357. Aro and Ace Representation in Romance: An Interview with Amanda Jean

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 357 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and today we are talking about aro and ace representation in romance with Amanda Jean. Amanda Jean is an editor, writer, and podcaster, and she has a lot of insight about aro and ace spectrum romance and the expectations of romance from aro and ace spectrum readers. She discusses acquiring titles for a romance press that foster and include good representation, and of course she has a ton of recommendations as well. We talk about what a romantic story and a Happily Ever After look like or feel like when representing aromantic and ace spectrum people. We also discuss the various ways that we learn to recognize pieces of ourselves and the powerful relief that comes with understanding who and how you are. When Amanda Jean starts talking about recognizing her own sexual identity, I got a little teary during the recording. So if this is something that’s of interest to you, this episode might be a little emotional. And again, if you are looking for representation of aro and ace spectrum characters in romance, boy, do we have recommendations! I am sorry in advance for your wallet and your TBR.

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I have a compliment. It’s my favorite part! Yes!

To Kate K.: You are more adorable, entertaining, and inspiring than sixteen baby turtles wearing fuzzy yellow tracksuits, so keep up the good work.

If you would like a compliment of your very own, have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Individually handcrafted and heartfelt compliments from, well, me are available at different tier levels.

At the end of the episode, I will tell you about the music you are listening to, and I will tell you about some exciting things we have going on at Smart Bitches this coming week, and I will tell you a really bad joke – like, wow, is it bad. But also in the show notes, Amanda Jean was kind enough to send me a bunch of links. If you’re not sure what aro/ace spectrum means or if you’re looking for more resources about aro/ace spectrum recommendations, she sent me so many things, and she talks about so many resources; this is going to be a most informative episode.

So I hope that you enjoy this one. Let’s do this thing: on with the podcast.

[music]

Amanda Jean: I’m Amanda Jean. I’m an editor of queer romance and queer speculative fiction and a bunch of other stuff, and I also co-host and produced podcasts? My former podcast was The Hopeless Romantic with author Austin Chant, and it was all about basically just dissecting the ins and outs of queer media and queer romance. It was a lot of fun, and now Austin and I co-host The Red Pen, which is about also dissecting media that we love and talking about why it’s great or why parts of it didn’t work. And in terms of my day job, I work primarily as an acquiring editor at Less Than Three Press, but I freelance with a bunch of places in the queer romance industry.

Sarah: That’s a lot of editing and talking!

Amanda: Yeah, it really is. The two things that I’m best primed to do. [Laughs]

Sarah: So you mentioned when you contacted me that you are very passionate not only about queer romance, but addressing aromantic and ace spectrum people in romance, and I’ve noticed more and more romances being published that not only include characters who are on that spectrum, but talk about what that means for those characters, which I find incredibly excellent. Can you talk about what it means to address the needs of this group of people and what you do to make that happen?

Amanda: Yeah! So full disclosure: I am demi/aro/ace myself, and –

Sarah: Can I ask what that means in case someone who’s listening –

Amanda: Yes. Absolutely.

Sarah: I’ll be honest with you: for a very long time, every time I saw the word “cis” I had to go look it up because I was like, what?

Amanda: [Laughs] I feel like we just need glossaries with all episodes of whatever we listen to.

Sarah: Thank you, yes!

Amanda: So yeah, in this context, at least for me – various people will define demisexuality or demiromantic orientation differently – it’s essentially people who experience either sexual or, and/or romantic attraction in specikip – bleah! – I will take that again.

[Laughter]

Sarah: It’s a good plan! Go ahead! Feel free!

Amanda: Yep. It’s, it means a lot of different things to different people – no community is ever a monolith – but essentially, people who are demisexual and/or demiromantic experience sexual or romantic attraction under very specific circumstances. For me, it’s, I have to already develop a deep emotional connection with somebody to even feel romantic or sexual attraction. For others, that may vary.

Sarah: On one hand, I love that there are children growing up with these words so they can better understand themselves, and I love –

Amanda: Yes.

Sarah: – reading about people who learn about these terms and go, ohhh!

Amanda: That’s me!

Sarah: Oh, that’s, that’s me! I get it! But it’s also tricky because, as you said, no one’s a monolith, and we all have different interpretations of what that means.

Amanda: Yeah. And it’s, I think that was one of the reasons – I thought I knew everything about my life and my identity at a certain point. I’m a pretty assured person when it comes to that, and then in my, it was my mid to late twenties, I actually sat down and examined what various versions of being aromantic or being asexual could be, that it wasn’t just, oh, I’m not interested in romance, or, oh, I’m not interested in sex. It was an entire spectrum of people who are trying to navigate complex dynamics, and I was like, oh, that’s me! [Laughs]

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Amanda: That’s me too! And yeah –

Sarah: And now you bring that into your work!

Amanda: Yeah. I try to, anyway. It’s, it’s surprisingly difficult, and I’ll get into that. First off, I want to say, I think one of the reasons I’m so passionate is because we already, for people who read queer romance or write cro-, cromance? [Laughs]

Sarah: Qua-rom-, qua-, oh, that’s going to be fun to spell.

