thai place one of them heard about? Unless you’re violently allergic to peanut sauce, I’d suggest the Thai, even if you’re not a “spontaneous going out to a new restaurant” person. One of those writers could become your new critique partner, or maybe explain a craft concept in a way that suddenly makes it clear to you…or even become a good friend.

It’s All About the Shoes:

- Don’t worry. It really is not all about the shoes, or the wardrobe, although some people (myself included) spend an inordinate amount of time on that aspect of things. I’ve seen some pretty awesome writers at conventions wearing normal work clothes or casual wear, perfectly sensible shoes, and party dresses that aren’t themed. All of that is absolutely fine. It’s a long few days, and you need to be comfortable in order to enjoy yourself. Wear what makes you feel good and don’t worry about the theme parties if you’re not so inclined. You will not be the only one.

- At every costume event, there will be people who are not in costume. It is okay to be one of them.

- At every super-fancy event, there will be people who are not all that fancy. It is also okay to be one of them.

- On the other hand, if you want to dress up, a conference is certainly your opportunity! And if you don’t already know about renttherunway.com, now you do. You’re welcome. There is a UPS drop box across the street from the conference hotel.

What does she know about all this anyway?

As some of you know, I suffer from major depressive disorder and social anxiety. I’m always very frank about that, and about the fact that I take medication for those conditions and see my psychiatrist regularly, because I think mental health is just as important as physical health – and the more we learn, the more we know that to a great extent mental health is a facet of physical health. Also, if I weren’t on those medications, you wouldn’t want to know me (you’ll just have to trust me on that). My point is, when I talk about the difficulty of emerging from the writing cave, switching my pajamas for real clothes, and facing the anxiety of being in a crowd full of strangers, I really, really know whereof I speak.

 If I hadn’t gotten lucky and happened to share a room with Christine d’Abo at my very first convention, I might have never gone back. But Christine turned out to be not just a roommate, but a friend. I buddied up. I followed her around because she seemed to know the drill, and she was cool with that because she’d been a conference newbie at one point, too. She paid it forward, big time (and has since become, by the way, one of my best friends in the world).

One of the reasons I look forward to conventions is that while doing so, I also get to indulge my little over-preparation obsession. Yes, I do have spreadsheets detailing what I’ll wear and when. Yes, I do start thinking about those things months in advance. But those are stress-reducing techniques for me. Knowing what I need to pack and having a checklist makes me calmer. Knowing my roommate(s) helps me feel at ease. Taking quiet alone-time breaks allows me to maintain apparent sanity. And I remind myself often that it’s only for a few days.

Even so, the anxiety can get the better of me at times. I thought I had the whole conference/anxiety thing stuffed firmly in a box, but during one of the book signings at RT 2012, I experienced a panic attack. It started near the end of the event (during cleanup, actually, when everyone started to get up and clear their spaces…but then they announced that the authors needed to stay at their tables until their stuff was picked up). I don’t think anybody noticed – that certainly wasn’t my first rodeo, I know how to get through one, and I knew I had meds waiting in my room, which helped a lot. Inside I was a hot mess, however.

I barely remember gathering my stuff from the table when it was time to go. Eventually I made I up to the room, downed my Klonopin, and was back in shape by that evening. And that was all that happened. Had the attack, then dealt with it. And everything turned out okay. It was all okay!

It was a huge moment for me, because that had always been my worst fear about conferences – what if I have a panic attack when I’m supposed to have my professional author face on? It happened…and the world didn’t end. The rest of the conference, even the rest of the day (and the next, much longer, book signing a day or so later) were fine and panic-free. This year I am even adding Club RT to my schedule. Unstructured chat with whoever walks in! I am fearless! And I’ll have my Klonopin in my pocket, just in case.

So…

The upshot is, if you’re on the fence, you should try it. If you have always said “Nope, never in a million years,” you should try it. Grit your teeth, make a plan, suck it up, and know that even if your worst fears come true, it might not be so bad after all. It’s a risk, sure, but the rewards are totally worth it. Even if you opt out of the fabulous shoes.

ETA: I got all these gifs from google image searches – if any of these belong to you and you don’t care to see them here, please just let me know and I’ll be happy to take them down and/or credit :-)

There’s advice telling us how to do the actual writing, then how to sell it.

