My e-book romance novella publisher, a self-professed white man, has asked me to write an “Urban romance.” We have never met face to face, he and I (preferring to conduct our demi-tawdry business like Charlie and his angels), but somehow I’ve been found out. Perhaps the stealth multiculturalism in my Motorcycle Club and Starcrossed Stepsibling e-book romance novellas has given my skin color away. The publisher is a very nice man and homegirl needs money, so it doesn’t take long to answer.
“Yes,” I find myself typing. “Urban. Check. Love to.”
My first thought is that this feels…tentatively empowering. I am a Black woman, I remind myself. On one hand, hurrah! A chance to write for and about my my sistergirls in the ether! 50 Shades of Brown, here we go!
Yet it’s the word “Urban” that continues to jar and rattle, inviting darker thoughts. The word exploitation comes to mind. Then, blaxploitation. The next thought is more cynical, a rationalization: Better I write this story than someone who isn’t Black.
Because I’ma be real: I know what “Urban” is code for.
To get realer: in e-book romance novella world, this euphemistic “Urban” is not the same “Urban” that occurs next to “Outfitters” or anywhere in the set dressing of urbane, city-centric TV shows like Girls.
My publisher has given me a list of “Urban” titles — for research purposes — and I’m tasked to determine the genre’s most popular tropes so we can build ourselves a bestseller. The main trope: one or both leading characters in “Urban” novellas are necessarily Black. And on Amazon, at least, many of these same titles are tagged under seemingly varied sub-categories like “African American Urban Fiction,” “African American Romance Fiction,” and “African American Women’s Fiction.” It is as I suspected: “Urban” is broad, lazy code for “Black.”
My research also reveals that several bestselling “Urban Romance” writers, like Mz Lady P and Jessica Watkins, tend to set their stories against the inner city — which is to say, against a certain mythos of “the Hood,” where wisdom is derived from violence and where violence is sexy and sometimes sexual currency. (Both “Hood Romance” and “Thug Romance” are searchable tags; they exist under the umbrella categories of “Urban Romance” and “African American Women’s Fiction.”) Hustlers, escorts, and kingpins populate the pages of these stories. I note recurring plotlines of disputed paternity and domestic violence. I also note that stories marketed as “Hood Romance” populate several of the top-ten slots on Amazon’s “African American Women’s Fiction” bestseller list.
Once again, it’s the conflation of terms that rattles me; the coded language. For if “Urban Romance” can mean “Thug Romance” and “African American Women’s Fiction,” what is a reader left to surmise about the group on literary parade? If someone looks at those terms as synonymous, what does that tell them?
I remind myself that genre fiction is a world populated by tropes anyway. Bad romance novels play host to an abundance of problematic and tedious characters — the meek virgin, the reformed jerk, the conflicted step-brother. So what’s so different, so much more problematic, about writing the “kingpin” or the “reformed drug dealer”? I research some more, stop researching, and remember (smdh) oh, right: It’s the fact that the kingpins are forever and necessarily Black, whereas one is so much less likely to encounter a Black millionaire in Urban Romance world — hell, in any world. And the quality of representation matters, even in a bodice-ripper.
Of course, there are plenty of other (and for me, closer-to-home) writers of “African American Women’s Fiction,” who eschew “Hood” tropes while writing about somebody’s Black experience. The author Imani King writes about Black women ensnaring mostly white millionaires and billionaires. Nia Forrester’s multicultural protagonists range from writers to rappers to D.C.’s political elite. But these are not the titles I’ve been pointed to as I prepare to write my own novella. I’m afraid I know what kind of “Urban” is expected of me, and the idea of writing a closer-to-home story and then being told it isn’t “Urban” enough is a prospect so unpleasant that I stay the “Hood” research course.
“Love to.” That’s what I told my publisher. So I will try to write the fraught story. I will write the book that sells. I am Black, after all; I should be able to write what Amazon tells me is Black.
Folks from all sides of the railroad tracks are always trying to distill “The Black Experience,” as if we all have the same secret cultural touchstones and handshakes. So attempting to write any kind of “Black” story, even one that doesn’t qualify as a “Hood Romance,” invites a quiz of sorts: Is there a unifying quality to Blackness? Does my heritage really grant me the authority to write a “Hood” romance, even if I’ve never experienced certain writers’ idea of the “Hood” firsthand?
My editor seems to think so. But I’m starting to get that wary feeling again, so I make a mental C.V., cataloguing my qualifications to speak for and to this imagined “Urban” reader: 1) I had nappy roots, then an afro, so I know Perm Woes; 2) I take the wrongful deaths of young Black people far more personally than my white friends, whose siblings could never have been mistaken for Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown; 3) I am 80% anger below the surface, almost all of the time. Check, check, check. Okay.
Rude tally aside, one sixth-grade bully’s taunt persists in my head as I begin architecting my Blurban world: “You, Brittany, are not Black enough to do this.” For my “Black” is not Amazon’s “Urban Romance” Black, this much seems clear.
I am not Black enough to do this. “This” being a white man’s (and a massive media outlet’s) idea of what makes a sellable, “Urban” story. “This” being the art of wielding an alleged insider’s authority so I can translate a racial identity into a singular experience, and then a whole literary genre. I look at my life and decide I am not the right one to tell a story like Secrets of a Side Bitch, by Jessica Watkins. But if I’m not, who is?
I want to say that certain “Urban” titles are conflating a Black experience with problematic stereotypes, but then again: if these titles are written by Black people for a Black audience, what right does my light-skinned self have to police a narrative thousands of readers have found at least palatably realistic, and often five-star enjoyable?