Amanda: Qua-romance. [Laughs] Q-romance! If you’re involved in this segment of the romance industry, all, you already know there’s so much gatekeeping, and it’s really hard to see yourself in stories in the mainstream, so we’ve carved out a section of romance to try and see ourselves in stories and not be alienated from our own identities. I’m glad that there has been, as you talked about, an increase in the amount of stories with aro/ace spectrum people in them. Also, ace is shorthand for asexual, and aro is shorthand for aromantic. For me personally, I’ve worked on a lot of aro/ace spectrum manuscripts, and I’ve worked with my bosses at various places to try and create more inclusive wording on calls and in submission guidelines, because that has been something I have noticed is lacking at a lot of places, even places that would happily publish aro/ace spectrum literature. And this ties into some other stuff I’m sure we’ll talk about, but when you work for a press that is built and structured around romance, trying to adjust the optics of calls and guidelines can be tricky, because you don’t want to seem like you’re asking for ace spec stories as an afterthought.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: I’ve stumbled in that. Some call language I’ve put out has not been super inclusive, even though it is something I would like to see myself represented in?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: Like, hey, I want aro/ace spectrum stories in here! Yeah, I know that this is a romance press – [laughs] – and it can seem kind of counterintuitive. It’s a process, it’s complicated, and I try to, I try to prioritize own voices work. I try to encourage ace spec authors I know to write and to publish. I try to invite spectrum editors to work with me. Okay, so this is a hard one: I reject manuscripts with shitty rep, because, yeah, we need it, but we don’t need it to be bad. It’s worse if it’s harmful than it, than if it never existed at all.

Sarah: Yo. Ask me about romances where Nazis fall in love with concentration camp victims. I hear you!

Amanda: Ughhh! Me screaming into the void for ten years! [Laughs] Yeah, I don’t understand how we’ve gotten to this point in 2019 and people are still submitting Nazi romances and getting them published and getting accolades for them.

Sarah: Well, you know, I’ve, I’ve heard it said that Nazis are, you know, decent people.

Amanda: I’ve heard that they’re just, they’re fine.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amanda: [Laughs] Listen –

Sarah: Sure. Mm.

Amanda: Everything’s fine in here. The industry isn’t on fire at all times.

Sarah: No, not in the light, not in the least.

[Laughter]

Amanda: So –

Sarah: So you mentioned, you mentioned that it’s difficult and can be challenging, and you also mentioned that the, the beat structure of romance and the reader expectations of romance can be interpreted differently for aro/ace spectrum people. Tell me how that works. I’m really fascinated, because I’m very fluent in the beat structure of romance; read it all the time!

Amanda: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah: How, how does, how does that spectrum potentially create a difficulty or a challenge when it comes to reader expectations of the genre and reader desire for the, for the story of the genre to have good representation?

Amanda: Yeah, and I think – okay, so first of all, this goes back to the complexity of trying to market aro/ace spec fiction under the umbrella of romance. It’s really doable, and quite a few indie queer pubs will take the story, so your odds are honestly better publishing through sort of mid-sized indie publishers than they are big five, at least in my very subjective opinion. The question is, though, you know, how do we give readers, who know that they’re buying from a romance publisher and have certain expectations, the beats and structure that they’re inclined to like? And you can either do it or not do it, and both are totally valid. You can adhere to a beat structure, and you can not. I’ve worked on both. I’ve worked on aromantic stories that heavily conformed to a romance beat structure, which is inherently subversive in its existence, which is really cool, and some stories just can’t be contorted into something else, and you still have a shot at getting those stories out in the world through a romance publisher, because they tend to be a little bit – a queer romance publisher, specifically – they tend to be a little bit more flexible about what they’ll publish and market. So if you take a familiar beat of romance and even some of its tropes and apply it to aro/ace work, it’s a little easier for ace spectrum romance, because that can, can follow the traditional romantic beats, you know, like, the meet-cutes, the keeping people apart because of external and internal conflict –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: – the big old moment of falling in love, the dark moment, and then obviously the Happily Ever After/Happily For Now. Those exist wholesale, and for years, I know a lot of ace people have read – well, they read widely anyway, but they’ll specifically read fade to black or romances that are marketed as having no on-page sex in them – essentially PG romance – in part because for so long that’s been the bulk of what’s available to them, but now there’s more ace characters in romance, on-page navigation of relationships, and people actually talking about being demi or being sex-repulsed or what their –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: – personal boundaries and desires are. Where this gets harder, and where it gets, you know, kind of interesting and inherently subversive is when it comes to aro-, aromantic representation. So – or basically just nontraditional stories in terms of what we expect to see in the alloromantic society, and alloromantic means people who inherently experience what you would consider, like, traditional romantic attraction and feelings, and that would exclude even gray or demi aros like myself. One of the things that I suggest authors do if they’re going to be writing an aro story or a story with aro characters is taking a beat sheet like the fabulous Jami Gold’s romance beat sheet and plugging in their story in that beat sheet, which will basically tell them, you know, when the first act turn is supposed to happen; when the, when the, when the big moments in the arc are supposed to happen, to the page number, to the, to the word count; and seeing if their story can fit that general beat structure.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: You can use these well-known, well-loved moments to strike out your own path, and romance is essentially just about people. A beat sheet will show you when, what, and where those things happen, and there’s no reason you can’t use it as a tool in aro spec fiction, and I think publishers will have a better idea of how to market your book. And that’s a difficult decision. Like, if you’re a person who knows that your story cannot be put into that beat sheet, cannot follow those specific structure guidelines, yeah, you’re, you’re going to have to make a hard choice as to whether or not you want to try and sell your book to a publisher who doesn’t know how to market it. That’s, it’s a rough choice. But I think for me, I’m really only married to the idea of romance being about a Happily Ever After or Happily For Now between people?