Advice on how to be a professional author—how we need a blog, a website, a Facebook fan page, a Twitter presence, a newsletter, an Amazon Author Page, Google Alerts, a mailing list, a marketing strategy, a book trailer, a blog tour, promotional items, a tagline.

How we need to monitor our web traffic, our inventory of followers or fans or friends or subscribers, our Goodreads presence and how we’ve been shelved and how many times, how many ratings we’ve been given and what the average is—to the second decimal place—how many Likes we’ve gotten, our Amazon Author Rank, our Novel Rank stats, our place or lack thereof on Top 100 lists (paid versus not paid versus genre versus subgenre and refreshed on the hour), reviews of our work and the comments attached to them.

How to pinpoint, quantitatively, numerically, in stars and in hits, where we rank amongst our peers, whether we’re ahead of the curve or trailing behind, how this month compared to last, how this book measures up to the previous one.

Are we promoting ourselves enough? Too much? In the right ways? What is the right way?? What did I say to make that person unfollow me?!?!

The Internet makes this kind of authorial hyper-involvement so. Easy. So easy! And so instantaneous, and so accessible, and so constant. If denizens of the epidemically overfed first world are living in a so-called food circus, then twenty-first-century authors are living in a feedback circus.

I’ve seen people refer to the act of obsessively monitoring facets of one’s author presence as “self-stalking,” which works. I’ve seen others calling it, “managing your author platform.” I’ve seen it treated as madness, and as professionalism. I’ve seen it condemned, and exalted. I’ve seen it harnessed and turned into incredible sales and earnings. And I’ve seen it turn formerly beloved hobbies into pure psychic torture.

In its worst guises, I call this stuff “nanny-camming.” This is an opinionated term, and one I’m not suggesting reflects every author’s experience—not even close. But it’s how I see it, when “being aware of your author presence” crosses that line into self-stalkery; when all that diligent management of one’s own brand and rank and quantifiable success becomes more harmful to one’s productivity than motivational. Keep hitting Play on that nanny-cam feed for long enough, and eventually you may see something you wish you hadn’t. But even if you don’t, the act of constantly reminding yourself that you might and anticipating that ugly moment can be just as upsetting.

I’m not going to tell anyone what they have to do. I’m certainly not going to tell anybody How To Be An Author. What the poop do I know about it? This is my job now, and I make a passable living from it, but I wouldn’t purport to be any kind of capital-S Somebody.

What I would like to suggest, however, is some emotional self-awareness.

[Begin aside—skip this paragraph if you have no interest in feelings-y mumbo-jumbo.] If you’re not familiar with emotional awareness work, it’s basically a technique for recognizing how you’re feeling, physically, as you experience different emotional reactions. For instance, when I’m anxious, my stomach feels empty or upset, and my breathing turns shallow. When I feel I’m being misunderstood or unheard, my throat gets tight. When I’m angry at someone’s callousness, my heart knots in my chest. It’s just a collection of techniques for recognizing and processing emotions as physical discomfort—or pleasure—as a way to detach those emotions from their stimuli, so you’re not giving other people’s actions the power to upset you. The basic idea is: they’re your emotions, here’s how to keep their mitts off your steering wheel. Anyhow—emotional awareness. It’s pretty liberating. If you think you might benefit from such a thing, check out the book The Heart of the Soul, by Gary Zukav. It’s a little oovy-groovy, but it might prove helpful if you identity yourself a particularly impulsive, reactionary, or hypersensitive personality. I honestly believe emotional self-awareness is simultaneously the most useful yet under-exploited skill in the human toolkit. [End aside.]

Authors have kind of an unfortunate reputation for being crazy. Same as comedians and musicians and artists—anybody whose job requires that they flip their hearts inside-out then ask people to pay to take a gander at it. We’re basically gestating and birthing babies then holding them up, inviting strangers to either coo or throw darts. That’s a really weird thing to want to put yourself through. A bit of crazy’s probably as necessary as coffee and a keyboard, for this gig. But if the crazy’s getting in the way, eating up your energy or sucking the joy out of the practice of writing, then something’s not right.

My basic advice to my fellow authors is, if it feels bad, don’t do it.

And please, hear this too—it’s okay if it feels bad. Even if you think it’s supposed to feel good.

