Okay, I've been around awhile...
20 years ago when I started this Blood/Sweat/Tears Journey of Writing there was one size fits all, white on white boy meets girl ...
Sure, there was gay erotica and bdsm erotica but it was not in the mainstream...
I'm still ranting on and on because the fight for diversity across the love/sex genres is still sparse...
Yes, yes, there is multiracial diversity, gender diversity, and preference diversity (kind of...) because you still have to hunt for great writing in those genres...
But it's out there...the romance novel of today is not the same as yesterdays...
Back on track:
My lament continues because their is hardly any chronically ill/disabled persons represented in Romance, Romantica, Erotica ...thank you The Fault in Our Stars and Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl for making me cry my guts out and I love you for that because emotion is so cathartic,: however, I am still looking for the great story that portrays the pain, challenges, laughter, and orgasmic sex that chronically/ill or disabled people face every day...
Maybe the writers are out there, writing their hearts out...but publishers are afraid to take a chance. Yeah... there's a blog post I kinda touched on the taboo aspects...
Maybe its the size of the target audience is so small...
Ummmm... 1 in 5 US citizens is disabled... that's a pretty small number, right?
Yep, 36 Million...tiny
Annnnnd... 1 in 2 US Citizens have a chronic, invisible illness... 1 in 2? Seriously?
117 Million
If I could whistle, this is where I'd do it...
In my mind, my current frustration that we as writers are not writing what we are living is justified...
Except, my part of the "we" equation is now methodically introducing damaged people in my novels because six years ago I was hit by a train that didn't stop moving so that I could patch up the damage. I had to pull myself out from under that moving train and climb onboard for the ride of my life that would leave me mentally, physically, and emotionally forever altered. The train was the invisible chronic illness known as Rheumatoid Arthritis...and I will be a passenger the rest of my life, leaving me feeling out-of-control of where I'm going... And occasionally I get thrown under the train so I can battered and scraped up again...
Thank you RA Train, I am forever in your debt because I am a better writer today than yesterday. A lot can be said for an author that writes with their own blood...
So now my BDSM-LGBT Erotica is more raw, authentic, both forgiving and unforgiving, because the taboo truth is that chronically ill and disabled folk have sex too...
And I'm trying to keep it real to balance the scale a bit.
Thank you Delta of The Romance Reviews for touching on the fact that my heroine lives with the invisible illness BiPolar Disorder in the great review of the Consequences of the Big Mistakes
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