Sarah: Right!

Amanda: And that can be between two people, three people, more. It can be filled with sexual intimacy or, or not. It can end in marriage or commitment, or it can end in two people just deciding that they’re wild about each other! Whatever it looks like, if it’s platonic or not, I think what romance readers are looking for are heightened emotions, heightened stakes, and the payoff of a happy ending, and you can have all of that in ace spectrum and aro spectrum or aro/ace romance or not-romance, as it were. If you’ve got that, you’re writing, I think, within the umbrella of romance, and you can fully raid the chest of tropes that romance has cultivated and have fun with it. Like, you can have an aro spectrum romance with dukes, pirates, enemies-to-friends, hidden identity! The world is your oyster, and you can use the system to your own ends, and I think that that may be beneficial to authors who are writing especially aro spectrum stories, who are trying to get their books out into the world.

Sarah: Right.

Amanda: Raid the existing infrastructure and use it to your own ends. [Laughs]

Sarah: Right. How, are you seeing in your submissions, are you seeing more ro-, romances and stories being submitted with aro and ace spectrum themes included?

Amanda: Yes. It’s been increasing  –

Sarah: Ooh! That’s good!

Amanda: Yes, yes. I, I, I’m very happy about that. I’m not – [sighs] – I’m extremely cynical about the state of mainstream publishing.

Sarah: Yeah, you mentioned that when you emailed me, and –

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: – I’m very curious as to why that is.

Amanda: I think, so –

Sarah: Basically, your pitch was, I can yell about queer romance all day! Well, I’m really excited to hear it! Go ahead!

[Laughter]

Amanda: I’m always here to, to yell. One of the reasons I’m cynical is because I know, I have a pretty good idea of the power that I hold as an acquisitions editor – and a content editor at other places – within queer publishing, which makes a decent amount of money and has a very, has a growing and very loyal core of readers, but is not getting much attention outside of its own market.

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Amanda: And in order for aro/ace stories, and even broader than that, any, any stories that aren’t basically cis, white, m/f, you know, “traditional” –

Sarah: Right.

Amanda: – romances, for those stories to be given the space that they need and the readership that they, that they really deserve, we need industry-wide change, and I can’t really affect that on my own.

Sarah: Speaking just for paper, which alone is a weird market because a lot of queer romance publishers don’t operate unilaterally in print because it’s so much more expensive and carries an –

Amanda: It’s expensive.

Sarah: Yeah, and it carries an entirely different logistical load.

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: You don’t have that many places selling print romance anymore, and if they do –

Amanda: No.

Sarah: – it is a very specific kind of book, and that type of book changes quickly, and they are looking at trends in a completely different way.

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: We’re moving away from mass market into trade. That’s a whole other logistical boundary!

Amanda: And it’s also interesting, you know, working in, in queer pub, I’ve seen how many of the, the presses that do offer print and do try to get print into at least book-, bookstores or libraries. They don’t publish in mass market specifications –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: – and so they’ve, they’ve already, I don’t want to say disqualified, but they’ve already made sure that they can’t get on a shelf in a, in a QFC, in a Walmart, in a Costco –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: – because –

Sarah: I don’t even see romance in my Costco anymore.

Amanda: Yeah, I’ve seen a, I, I haven’t been back in a while, but I saw a couple stragglers. You mostly, honestly, the, the, the most frequent places I see it are the little, like, book kiosk type situations in, in, like, grocery stores now, which is –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Amanda: – so wild, because romance used, you couldn’t go into a bookstore without – you couldn’t go into many stores without seeing a lot of, of books for sale and magazines and stuff like that, and we’ve moved away from print so much that it’s kind of dying out.

Sarah: And yet print is the dominant format for people who are younger than me.

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: And they want trade. I have a lot of theories as to why.

Amanda: Yeah, it’s weird.

Sarah: It’s weird, right? And it’s, it’s, it’s fascinating to watch it change, the longer you’ve been in it.

Amanda: Yeah! One of the first conferences I went to was, it used to be called Gay Romance Northwest. It was in Seattle, and during a – this is specifically for queer fiction?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: It was pretty heavily geared towards m/m back in the day, back – but it, it evolved. [Laughs] It got a lot of great feedback, and the organizer was like, oh, okay. This, this is not quite what it needs to be. One of the, the first things I noticed was that the only thing anyone was talking about in panels was cis men.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: There was absolutely no discussion of, of bisexuality, there was no discussion of trans people, there was no discussion of lesbian or women-loving-women fiction, there was none, and I raised my hand and asked, because I was like, hey, I know that publishers I read do publish outside those lines, and I was essentially told, oh, other presses handle that, like lesbian romance is its own cordoned-off thing.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amanda: And I was like, what –

Sarah: Oh God!