Obviously, life will feel bad sometimes—challenging, disappointing, frustrating, unfair. Writing will occasionally feel shitty, and so will revisions and edits and untangling plot gnarls, and I’m not saying don’t do those things. If you want to be a professional writer, them’s the breaks. You have to finish books.

But all those other things we tell ourselves we have to do—the social networking and blogging and promo and other interactions… Those are not required. Just because someone stood behind a podium and told you in a conference workshop that you have to use Google Analytics or you have to tweet or you have to be active on this forum or that, it doesn’t make it so. If you’re finishing books and completing their edits, and making them available to the public in some manner, and you’re getting paid for your work, you are a professional writer. Period. Anything else you choose to do is gravy.

And anything else you choose to do but don’t enjoy…

Let yourself question if it’s worth it.

Perhaps you blog, and you suspect this might earn you an extra ten book sales a month, and perhaps that works out to an extra twenty bucks in royalties and a nice little stream of potentially loyal readers. That’s all good…unless blogging makes you miserable these days, and every post feels like an obligation. Consider if it might be a more valuable use of your time, not spending those few hours a month composing (or procrastinating) those posts you feel you have to produce. You could use that time to write your books, or for some other pursuit, one that makes you feel energized and inspired. You might be more productive if you invested those hours walking, or knitting, or reading, or cleaning the crisper drawers, or going out with friends or your poor neglected family. (My husband would likely endorse the latter.)

You don’t have to do anything, just because somebody slapped a bullet point on it and said it’s what legitimate, responsible, ambitious, real professional writers do. If you’re a professional writer, then whatever you’re doing, that’s what a real writer does, too.

Some writers thrive on external feedback, both positive and negative, from friends and strangers alike. Praise puts wind in their sails, and criticism drives them to consider areas where they might improve, the next time around.

If this is you, God bless. You are well adjusted. You’re the envy of many. You need not read on.

But if this isn’t you, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It would be nice if we all felt this way, and on good days, many of us do. But you may simply not. It doesn’t mean you’re not cut out to be an author in the digital age, but it may mean you have some damage control to exercise.

For example, if you know from experience that every time you look at your Amazon ratings or your Goodreads stats, you wind up feeling jittery and naked, then don’t do it.

Some days we need to pretend there’s no audience. No eyes on us. If even glowing reviews wind up undermining your ability to get the day’s word count met, because they make you feel exposed and ruin your ability to “dance as though no one is watching,” then don’t check them. Or check them on days when you don’t feel primed for anxiety, or can afford to derail your productivity for a little while.

I have to do this. I’m a fairly anxious person, and some days I’m simply more wound-up than usual. It’s more a noisy-brain thing than a thin-skin thing, for me—the sensitivity manifests in different ways, for different people, to all different degrees.

“But I have to read to my reviews—it would be rude not to, after people took the time to write them!” No, you don’t. It wouldn’t. They wrote those reviews for other readers’ consideration, in most cases. This is a concept that many authors take their sweet time in grasping, and with good reason. It’s hard for us to accept that it’s not about us, when a book can so often feel as attached and vulnerable as an exposed organ.

On those noisy-brain days, a thoughtful friend might forward me a link to what I can safely assume will be a lovely write-up of one of my books—but I know not to click on it. It’ll snap me out of writing mode and into author mode (the verb versus the identity) and for a time, I’ll cease simply being a person who bangs her fingers on a keyboard, telling herself stories, and become one who worries about whether those stories will give strangers the pleasure they were hoping for after they were kind enough to pay to read them.

Other days, no problem—click that link, smile to know someone is a happy customer, back to work. I suppose I may be lucky in that I can readily pinpoint which sort of a day I’m having. Thanks, Gary Zukav!

If you feel anxious and insecure (in general or just in a given moment), and even coming upon a nasty review of someone else’s book will make you feel paranoid and naked and vulnerable, don’t click.

Conversely, if you think reading someone else’s nasty review will make you feel better about yourself, give that impulse some serious circumspection. Ask yourself if that hit of schadenfreudean dodged-bullet relief actually feels good. I’d venture to suggest that “Look—she’s not so great!” is not a satisfying emotional substitute for, “I’m actually doing pretty okay!”

