Do you feel you have the chance to write two distinct characters to get wide appeal or do you still feel constrained to writing an "every woman" character and an "every women wants" character so as to interest the greatest chunk of audience?
Quite frankly, when I write, I'm not thinking at all about "interesting the greatest chunk of audience". I do keep some hypothetical market considerations in mind. For example, given that the existing market for "pure" lesbian historic romance is fairly dire, I do tend to actively look for cross-genre elements to include (e.g., mystery, fantasy). And both for marketing reasons and personal enjoyment I like to develop complicated enough plots that the romance thread itself is only one strand of the braid. But in the end, I'm writing the stories for me -- and hoping that I'm not such a complete freak that that means nobody else will like them.
But fortunately, given that there really is no coherent "non-contemporary lesbian romance genre" I'm not constrained by genre conventions to include clearly labeled subject and object characters, or to make any particular character an "every woman". In essence, I'm trying to write exciting plots involving individual characters and interesting settings ... but where I'm choosing to write that subset of all possible stories with those criteria that also happen to involve lesbian romances. This is in contrast to writing lesbian romances to which I've added exciting plots and interesting settings.
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Part 2 (continued)
Date: 2011-02-16 09:32 pm (UTC)Quite frankly, when I write, I'm not thinking at all about "interesting the greatest chunk of audience". I do keep some hypothetical market considerations in mind. For example, given that the existing market for "pure" lesbian historic romance is fairly dire, I do tend to actively look for cross-genre elements to include (e.g., mystery, fantasy). And both for marketing reasons and personal enjoyment I like to develop complicated enough plots that the romance thread itself is only one strand of the braid. But in the end, I'm writing the stories for me -- and hoping that I'm not such a complete freak that that means nobody else will like them.
But fortunately, given that there really is no coherent "non-contemporary lesbian romance genre" I'm not constrained by genre conventions to include clearly labeled subject and object characters, or to make any particular character an "every woman". In essence, I'm trying to write exciting plots involving individual characters and interesting settings ... but where I'm choosing to write that subset of all possible stories with those criteria that also happen to involve lesbian romances. This is in contrast to writing lesbian romances to which I've added exciting plots and interesting settings.