Amanda: The irony of someone telling that to me who worked in the industry was very funny. It’s still a dominant mindset that cis m/m is the only thing that sells, and cis m/m is the only thing that has, like, a, a staunch readership, and yes, lesbian romance does exist, but it is, it has its own glorious, storied history over here, and we don’t touch that. Even though nine out of the ten, you know, queer romance publishers I could name publish stories with lesbian and bisexual women in them, with trans folks. Like, even though they do cover this demographic, they still consider it someone else’s purview. I mean, I’ve seen in – if you look at the state of queer romance in 2019 versus 2008, 2005, when it was existent but burgeoning?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: It’s massively different, and I think that that may be the case ten years from now.

Sarah: I answered an email from a listener recently. She realized that she might be demisexual because reading sex scenes on the page without the emotional develop-, development in the text made her supremely uncomfortable.

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: She was like, the, the ones where they bang first and then have feelings? She’s, I can’t do that. I just –

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: – I cannot. I, it, it’s, it doesn’t work for me, it makes me deeply uncomfortable, and then I learned, wait a minute, there’s a –

Amanda: [Laughs]

Sarah: – there’s a word for that.

Amanda: There’s literally a word for that, and I mean, everybody’s expression of their, of their sexual orientation and their boundaries is different, but that was also a – I always just thought I was, like, picky? It’s a strange thing, because you’re inundated every day with images of what a perfect romance or, should look like, and it, it gets in you to, to a point where you just, if you’re like me, it takes you a really long time to realize that you’re not just weird?

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amanda: Or special or picky or prud-, like, you, oh! This is like a whole thing! I can just be this way, and it doesn’t need, you know, a disclaimer.

Sarah: And it’s not just, this image represents romance, but this rep-, this image on this cover represents sex and sexy –

Amanda: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and attractive, and if that doesn’t apply to you, you start to wonder, what’s wrong with me?

Amanda: Yeah, what’s, what’s up with me? Yeah, I –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: – I have had long discussions with my co-host Austin Chant and other authors about – and other readers – about how, you know, I’ll read a book that everyone loves, and I’ll be like, you know, I thought the writing was great, but I just, it left me cold, and I realized later it was because I need the building tension of a, a budding romantic relationship where these characters are becoming invested in each other before the sex. If they have sex too early, I’m out. Like, I can still read it –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: – I don’t, I don’t necessarily become uncomfortable, but I definitely lose my investment. It’s like the bubble of tension is completely popped, and I can’t –

Sarah: Yes.

Amanda: – can’t sustain my interest anymore. And I thought that was just, like, oh, this is the sort of story I’m drawn to, and that’s true, but it also feeds back into who I am as a person and how I navigate the world and navigate relationships, and I cannot believe it took me as long as it did, but that’s a common story. Like, until you really do see the words in front of your face or see the specific representation and go, oh, that’s me! you don’t necessarily have the, the context or the language to understand it. It’s your identity and not just you being strange.

Sarah: Which is why it is so important for there to be positive representation of variations of sexual expression and sexuality.

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: I mean, there are so many women who, through the decades of romance fiction, have learned to own having sexual desire, which is off-limits and communicated –

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: – openly as this is not allowed. That same sort of permission to explore in the privacy of your imagination should be given to all readers.

Amanda: Yes. And I think for queer romance in particular, because the dominant stories are still cis m/m, or even cis f/f – if we’re looking at popular lesbian fiction, a lot of it is pretty cis – there, there is a, a growing presence of trans characters and trans stories and trans authors.

Sarah: One trans romance that I adored was called Roller Girl by Vanessa North.

Amanda: Oh, Vanessa North! Yeah, that is a great, it’s such a cute story.

Sarah: And I, I remember saying in my review that one of the things that I loved about it was that the heroine had been formerly a professional athlete –

Amanda: Yes, yeah.

Sarah: – and there was a throwaway comment about working out in a room full of medals with my dead name on them.

Amanda: Yes!

Sarah: And yet the character had this really wonderful relationship with her body in every form, because as an athlete you’ve got to pay attention to it!

Amanda: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah: And so she had to reconcile her identity and her body in a way, yet still acknowledge that there was this whole other thing that her body did in the past that she didn’t put away for her own personal reasons. I found it just such an, a lovely book.

Amanda: Yeah, Vanessa North is, is usually one to knock it out of the park, and I really loved Roller Girl because it did have that very loving, very –

Sarah: Yes!

Amanda: Anytime I see an exploration of trans stories that are loving and positive and written by cis folks who do not try to write like the “trans story,” like the trans narrative, they’re just writing a nice story with some trans people in it? [Laughs]

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: I’m always game for that, and I think that also, I mean, I’ve seen less of this in queer romance with aro/ace stories, because I think most people who are writing aro/ace spectrum stories are aro/ace spectrum themselves? That’s not a hard and fast rule, but it is still the majority.

Sarah: Yes! You mentioned that you have examples of positive representation to share.

Amanda: Yeah!

Sarah: Just name all of them; I would really love to hear what books that you are recommending. And if they’re books that you’ve edited or acquired, please feel free to talk about them, because we all discover books in different ways, and –

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: – as an acquiring editor, you’re going to see a lot more of the spectrum of what is being written before you can, you know, share with the rest of the world what’s being published.

Amanda: Yeah. I do have a couple that I’ve acquired or edited or worked on, because –

Sarah: Bring it!