If even seeing the name of a book reviewer in your tweet stream is enough to pull you out of your writing flow and trigger that sour-stomach, stage-fright feeling, give yourself permission to unfollow them—for the morning or the week or for good. If you’re worried they’ll notice and be hurt, or worse, that they’ll give you bad reviews as a result… Try to remind yourself that most professional bloggers and reviewers are just that—professional. If they do even notice an unfollow, it’s highly unlikely they’ve got some shit-list of Mean Authors to Punish. If they do…? Well, be glad you’re not following them anymore. They probably need to work on their emotional awareness techniques.

Ditto goes for anyone else you follow on social media who consistently pulls you out of your flow. They may do so through no fault of their own. Maybe they simply retweet lots of breaking industry news, and in order to dance as though no one is watching, you need to avoid constant reminders that you’re but a miniscule cog in said industry. You can unfollow people if they trigger you. It doesn’t mean they’ve done something wrong. It doesn’t mean you’re too sensitive. It just means you’re a more productive writer without that particular person in your periphery.

If you find yourself thinking that just about everyone in your social media network triggers these feelings, and regularly… I’m not being flip, but consider that you may not be emotionally compatible with social networking. That’s totally okay. The real world is a fine world to inhabit, and most of us authors could probably stand to spend a bit more time there.

Of course, not-clicking is easier said than done—that adrenaline spike upon seeing a link that you know pertains to you is hard to simply let pass. For some, over-clicking or self-stalking is simply a bad habit, but for others it’s a true compulsion. I don’t mean to suggest it’s easy. It might require some weaning, or even a taste of cold turkey.

“But I have to be on social media, if I want to be an author!” To be a professional presence in the industry, yes, it certainly can be important. But if it makes you too paranoid or tightly wound or exposed-feeling to be productive or take joy from this craft…? Fuck it. It’s not worth it. Scale back, or opt out, or take a hiatus. If you can’t get your work done, then your digital platform’s moot.

If you need some flattering review snippets for your website, but you know heading to Google and nanny-camming yourself is a powerful anxiety trigger you can’t afford on a given day, ask a friend to wade into the interweb waves and source a couple for you. If they’re an author, they’ll probably sympathize.

“But this stuff all comes standard with the job, nowadays! I should toughen up.”

You could. I think most authors endeavor to, when they cross the threshold that separates “aspiring” and “published.” We check everything when our first book comes out, because we’ve earned the right to feel like we’ve arrived, to confirm that we exist on these websites, to seek out proof that a stranger invested the time and money to read our work.

And some of those new authors are on their way to cultivating nice thick skins—waxy skins that repel the bad reviews like raindrops while the good ones stick tight. Good for them!

Or in time those authors might decide they don’t care what anyone aside from their editor or their critique partner or their most admired reviewer thinks—their finite list of Ideal Readers, to steal Stephen King’s phrase. Good for them!! That’s been my own adopted approach, and it’s served me well…provided I keep it at the forefront of my brain.

Other writers will care what every last reader thinks, and use that feedback to correct course and adapt and strive for the most dizzying heights of mass-market appeal. Good for them!!!

But if you’ve been around the block, survived a few release days, and exposed yourself to enough public criticism to recognize that it’s not getting any easier, and that exposing yourself to it inhibits your writing… Not good for you.

Cut down. Be selective, and make a short list of forums you’d like to stay active on, the ones you feel are worth your energy. Or set aside designated time for such things, when you’ll be in the best state to process whatever feelings they might trigger. Or opt out all together.

Do what you have to do, to dance like no one’s watching.

Give as many or as few fucks as you can spare. Just make sure, above all else, that you’re saving enough fucks for your work-in-progress.

Writing itself is hard enough. Being an author is something else entirely.

The ceilings were sloping, and there was a big Robert Smith poster looming over everything. My future husband was skinny and always worried something in his hands, his thumbs square to his pretty forearms. His dark hair was always too long, and even though he was this overly confident, superiorly funny Minnesota boy, he could only hold eye contact with me for so long before he’d look away, a self-effacing smile on his face as if he was couldn’t believe that he was so worked up over a girl.

Who was me. Who couldn’t believe I’d snagged the attention of this boy, this funny boy with green eyes and dimples who had such an accurate bead on me, right away, that he sauntered, sauntered up to me one day and said, I’m going to go get a coke. But first, I want to let you know that when I come back, I’m going to ask you out. And I swear, it will be fine, better than fine.

