BEST DAMN JOB IN THE WORLD By Laura Baumbach

I've been writing m/m erotic romance professionally for 16 years. I've seen a lot of changes in the romance community and publishing industry over that time. Most have been for the better; some were a long time coming, and others were not so good.  

My name is Laura Baumbach. I'm a life-long reader, a published romance author for sixteen years, and a publisher celebrating a successful decade in the romance business. 

At one point, my writing was published by six different romance epublishers with many of the titles put out in print from them as well. I've enjoyed a varied and exciting career that eventually led me to start my press, ManLove RomancePress aka MLR Press. We publish over 120 authors and have an editing staff of over thirty people, formatting department, social networking director, and a roster of talented artists for cover art.

It wasn't easy getting to the place I am today.  Fifteen years ago I started out fighting to break down of barriers that prevented m/m erotic romance from being even considered a part of the romance community. In the early days, I and others like me fought for equality within the community especially where contests and reviews were concerned.

We joined RWA, participated in the community, attended conferences – where we weren't always welcome, working from within to achieve real change. We paid the price of everything from public humiliation to personal snubbing. But we continued our labors.

Our hard-won success is measured by how accepted m/m erotic romance is today. How easily the newer writers to this category of romance take for granted that reviews are theirs for the asking, that entrance and winning of romance chapter writing contests, or entry into the RITAS, like their counterparts in heterosexual romance, is their expected right. They neither know nor care that those things were not available to others in this field a decade ago. They reap the fruits of previous m/m authors labors and pain without knowledge of the cost.

It's the way of the world. The new rarely appreciate the old.

But now it is time for the new to help carry the torch for m/m romance. To continue to assure equality and acceptance for their category of romance as a community united. Or to pick that torch up when it gets dropped. When discord and bickering split a community into fractions.

Let us never lose sight of the goal of every romance author writing commercial fiction for their readers. We write about love, romance, and happily-ever-afters. We need to bring that rush of effervescent emotion to our readers, to brighten their world for a few hours, and to give them characters to take to their dreams at night.

I like to think we are here to spread a little magic into the world. And if we, as m/m romance authors, manage to make a positive impact on increasing acceptance and tolerance of one another (no matter what letter of the alphabet represents our true selves) in the process, then I'm pretty sure I have the best damn job in the world.  ~ Laura

BIO: Laura Baumbach, Author, Owner/Publisher -- Laura is a graduate of Santa Ana College, Santa Ana, CA with a degree in Nursing. For thirty-four years she specialized in critical care and emergency trauma nursing. Now retired, Laura devotes herself full time to publishing and writing. She honed her business and people management skills as a hospital department head and supervisor which she puts to good use in the publishing industry. MLR Press was founded in January of 2007.

Laura is also a Romancing the Genres Alumnus. We are honored to have her back as a guest.

http://www.laurabaumbach.com/ 

What I Love About Writing LGBT Romance by CJane Eliiott

Thank you for having me on the blog today to talk about LGBT romance. I’m often asked why I write LGBT romance and usually answer with something glib like, “Because I like to.” But in thinking about what I wanted to say to this blog of readers and writers across the spectrum of romance genres, I took a deeper cut at what has me love writing LGBT romance.

First, why romance?

I’ve always gravitated to relationship stories. When I’m introduced to a couple in real life, I plague them with questions. How did you meet? What had you fall in love? Were there any obstacles in the way of you being together? How did your families and friends feel about you becoming a couple? I find it all endlessly fascinating. So when I began to write fiction, relationship stories flowed out of my pen.

A quotation by psychologist C.G. Jung appears at the beginning of my first published romance novella:  “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

In romance, the meeting of the two MCs acts as a catalyst: a bad boy reforms, a shy guy steps outside his comfort zone. Neither character reaches the end of the story being the same person they were when the story began. I’m a big believer in love as a force for growth and redemption. To me, the best romance stories are those in which people find the courage to go beyond their fears or grow in self-knowledge through falling in love.

Why LGBT romance?

I’ve always been committed to social justice: civil rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights. Although I’m straight, I’ve long been a stand for the right of LGBT people to live their lives as themselves and to love (and marry—thank you, Supreme Court!) who they choose. My bio states I’m particularly fond of “coming out” stories. It takes courage to come out as who you are in a world that says you’re wrong to be that way.

As Anne Tenino said in her post, it’s this extra layer of having to defy societal norms simply to be yourself, much less be in love, that adds the zing—and also the poignancy—to LGBT romance. At the Gay Romance Northwest conference in Seattle last September, the attendees wrote down what they loved about the genre. One of the main reasons for reading and writing LGBT romance was that people wanted to read stories with hope—stories in which love prevailed over hate and bigotry.

I love giving my LGBT characters their happy endings!

My latest release, Sand-Man’s Family, is available for preorder from Dreamspinner Press. Due out on May 4, Sand-Man’s Family is the third novella in the Wild and Precious series.