Amanda: – that’s just how it happens. [Laughs] So the first one I’m going to mention is Daria Defore’s The Trouble? It’s about an aro spec dude in a band who ends up in a friends-with-benefits relationship with this hot guy who throws a drink at him, and turns out to be his Accounting TA: very dramatic. Daria coined – I don’t know if she coined the term, but she’s definitely been the one I’ve seen using it – the term aromantic comedy to describe The Trouble and a lot of her work, which I think is hilarious and delightful. And The Trouble is one of those books that I immediately think of as fitting a romance beat structure criteria while it examines a, a relationship that is not traditionally alloromantic.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: Love The Trouble. Mr. March Names the Stars by Rivka Aarons-Hughes is a cute novella – it’s like sixty pages – and it’s about two, two whole ace characters! [Laughs] It’s not just one! That’s one of the – this is a slight aside, but a lot of what I see is a lot of stories where ace characters or aro characters are trying to navigate relationships with alloromantic or allosexual people or both, and that’s very valid and I love those stories, but also, like, as it – I feel like ace and aro people are also drawn to, you know, each other! [Laughs] Sometimes we make relationships work with other aro/ace spec people! But I really like Mr. March Names the Stores, the Stars – Mr. March Names the Stars. It’s really cute; it delves into the worlds of pagan festivals as well?

Sarah: Ooh!

Amanda: Yeah. I don’t know; I really like that one. There’s an author named Alison Evans who has written a couple of things that are really good, but specifically, We Go Forward is about two women meeting in Europe and traveling around and forming a deep, intensive bond. One of them’s bi, and the other is aro/ace, and they’re both learning to navigate this intense new relationship, this friendship to a backdrop of, like, sneaking into David Bowie’s old recording studio or exploring castles, and it has some conformity to a romance beat but overall is just not that style; it’s a little bit more exploratory.

And then one of my favorite newer releases is by Talia Hibbert. It’s called That Kind of Guy, and it has a demisexual dude who confronts his need for emotional intimacy in a fake dating scenario? It’s real good. It’s, it’s, it’s an m/f romance as well.

There’s For Better or Worse by R. Cooper, who I like a lot. Usually has a deft hand with quiet, character-driven stories, and they’re typically in these really fascinating small town settings, and this one features a demisexual dude realizing he’s falling in love with his best friend and trying to figure that whole situation out.

There’s Their Troublesome Crush by Xan West, which I have not read yet, but I will always recommend Xan West, and I love them.

And then there’s a few resources that I was actually going to send you to see if you could stick ‘em in in the show notes, because I –

Sarah: Please do!

Amanda: – I, I sort of did my own, you know, research from my recollections, and also it was like, oh, there’s all of these other stories that I haven’t read yet because I’m busy. But –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: – I’ve got a link to a compiled recommendation post of aro, aro/ace spec fiction by Corey Ann, Corey – [sighs] – wow. Taking that again!

Sarah: Corey Alexander? [Laughs]

Amanda: Yep, Corey Alexander! So Corey Alexander, who is also Xan West, and then there’s some Goodreads lists and I think a couple other, like, blog posts floating around with sort of vetted aro/ace spectrum recommendations, which is one of the things that I always look for. Like, Goodreads is harder because people just nominate whatever, but I like the, the really curated ones, and I’ll link that.

Sarah: Have you read Play It Again by Aidan Wayne?

Amanda: Let me go look at the cover. [Laughs]

Sarah: It is a, it is a phone, it’s a black-framed phone against a blue background. It is about –

Amanda: No, I haven’t! This is, I think, on my TBR.

Sarah: Okay, so I read this, and I loved it because it was very low angst. The biggest change, or the biggest challenge between the characters is, is distance. But also, one of the characters, Dovid, is extremely famous as a YouTuber. Like, his channel supports him and his sister. His sister is aromantic, asexual, sex-repulsed, which is, I’d, I’d never seen the term sex-repulsed before, and I was like, well, that is really not a kind way to describe yourself! And then I looked it up and was like, oh, that’s a thing! My bad!

Amanda: Yeah. [Laughs]

Sarah: I don’t know how I equated it as, like, negative self-talk, and I felt terrible! I was like, wow, I didn’t –

The other character, the other hero is Sam, who is a very quiet, shy, Irish gamer, and big famous Dovid discovers his channel and recommends it, and then all of a sudden Sam wakes up and is like, why are all these people following me on my channel, what just happened and, and sort of catapults him into a level of fame he’s not ready for. Along the way in the story, Sam realizes, because Dovid asks him, are, are you asexual? And Sam’s like, wait, what?

Amanda: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: That’s a thing, huh? I also was fascinated by the idea of someone who is very sexual navigating a relationship with someone who is asexual and just figuring that out by being so clear and attentive to his partner’s responses, verbal cues, physical cues, and consent, and I, that part I just adored.

Amanda: Yes! That’s one of the cool things that I find in aro/ace spectrum romances is that there’s usually more navigation and more communication, which are two things I’m always thirsty for.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Amanda: So anytime you see that sort of attentiveness, that sort of care, that sort of very important, essential negotiation of boundaries and determination of what the other person wants, I’m a sucker for it! And it does –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amanda: – it does tend to pop up a decent amount in aro/ace spectrum stories because they, it kind of has to. I don’t know; I guess, I guess you could write it where it just, someone’s like, oh, by the way, I’m asexual, and the other person’s like, oh. ‘Kay. Like – [laughs]

Sarah: Even, even navigating those boundaries, you need to talk about them!