So on Monday nights, with this beautiful boy in his attic apartment, we’d watch The X-Files on his Zenith television, and to tune it in, he’d have to climb out the little round attic window of his apartment and hang off the side of the house and rest this antennae attachment he got at Radio Shack in the rain gutter.*

Um. Yes.

Then he’d swing back into the apartment, and shove his dumpy sofa in front of his Zenith, and then he’d pour me a beer in the one beer glass he owned and drink out of the bottle for himself. And we’d watch Mulder and Scully with our legs crossed over the other on his dumpy sofa and marinate in the second-hand sexual tension until, well. Let’s just say that Robert Smith learned some things.

Oh, it was fine. Better than fine.

Everything about those Monday nights, every little thing about them, is what I am trying to recreate when I watch a movie.

I want everything to be low-stakes and off-kilter. I want the underpants feelings to come slow and easy. I want to hardly be able to believe what I’m watching, but it to all be okay because some love in the story makes it okay. I want nerdery and strange images and I want to cross my legs together with a cute Minnesota boy who likes all the parts I like at the same time.

Actually, that Zenith was the last television we ever had, and it died nobly, during an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer somewhere inside our first year of marriage. Nowadays, when we watch something together, we steal an unstable 90 minutes sometime after our son falls asleep and before we drop from exhaustion. We lean back on our martial bed, with a laptop balanced on our knees and the volume so low we breathe shallow so we can hear the movie and if our child cries out for us.

Somehow, it’s fine. Better than fine.**

The first time we watched the movie Sidewalls (Medianeras, written and directed by Gustavo Taretto, 2011), ensconced in the bedroom of our urban brownstone, the streetlights shining through the windows, the even and sleeping breaths of our kid a few paces away, we looked at each other as it opened with one of the most beautiful monologues we’d ever heard in film and grinned.

It was about the irrational architecture of Buenos Aires, how it had grown out of bad logic, short buildings next to tall ones, small buildings built to make room for even smaller ones, and how this irrationality reflected its people perfectly. How a shoebox apartment lost in the swell of this overgrowth led to depression and anxiety and pain, and how really all the pain and disconnect of the world could be attributed to builders, to architects.

We grinned, because it was beautiful, because we were sitting, knee to knee, a laptop balanced on top of them, in one of the most irrational brownstones in Columbus, Ohio—four narrow stories tall, worked over so heavily in plaster and carved wood and staircases that we sometimes don’t even know if the other person is even in the house and we spend good parts of our day going up and down stairs and looking in all the nooks that 19^th century people had some use for trying to find each other.

Just like we’ve been trying to find ourselves, and each other for the last few years.

Unlike that 400 square foot attic apartment, the garrets sloping so close over our heads we had to push the dumpy sofa into the middle of the room to watch TV. So close and small we always knew right where the other was, and we were almost always close enough to touch.

Martin

So of course, Sidewalls, is a love story. Perfectly low-stakes and off-kilter, and wonky. The deliverer of our monologue is Martin (Javier Drolas), a shoebox apartment dweller, who until recently, completely confined himself to his apartment, for years, due to severe agoraphobia. He was cured, he says, by a psychoanalyst who told him to go into the city with a camera, where Martin documents the unbeautiful. Because he is also phobic of all transportation, he only goes by foot, and carries a “panic backpack” outfitted for every contingency with tools, first aid, computer memory, and antibiotics.

Every building, says Mariana (Pilar Lopez de Ayala), our heroine, has a side whose only use is to differentiate between us, divide us, to show the wear and ugliness of the building. This is the sidewall. Home only to cracks and graffiti and advertisements. She is an architect who has never built anything, not a building, not a bathroom, she tells us. She works as a window dresser, building ideas in non-rooms that are neither inside or outside, and tells herself that if someone looks at one of her displays, and likes it, that this is the same as liking her. She’s learning to be alone after finding that the man she loved was a stranger; she’s learning to live, again, in the 8^th floor apartment she abandoned for him, eight floors up and alone and she’s phobic of elevators. She brings her window display mannequins to her apartment for company, to talk to, to make love to. And obsesses over her childhood copy of Where’s Waldo? Despairing because there is one puzzle in the book she has never solved, has never found Waldo—Waldo in the City. She believes she has no choice but to accept that this is a metaphor for her loneliness, her inability to find herself.

