Heated Rivalry has pushed gay romance as a genre into the mainstream eye, which of course means we must now be subjected to an endless stream of video essays and thinkpieces about whether certain demographics (women, straight men, people who aren’t into hockey) are “allowed” to like it.

I do understand why this happens. Capitalist society in general (and USAmerican culture in particular) likes to frame consumption as a political act. This, among other things, fosters a desire for one’s consumption habits to convey the “correct” politics; if voting with your wallet is the only real vote you have, then buying the wrong thing — or even buying the right thing for the wrong reasons (voyeurism, ignorance, horniness, etc.) — makes you a bad person. Add to that the perennial audience desire for fictional characters’ experiences and values to perfectly reflect one’s own experiences and values, and you create a perfect storm of derangement in which reading about someone who isn’t like you is somehow stealing from people who aren’t like you.

This is stupid. Thought crime isn’t real. The point of fiction is to explore a point of view outside your own. If you needed me to tell you that, I’m glad I told you that. And speaking as someone who writes this stuff, I don’t particularly care who engages with my art or why — I just care that they’re doing it.

Yes, even if they’re jerking off to it. That’s their business, not mine.

-K

Draft2Digital has just rolled out distribution through Bookshop.org, which means a bunch of my books are now available on Bookshop. However, it looks like Bookshop is blocking distribution for titles that are under a certain length. My short stories haven’t made it onto the site; neither have any of the Saintstown books, nor the first Casefile of Jay Moriarty book.

Some other writers are also reporting that their erotica books were blocked from distribution through Bookshop. According to Draft2Digital, this isn’t a blanket ban; they claim “additional safeguards” are needed before erotica can be sold on Bookshop, and that “support is coming soon.” I can only assume these “safeguards” will include age verification, which presents its own issues.

It would certainly be a wild choice for Bookshop to suddenly ban sex books, considering how hard they’re riding the Heated Rivalry hype wave. I’ve seen other platforms try to thread the needle between romance and erotica by claiming erotica is “for the purpose of titillation/arousing sexual desire,” and meanwhile romance … isn’t, I guess? I think BookTok would disagree with that assessment.

And also, as I’ve pointed out before, who gets final say over the “purpose” of a piece of art? Who gets to decide whether I’m a pornographer? And why is a pornographer such a terrible thing to be?

I suspect this tension between a publishing industry going all-in on “spicy” romance and a retail industry desperate to crack down on any and all “adult” content will come to a head sooner rather than later.

-K

Conventional publishing wisdom holds that you’re supposed to adopt a buzzy, overexcited tone when announcing the release of a new book, the better to build up hype. I’m not sure that wisdom holds when the book in question is about a very serious, very horrible thing that won’t stop showing up in the news while you’re writing and publishing the book.

New Novella: “A Reckoning in Whitehall”

Jason Collier is on his way up in the world. Wealthy and well-educated, he’s translated a successful business career overseas into a parliament seat at home in Britain. His marriage to one of the world’s most powerful tech executives has made him a key asset to the government. It is, in light of all this success, of little concern to anyone who matters that Collier has left a trail of violated and abused victims behind him.

Jay Moriarty certainly isn’t anyone who matters — but twenty years ago, Jason Collier hurt a boy named Sebastian Moran. For that, Moriarty is going to destroy him.

“A Reckoning in Whitehall” is the tenth story in my series The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, a modern-day queer take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes villain, his partner Sebastian Moran, and the various crimes they commit together.

This one gets pretty heavy. It’s about abuse and sexual violence, and the ways in which they’re enabled by structures of power. I originally hashed out the concept early last year in an attempt to understand what were, back then, current events; I was not expecting it to be even more relevant by the time it came out.

I put a lot of love, anger, and grief into “A Reckoning in Whitehall.” It’s not a nice story, but I did my best to make it an honest one.

-K

Jay couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t a new problem; he had a suspicion his parents had started giving him computers as a kid just to keep him from wandering the house at night and scaring the life out of them.

On this particular occasion he’d given up any hope of a good night’s rest by about three in the morning, waiting instead for the chorus of bird calls which announced to every insomniac that the dawning day was irrevocably fucked. It’d be pigeons, this time of year—many of London’s other birds had flown south for the winter.

Sebastian lay sound asleep next to him, despite Jay’s tossing and turning. Jay wouldn’t have expected him to sleep so deeply, but maybe a soldier had to learn to sleep through anything. They’d met up earlier—yesterday, now—after an uneventful day on Jay’s part and a frustrating client meeting on Sebastian’s, having a few drinks together before heading back to Jay’s flat for the evening.

If Sebastian hadn’t woken up yet, it was probably safe for Jay to check his phone. But as he reached toward the bedside table where he’d left it charging, a soft pained noise sounded from the other side of the bed.

Jay rolled to face him. “Sebastian?”

Sebastian’s body was a vague outline in the dark; he didn’t answer, but after a second or two made another sound, low in his throat, and shifted uneasily beneath the covers.

He was having a nightmare.

A few days ago, a mutual of mine on Tumblr asked a pretty interesting question: “why do people get uncomfortable with political fanfic?” She went on to point out that “A lot of you love to boast that you love the dirtiest, nastiest smut ever, why can’t you handle someone writing ‘fascism is bad’?”

It reminded me of the time a book marketer told me The Casefile of Jay Moriarty was too political for queer romance readers, and too gay for political thriller readers. As if those two categories were completely mutually exclusive.

Fanfiction and romance fiction have a lot in common, and not just because fanfic tends to have a lot of sex and romance in it. Both are capable of being really really good — like, “permanently alters your brain chemistry, haunts you for the rest of your life” good — but are largely viewed as inherently frivolous. Both mediums are often read, written, and published by people who don’t particularly give a shit (much to the frustration of readers, writers, and publishers who do).

And so, very often, a reader going into a fanfic or romance novel will be doing so with the expectation that these works are low-effort; that the experience they’re about to have won’t make them think or feel anything complicated. When that assumption turns out to be untrue — when the work demands effort on the part of the reader — they respond negatively. It’s the literary equivalent of a pillow princess suddenly being asked to top.

However, just because I understand this viewpoint doesn’t mean I have to respect it. Fuck your comfort, I’m trying to do something interesting out here. To quote Bruce Sterling, “You can get a hell of a lot done in a popular medium just by knocking it off with the bullshit.”

-K