Amanda: Yeah. Because that means something different. Like, I could, I could tell a potential, I don’t know, love interest, partner, whatever, that I am ace, but they might not know what that means, and they might not know what it means to me.

Sarah: Yeah. It’s like trying to say you’re feminist: you still need to deliver a dissertation as to what that means.

Amanda: Yeah. It gets – I mean, that’s one of the other funny things about anytime you’re reading a marginalized identity, and, like, one of the characters in it doesn’t – it isn’t that identity or doesn’t understand it, like the, the, the PowerPoint presentation?

Sarah: [Laughs]

Amanda: They either –

Sarah: Are we at a 101 level, or are we at a 102 level, or maybe a graduate level?

Amanda: Right

Sarah: Yeah.

Amanda: [Laughs] Is this a defense of your thesis? Like, what’s going on here? Yeah, I, I don’t mind that. I will say I’m glad that there are more stories like this being published so that we don’t see as many of those really heavy-on-exposition scenes where somebody has to, like, be told the Google definition of stuff? Although I still am disheartened to see a lot of reviews where people – for example, a lot of people are confused by neopronouns or, or non he/him, she/her, or even they/them pronouns. People are, still get really picky about singular they, because they just don’t understand that that’s fine, and it’s always, it has a long history of being used in the singular. I think that we’re on an, a general upswing with people being able to put marginalized identities in stories and not have to give these very 101 talks about them. But I, I realize for stuff like aro/ace spectrum, like, not everybody is going to know what being demi is or, as I said, like, it’s different for every single person, and I think that that’s really cool and starting to be reflected in fiction as well.

Sarah: Yeah. And I mean, really, the more ways that you can talk about how people experience intimacy in, in, in every iteration of intimacy –

Amanda: Yes.

Sarah: – the more it legitimizes different forms of intimacy –

Amanda: Yeah.

Sarah: – that are so very often socially rejected.

Amanda: Yeah. Yeah, that’s been one of the, the weirder things about realizing that I’m aro/ace spectrum and realizing that the way that I deal with my friendships is maybe not what is considered, I don’t know, the norm? And yet is so valid, because –

Sarah: Mm-hmm

Amanda: – I just – again, it is one of those situations where I just thought I was weird. And I was like, oh, wait, no, this is a way I can navigate my life.

Sarah: And you can find people who, like you said, can have that level 400 conversation because they have experienced that same thing.

Amanda: Yes, exactly. The level 400s are always fun, but you know what, we’ve got to get the, we’ve got to get people in and give them that 101.

Sarah: Yeah.

Amanda: [Laughs]

Sarah: So I have a somewhat personal question based on the, the listener email I received. Did reading help you realize that about yourself as well, or was it more life experiences? And if you’d rather not answer –

Amanda: No, I –

Sarah: – since I didn’t include that on the questions, it’s totally okay.

Amanda: It’s totally fine. No, for me, I think it was honestly being adjacent to activist spaces?

Sarah: Hmm.

Amanda: It wasn’t reading, because I had definitely read stories with at least ace characters in them. I don’t know that I’d read any with aro. I don’t know; I’ll find out. And I just didn’t think that was me, because I thought that to be asexual meant that you had to be maybe sex-repulsed? I’m not really sure what was going on in my head, but I thought that in order to be asexual you had to meet XYZ criteria, and I’m, I’m very sex-positive, and I enjoy reading stuff with sex in it, and I, you know, don’t mind hearing about sex. Like, it’s never been something that has been deeply uncomfortable for me, and it is for other people, for some other people. And so I just thought, oh, I can’t be ace; I’m just weird. I’m just picky. And then I finally found some, I don’t know if it was a blog post and maybe even a Tumblr post going around with different definitions of types of asexual identity and how it can be expressed, and I, I’m a bad ace: I don’t remember all of them right now. [Laughs] But some of them included people who are sex-repulsed; some included people who enjoy actually living vicariously through expression of sex and sexual intimacy in media, which is, again, I think, very similar to my personal identity? I really do feel like I live vicariously a lot of the time through what I read and what I consume, and that’s, again, it goes back to one of the reasons why if people have sex too early in a story I’m like, why? [Laughs] Why? I don’t care now! But yeah, I think for me, my view of asexuality and later aromanticism as being one thing that I’d only seen expressed one way was a reason why I didn’t realize who I was earlier. I’m hoping –

Sarah: Ohhh.

Amanda: I’m hoping that as time goes on and there are more different and nuanced takes on aro/ace people in fiction that other people may see themselves in it, because that is one of the reasons why I do the work that I do.

Sarah: Yeah. That you want to share the experience of discovery.