Blurb:

When Sandy Nixon's conservative Catholic parents discover he's had sex before marriage, they are furious. But when he blurts out he's bisexual, they go ballistic. After they threaten him with conversion therapy, Sandy does what many queer kids long to do—leaves his homophobic parents in the dust. He moves in with his Uncle Phineas and Phineas’s partner Cody in Portland, Oregon, and is finally safe to be himself. Sandy misses his siblings, though, and decides to visit his former home in Rockford for Thanksgiving. On the train, he runs into Jade Byrne.

As the only out gay kid in their Catholic high school, Jade had stared down homophobes while being fabulous in the school musicals. He’s crushed on Sandy for years. But he’s made sure never to show it, even after they had a one-time hookup, because Sandy’s the good Catholic kid, the altar boy, and the apparently straight athlete—all the things Jade isn’t. Traveling back to Rockford together sees the start of a month of adventures, a blossoming attraction, and a chance for Sandy to learn what it means to have a family that hurts and to choose a family that heals.

C. JANE ELLIOTT

To order any of my stories, go to my Dreamspinner AuthorPage or to my Amazon Author Page.

AUTHOR BIO: After years of hearing characters chatting away in her head, CJane Elliott finally decided to put them on paper and hasn’t looked back since. A psychotherapist by training, CJane enjoys writing sexy, passionate stories that also explore the human psyche. CJane has traveled all over North America for work and her characters are travelers, too, traveling down into their own depths to find what they need to get to the happy ending.

CJane is an ardent supporter of LGBTQ equality and is particularly fond of coming out stories.

In her spare time, CJane can be found dancing, listening to music, or watching old movies. Her husband and son support her writing habit by staying out of the way when they see her hunched over, staring intensely at her laptop.

E-mail: cjaneelliott@gmail.com

Website: http://www.cjaneelliott.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CJaneElliott

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cjane.elliott

Why You Should Read (and Love) Gay Romance by Anne Tenino

 Often when blogging for a site that doesn’t focus on LGBTQ fiction, I’m asked to discuss why I write gay romance. Not only do I not have an easy answer to the question of “why,” I definitively (in my mind) put the issue to bed almost two years ago on my blog.

So naturally, when I was told I could choose any topic I liked for Romancing the Genres, the first one I thought of was Why I Write About Two Men Falling in Love.

Sigh. I’m really good at self-sabotage, I guess.

Eventually, through a long, convoluted dialogue which I won’t bore you with, I decided to address a different set of “why” questions: Why do people love gay romance? Why should someone who’s never read one want to give one a try?

The simplest answer is “love is love,” which can also be read as “romance is romance.” For the more complex answer, I’ll use the popular roller coaster analogy (i.e., equating the journey of two people falling in love to an emotional carnival ride).

As with a real-life roller coaster, the emotional one is most exciting when the highest peaks are reached after climbing up from the lowest valleys, and the loop-de-loops are truly death-defying. In romance novel terms, this means the author makes it as difficult as possible for the couple to get together and stay together. We throw up seemingly insurmountable barriers so that, when the couple overcomes them, the resulting surges of happiness, joy, hope, love, etc. are made even stronger in contrast. We make characters suffer so that they (and we) are more grateful when it ends.

In other words, best-loved romance novels evoke the most intense “feels.”

Gay romances take readers on exactly the same emotional roller coaster as straight romances do. I’d even argue that LGBTQ love stories have a built-in advantage because gay protagonists come with an inherent road block (no backstory needed).

For all the progress made recently in LGBTQ rights, prejudices still exist. There are still people who will publicly say they don’t think same-sex couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples. Regardless of how the issue is treated in the story itself—in quite a few of my novels, the characters have supportive families and communities—we begin reading these stories knowing that there are people out there who think men loving men and women loving women is just plain wrong. When we reach the end, the characters have not only overcome the plot hurdles they’ve had to jump, but they’ve overcome the societal hurdle that actually exists.

ANNE TENINO

That’s what makes it so much more rewarding when love wins anyway. When reading romance, we already know it’s going to end with two people in love and happy, just as we know the roller coaster will eventually stop and let the riders exit. In both cases, the experience is all about the excitement of the journey. ~ Anne Tenino

Catalyzed by her discovery of LGBTQ romance, Anne Tenino left the lucrative fields of art history, non-profit fundraising, and domestic engineering to follow her dream of become a starving romance author. For good or ill, her snarky, silly, quasi-British sense of humor came along for the ride.

Anne applies her particular blend of romance, comedy and gay protagonists to contemporary, scifi and paranormal tales. Her works have won awards, she’s been featured in RT Book Reviews, and has achieved bestseller status on Amazon’s gay romance list.

Born and raised in Oregon, Anne lives in Portland with her husband and two kids, who have all taken a sacred oath to never read her books. She can usually be found at her computer, procrastinating. You can find out more about her works at http://annetenino.com