How?
It’s the question I keep asking myself, right now, about everything.
I had a plan for this post—updates on the indie author social media game from one new to the trenches, updates on my cover artist (I have one now)—but there’s nothing I want to write about right now less than TikTok, especially after its purchase by a noted oligarch.
For months now, I’ve been trying to thread the needle between awareness and outrage and business as usual. I’ve been trying to plug away at a new manuscript while my editor has The Alchemists, but it’s hard to want to work on a (at least on the Stacey Spectrum) lighthearted romance-driven fantasy when you’re watching American democracy—hell, the entire concept of America, as defined by the constitution—slide with growing rapidity off a cliff point of seemingly no return. It’s hard not for it to feel like I’m just burying my head in the sand of a tidy little world I created.
Escapism isn’t a bad thing. We need escapism right now—it’s the antidote to burnout, it’s the reset that allows you to get your head back in the game, dig yourself out of the grief spiral. I am deeply thankful for the tenderness of Heated Rivalry, which was responsible for the singular hour I spent yesterday not thinking about the actual fascists camped outside my old elementary school, back in Minnesota.
But there’s a line there, between a little escapism and cocooning yourself in frictionless feel good. That line is porous and malleable, and it’s easy to slip through to the other side without realizing you’ve done it. It’s easy to only want to read or to watch the comfortable things because everything else feels like too much, and it’s easy to get stuck there. It also makes it a lot easier for assholes in masks to go around abducting people, if we all hunker down in our cozy little comfort reads.
I guess we are going to talk about BookTok after all. I’m new to the scene, but from what I can tell BookTok is predominantly romance and fantasy, and ergo, romantasy driven. What’s notable here—and you don’t need me to point out because you are all smart people—is that these genres are, in the most general way, escapist genres. Romance, as a genre in particular is defined by the use of the specific tropes, and the necessity of a ‘Happily Ever After.’ There can only be so much friction when your genre dictates a pre-determined ending.
I keep seeing a variation of this same reel on Instagram (no, not the one of libraries acting out a specific Heated Rivalry scene with stuffies) which basically goes something like ‘Just a reminder that reading is a political activity because you can’t read if ICE murders you,’ and I have to say ‘no, no it’s fucking not.’
By that logic, breathing is a political activity (who knows, we may get there sooner or later). You could substitute any verb for reading in that sentence and the impact is the same. Reading political material is political. Reading banned books is political. Posting about books you can read to educate yourself is political.
BookTok relies on coziness, on aesthetic, on the craving for an escapist read, but also, in some ways, an escapist life. I’m watching plenty of other authors right now caught in this same quandary—between their morals, and their genre, and their work, and their audience.
How do we express outrage in a space that often shies away from substance in favor of aesthetic? How do we suddenly do an about face from embracing what we love about these spaces and genres to posting material that might feel antithetical to those things? How do we post those things without alienating our audience or feeling like a fraud? How do we decide that actually, this is more important than alienating our audience, and maybe if it alienates them, they’re not the audience we actually want? (This one at least, is straightforward.) How do we promote books about romance when it feels like there’s nothing more pointless we could be doing? How do we make this specific art, when this is not the art it feels like the world needs right now? How can we even make the art the world needs when ours are not the voices most important to elevate right now?
So, what do we do? I don’t know, I’m just a dumb writer, fumbling around in the cold and the dark, but here’s what I want for myself, for all of us:
Write your romance, but also write your rage and your grief, because we need both the balm and the flame. Keep writing, keep speaking. Read your romances, but also read Parable of the Sower. Keep blowing your whistles and banging your pots and pans if that’s what you have. Listen to your elders, who may have already fought this once before. Do not let your fear get the better of you; do not cover your head so much in blankets that you cannot see the world outside. Keep posting. Keep being angry. Keep calling your politicians and keep delivering dinner to those for whom fear is not an option. Maybe, one day, it will be worth it, and we will get justice, and that will be better than any Happily Ever After.
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