Amanda: Yeah. It was honestly such a relief. Like, I never, I always kind of knew I was queer. I always knew I was –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Amanda: – some form of bi. I didn’t know what, if I was pan; I didn’t know – not that bi and pan are the same, but you get my drift. I knew I was something that was not straight, and I didn’t know – I didn’t really care! Like, I had grown up in a, in a pretty accepting environment, and it was a pretty easy graduation to just start saying that I was queer, and I thought that was it. I thought I knew everything about myself, and so I had never had a particularly interesting, like, coming out to my family story. I never had any great dissonance with that. I never had to conceal who I was. And then the enormous relief when I figured out that I was aro/ace spectrum, I honestly can’t put into words, because it wasn’t something that I thought about every day, but it certainly impacted my relationships, and it made me feel like I was always the person who didn’t want to date and didn’t have a plus one to things, who got overinvested in my friendships and thought that maybe I was just obsessive? But I have always, I mean, not always, but I’ve generally had very, like, healthy, loving friendships, and I thought, you know, I’m just a strange person, and I have to resign myself to being, like, the weird cousin at the family gatherings who doesn’t have a date but maybe brought their best friend? [Laughs] And then later was like, oh! That’s actually not accurate! I, I’m a, I’m a complex person with a complex identity, and I can live my life knowing fully who I am and not just thinking that I’m weird or broken or whatever.

Sarah: And the, the idea that there’s – not only is there nothing wrong with you for feeling this way, but there’s also nothing wrong with being who you are and also wanting happiness.

Amanda: Yes.

Sarah: Like, you don’t, you don’t – happiness is not exclusive. You don’t, you don’t get to, like, say, only this group gets it.

Amanda: Yes.

Sarah: I mean, I understand that people identify in many different ways, but I’m pretty sure we have humanity in common.

Amanda: Yeah. We have interpersonal connections of any sort in common. I think that’s one of the reasons I said, like, I think romance is just about people and their relationships, and those relationships don’t all have to look the same, so long as –

Sarah: Yeah.

Amanda: – they end, in, in romance specifically, with Happily.

Sarah: Are there any other books that you want to make sure that you mention or things that you’re reading that you really want to make sure people know about?

Amanda: Yeah! I, I have a couple of authors I want to throw out there, and then, because I realize, like, I’m sure the vast majority of your listenership have read queer romance but may not necessarily live in that space, I wanted to throw out some recommendations there.

So my mainstay in queer romance is the fabulous, wonderful, and charming K. J. Charles. She writes a lot of historical fiction, especially gaslamp fantasy historical, which I love. Gaslamp is generally Edwardian and Victorian with a hint o’ magic in it, something fantastical, something speculative. And my favorites from K. J. are Think of England, which is just straight-up, I think it’s Edwardian – yeah, Think of England; it just had a, a f/f prequel published called Proper English; Jackdaw, which is gaslamp; and An Unnatural Vice, which I think, think Sins of the Cities is, is a gaslamp-adjacent series, so. Absolutely recommend K. J. Charles.

So Kim Fielding has been a longtime favorite of mine. I’m going to be the ultimate nepotist and throw out the name Austin Chant, who is my good friend and podcast co-host and a person I do edit frequently, full disclosure. He writes beautiful and trans-centric romance across a multitude of subgenres. He’s only published three things so far, but one of them was Peter Darling, which was a queer, trans Peter Pan sequel with a relationship between Peter and Captain Hook. It’s real good.

I just –

Sarah: Ohhh!

Amanda: Yeah, it’s really, it’s really good; it’s really cute; and it’s quite short, so you can, it’s like fifty thousand, you can just get through it in a sitting or two. If you’re me and inhale books. [Laughs] I just realized maybe that wasn’t everyone’s experience! It also has an audiobook if you’re into that.

I just finished Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue, which is about the first son of the president falling for a prince of England, and it was a romp, and I needed its escapism. I needed the, the alternate u-, the alternate universe window into a political landscape that is not our own, and it was really nice, while being still semi-grounded in reality, and who doesn’t love a royal, like, romance?

I really loved Lola Keeley’s The Music and the Mirror, and that came out last year. It’s an f/f ballet romance. I did some copyediting on it, but I was not, like, a content editor or anything. I love the, the pairing, which is like this badass ice queen meets ballet ingénue, and the setting itself, being in the professional ballet world, felt very realistic and very cutthroat.

Recently, Courtney Milan published Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure, which is a rarity in that it’s portraying women over sixty and women who fall in love with each other and also scheme up some really righteous revenge on a shitty dude. So if you’re into older women, if you’re into just a good getting revenge on gross dudes, I recommend that one.

And this one’s a little bit less romance adjacent. I just read a lot of speculative fiction because for my day job, because I, I essentially, you know, I edit and I also read slush pile stuff, I read romance every day. But for my own edification and my own sort of, you know, wiping the slate clean, I read a lot of speculative stuff, and that tends to have, it’s, it’s been getting a decent amount of queer rep in it, and I just thought I would list a couple of my favorite queer speculative fiction authors, and that’s Aliette de Bodard, who just won a Nebula for In the Vanishers’ Palace – or no! Okay, I was, I was correct in that I was wrong. [Laughs]

Sarah: Always good!

Amanda: Always good. I’m glad I caught that.

Sarah: You’d be surprised how many people on the internet can’t say, oh shit, I was wrong!

Amanda: [Laughs] I would not be surprised, but I am glad that I am not that person, mostly. So Aliette de Bodard, who just won a Nebular for The Tea Master and the Detective, which is very good, and also recently published sort of a, it was an f/f – I would say that one of her most adj-, romance-adjacent stories is In the Vanishers’ Palace, which is basically a dark retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” with two women. It’s really good.