Mariana bathing with her lover.

The sidewall of her building faces the sidewall of Martin’s.

So this is a love story divided. There is no light between them, and though they share the same street, and there the smallest geographical space between them, we watch them just miss each other, again and again.

Yet, this is not played as a farce, only three times are they within a few feet of the other, looking the other way, or in the dark. How they really miss each other is by their inability to connect and find lasting love with anyone else, and with their personal journeys of self-discovery and increasing readiness for love. And here’s the thing—that’s why this movie is everyone’s wonky love story. Because, we’re all sidewalled away from the other, and if we haven’t found love, it’s like Mariana’s Waldo, he’s there, it’s just our own blindness. We watch Martin and Mariana yearn for the same things, and cry at the same movies, and sing along to the same summer ballad. We also, without seeing them together, have the ability to discern where they are complements.

I think about the Monday nights before I met my husband, watching Mulder and Scully, while he sat in his attic apartment with the window open, the crickets singing, watching Mulder and Scully. We were already having our love story, in a way.

Or at least, that’s the hopefulness of all of this. It should be impossible to tell a love story about two people falling in love before they’ve ever met, or even know the other exists. That’s the wonk. That right there, the telling of this love story. The wonk is not that Martin is phobic and a hypochondriac, it’s not that Mariana smashes tea cups when her neighbor’s piano playing gets too sad, and the wonk is not that she gets her lip pierced. It’s that we watch them fall in love, utterly in love, and they don’t know the fact of the other’s existence until the last 45 seconds of the movie.

Yet, the movie is utterly romantic and dear for all of its failed dates with pothead dogwalkers and impotent swimmers, for its random and heartbreaking sidebars on architecture and cyber sex. Every time Martin smiles at something we know, we just know Mariana would also smile over—our belly swoops satisfyingly. Every time they express their longing for connection without wires or walls, we curl our toes in anticipation of their finding each other. Meanwhile, we see that every foray they make into their own, personal happiness is one more brick demolished out of the sidewall between them.

The wonk is in the telling. In this impossible trick of showing us how we fall in love before we ever meet our beloveds.

Sometimes I ask my husband to, tell me something about you. Something I don’t know. Something that happened to you before we even met. These are my favorite stories. Even the most mundane recollections fascinate me: once I walked a mile in the rain to buy a girl I met in a bar clove cigarettes because she said she was craving one. When I first came to college, I didn’t know which machine was the washer and which one dryer and it made me so angry, all the things we just expected my mother to do. There is always something about these stories that feel familiar, even if I have never heard them before, because they are the things that make my husband who he is, and I love my husband. They are the things that made him ready for me.

This movie is a perfect 93 minutes long, just exactly at the time we can spare after a child’s bedtime and before our own. But the first time we watched it, we started it over and watched it again, and talked all through it, in low voices, pointing out all the things we had noticed the first time. Not unlike that hour, year ago, we earmarked for the other every Monday night, the time we’d see each other even if we hadn’t made plans that week to see each other. I’d climb the stairs to his attic apartment and knock, and he’d open the door and say get in here, what took you so long? Even though I came the same time every Monday.

How do you find a person when you don’t know what you’re longing for? Mariana wonders. That’s it, exactly. Our love story starts when we ask the first questions of ourselves, when the sidewalls are intact. We have to know ourselves, what we long for, what we don’t want. We have to walk a few miles in the rain for a pretty girl who won’t be the one we settle on. We have to walk our dogs with a pothead and have terrible sex with someone we met at a public swimming pool. We have to first, be true to ourselves and pierce what we want to pierce and be afraid and then unafraid.

We have to be better than fine.

We are all irrational, a product of bad logic, we’re the short building next to the tall one. Somehow, we find each other. Mostly when we find ourselves.

This is a spectacularly wonked movie, and not primarily because its hero and heroine are. Its wonk comes from what it chose not to show us. And what it did. Just like love, it should be impossible.

Sidewalls is currently streaming on Netflix. Or available to rent from Amazon.

*When it rained, we couldn’t watch The X-Files. But what we did instead was so much better, I sometimes hoped for rain.

**Fourteen years in June.