I’ve been pretty busy lately with my day job plus working on books two and three. Book two goes for first edits in a couple weeks, so I hope to have some news about the release date soon! If you want more regular updates from me, check out my newsletter. (I send 1-2 times a month.) In the meantime, there is a topic that keeps on coming up that I figured I’d want to address.
As a contemporary romance author, how do we handle the state of our world? Um…I do not want to touch on the pandemic at all! I started writing my hockey romance series BEFORE all this started, and I don’t want to write a hockey romance that takes place in the bubble. That does’t really even make sense if I’m writing m/f anyway. I’m pretty sure I never mentioned the year in Take The Shot, so for me, I don’t want to write COVID-19 into my series. Especially since they’ve been worked on assuming the pandemic wasn’t a thing.
There’s a lot of books that are starting to be set during quarantine, and I have no desire as a reader to read those. Reading is an escape for me, and I want it to be an escape for my readers. This is a really hard time for a lot of people. I’m under a lot of stress. Up until a couple weeks ago, I was the sole provider in my household so on top of doing author stuff, I had worries about my day job since people did get laid off (I didn’t, I am very fortunate!). I am incredibly fortunate though, I have been able to work from home, and I’m not fearing losing my job, but people in my country are really hurting right now. I don’t want to remind readers how hard this time is right now.
This is of course my personal opinion. I’ve seen some reviews lately where readers were mad that the book didn’t address the pandemic. This book in particular took place in 2020. Here’s the thing about that, books take a long time. That book might have been written two years ago and by the time it came out adding those things into the book was not possible. OR! Like me the writer didn’t want to have to talk about this trying time.
The question is do readers expect us to address it? Some might, some might not want to talk about it at all. For me I don’t want to talk about it at all. And that is my choice as a writer.