And I’m really hyped for Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood, because basically every queer Tor.com release planned for the next two years is real good. Tor’s been killing it with a lot of diverse sci-fi and fantasy, and I’m also hyped for C. L. Polk’s next book after Witchmark, which is going to be f/f. Witchmark is also a queer m/m book, and it is more or less a romance. I would say that it’s probably primarily speculative fiction, but romance is a subgenre, and I recommend it as well. It’s a great first book.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. I want to thank Amanda Jean for hanging out and answering all of my questions. If you would like to find her on the internet, she is there! Her website is amandajeanedits – that’s J-E-A-N. She’s on Twitter @amandahjean, and I will have links to her old podcast and her new podcast and all of the other things that she mentioned, including the beat sheets and resources for people who are looking for aro and ace spectrum characters.

And if you would like to get in touch with me, you can do that! You can email me at [email protected], or you can leave me a message at 1-201-371-3272. You can tell me what you’re thinking, ask questions, leave me a terrible joke; all of these things are good ideas.

This episode was brought to you by Rogue Most Wanted by Janna MacGregor, the latest in the Cavensham Heiresses series. It is a Smart Bitches Hide Your Wallet pick for June 2019! True facts! When an upstart duke challenges Lady Theodora Worth’s claim to her inherited Scottish earldom and the Ladykyrk estate, Thea is suddenly in need of a husband – in name, at least. An elderly neighbor with a thoroughly modern sensibility and a dashing great-nephew just might be the answer to Thea’s prayers. Ever since he was jilted as a young man, though, Lord William Cavensham has been entirely too devoted to his family’s estate to wed, but he agrees to meet the woman his aunt has taken under her wing and introduce her to possible suitors. But after just one meeting with beautiful, spirited Thea, Will is determined to help her reclaim her title, and even more so, he can’t stop thinking that perhaps marriage to this bold, passionate woman may be the one thing he’s been missing all along. If you love Eloisa James’s humor and Christi Caldwell’s passion, then Rogue Most Wanted is for you. Rogue Most Wanted by Janna MacGregor is available now wherever books are sold.

If the show that we are creating here brings you enjoyment and you would like to throw a dollar at it once a month, I cannot tell you how much we would appreciate that gesture. We have a Patreon: patreon.com/SmartBitches. Monthly pledges begin at one dollar a month, and every pledge is deeply appreciated. It helps keep the show going, and it helps make sure that every episode has a transcript, including this one, which makes every episode accessible to everyone who wants to listen to or read each week. So thank you in advance for your consideration, and thank you to the Patreon community for underwriting the transcript for this episode.

The music that you are listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater. This track is called “Forgotten,” and it’s by Jason Hemmens. You can find the track as an MP3 on Amazon, or you can buy the album Welcome to Reality at Amazon and iTunes. I recently asked the Patreon community if they liked the different music every week, and the overwhelming response was, yeah, we dig the different music, so I have new tunes coming from Sassy Outwater as soon as we get permissions all lined up. I’m very excited we have really cool new music. Yay!

And speaking of cool things, we have nifty things going on at Smart Bitches this week. You want to hear about them? I’ll tell you about them! ‘Cause, well, that’s why the microphone is on. [Laughs] I’m a little punchy; it’s lunchtime. First, by popular demand and by request, we are adding a second day of Help a Bitch Out. People can write in with the plot or memorable – [clears throat] – moments of a romance that they have read when they can’t remember the title or the author. You’ve probably been through this. This is the state of my entire brain all of the time. We are adding a second day of HaBOs because y’all love to try to figure out these romance puzzles, and you’re terribly good at it; it is quite astonishing. So come on over on Saturday, and we will have some piping hot and fresh HaBOs for you.

Then, next week, we are running a giveaway of two Withings activity tracking watches. I love doing these giveaways, particularly because I have a Withings watch, and it is one of the greatest things I put on my body every day. I track my sleep; I track my workouts; I track how many steps I’ve taken. I really like going snowboarding with it, because it likes to tell me all sorts of interesting things. And we have two to give away, so please stop by to enter.

Plus, it is a new month! Hello, July! So this week we will have Hide Your Wallet, a new Rec League, plus reviews, Help a Bitch Out, and Books on Sale. Please come on down. We will leave the library door open for you.

As I’ve said, I will have links to a lot of the things that we talked about, including podcasts, resources, and all of the books that were mentioned in this episode in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

But as always, I will end with a bad joke, because, well, I love the bad jokes; it’s my favorite thing! This joke comes from Kit. Perhaps because it is the July 4th weekend, and if you are in the States celebrating on July 4th or you’re in Canada celebrating on July 1st, perhaps you’re going to a parade or a picnic or a both! You’re – or a both. A both. If you have to go to a both, or a boot, you might find this joke useful at whatever celebration for your respective days that you might be attending. Are you ready? It’s really bad. You’re going to be the hit of every picnic, I promise.

How do you make a bandstand?

How do you make a bandstand?

You take away their chairs!

[Laughs] I have this moment where I just imagine the, ohhh. Yeah, thank you, Kit! I love the terrible jokes.

So on behalf of all the mammals in my house and on behalf of Amanda Jean, thank you so much for listening. We wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you back here next week.

[lovely music]