Folks are always trying to distill “The Black Experience,” as if we all have the same secret cultural touchstones and handshakes.
When Black writers write “Urban” characters including strippers and kingpins, are we perpetuating a dangerous mythology or reflecting an “Urban” world for Urban readers who want those stories? I’d think a lot of these books were tone-deaf and offensive if they were written by white people, but is it possible that the authors write of a much-maligned culture for members of that culture to enjoy? Or are they too at the beck and call of an anonymous white man in Montclair, rendering their products as dubious as mine?
I decide I can’t try to mash my Blackness into a box to suit somebody else’s Urbanness. But perhaps I can find a middle ground. I’ll no longer assume the Race Card grants me full entry to the far-ranging and sometimes stressful scope of the genre. I will do the right thing and just write what I know.
I start drafting an outline — trope-adjacent, but Brittany-flecked: A Howard salutatorian in brownstone Brooklyn falls for a bad boy. T is a wrongfully imprisoned ex-con who used to work corners. I create a crew of outrageous secondary characters. I furnish chapters with jokes I think could have occured on Blackish, which for obvious reasons is one of my favorite TV shows. But then I think about how I made my Black man an ex-con, when no one overtly asked me to.
I try to picture who I’m writing toward, about, for — and no face occurs, exactly. Still, I stay the course.
In his new Netflix show Master of None, Aziz Ansari’s character, Dev, faces a similar cultural and ethical conundrum as an actor in audition rooms. Dev is an Indian guy, but a second-generation one; he doesn’t speak his parent’s native Tamil, and has never spoken English with an accent. Yet people continue to ask him to “do the accent,” often for roles that don’t require a specific cultural background. In the episode “Indians on TV,” the powers that be insist that the one-line role of “Astonished Cab Driver” be played by an Indian-with-an-accent, as if the accent is integral to the cabbie’s character. We’re left to realize that it’s unfathomable to, say, your average Law and Order viewer that an Indian cab driver wouldn’t have been born and raised in India — as if there’s no accounting for an East Asian actor unless they’re fresh off the boat. The entire Indian experience is thusly dwindled into one symbol the mob can recognize. One experience speaks for all.
Dev doesn’t “do the accent” — not because he can’t, and not because he doesn’t feel connected to people who do speak this way, but because he doesn’t think he should have to. That’s not his voice. That’s not his Indian experience. Dev’s friend Ravi, who also auditions for Astonished Cab Driver, is more pragmatic: he says he has to take work where it comes. Ravi says, hey, at least it’s something, and presumably thinks, I’ll do my darnedest. I’ll make that fraught thing sing.
“Indians on TV” was a gut-punch for me. I finished the episode feeling somehow complicit with the faceless oppressor, because I wasn’t bold like Dev; I didn’t flatly refuse to represent what I couldn’t relate to. I didn’t fight hard enough to be unique when the world, and my own warped imagination, was telling me to bend toward the symbol. Like Ravi, I try to give my portrayal depth and humor and humanity where my publisher and the maw of Amazon might only deign to see a racial identity — but still. I made my male lead an ex-con.
I do the accent.
I often do have fun while writing my Urban romance. The fun surprises me. It arrives in the language I put in my characters’ mouths, which doesn’t feel disingenuous to write. I simply let my people speak like My People, in the voices of Allens at family reunions and in their inner sanctums. My characters crack wise about things I can’t explain to white friends; my characters have divisive opinions about The Help and The Best Man movies. I ache a little realizing what I’ve been made to lose in the muddle of my obsessive, is-this-ethical inquiry: the fact that I do love being Black, and believe there is something special and worth capturing of even this broadest definition of my experience.
Perhaps one of the reasons I’ve been so loathe to take this “Urban” project on, it occurs to me, is because I fail to dwell in my own Blackness sufficiently. Perhaps I was so resistant to creating a world whose only real requirement was “it’s gotta be Black, all Black” because it was hard for me to imagine such a utopia, my writing and daily life being often (and lamentably) angled toward impressing white men.
But as soon as the manuscript is done, my demons return. I am suddenly loath to give my story away, as if once the document leaves my desktop it will become an instrument of oppression, all its good intentions and sly inside jokes warped in white-editing translation. The idea that I’ve written this book for my publisher becomes horrifying, even assuming the best-case scenario — in which my book full of empowered Urban ladies getting their grooves back is enjoyed to pieces by an Urban lady readership.
I read the novella over again, hoping to note where I was “punching up” against where I was “writing what I knew.” I waver between 50 Shades of Brown-proud and a darker, certain shame.
It’s a funny thing, to be in the position of checking one’s privilege when history and personal experience have largely conspired to tell you there isn’t much to check. But I’ll say it: in one sense I’m a privileged Black lady. I wasn’t raised in anyone’s idea of a ghetto, and I probably shouldn’t be writing stories as if I have any idea what that’s like. When words tumble out of my own head, they tend not to include fraternally meant n-bombs.
But, media, make no mistake: I am still Black. I want to create thoughtful work about being Black, as I experience it. I specifically want to do this for the girls like me, who were nine and ten and eleven and seeing their own faces nowhere in books, magazines, or movies. Girls like me grew up not-quite-knowing why we were different from others, but every now and then, we’d get told. We’d get knocked down a level, with cold, quick remarks in classrooms and job interviews, at parties, on dates. The perfect retorts to those micro- and macro-aggressions occur to us now only in the dead of night, years later; they wake us and fill us with sharp, righteous anger, anger doubled by the fact that in not speaking out when we were first offended, we tacitly accepted the system that is forever diminishing us.
Girls like me grew up not-quite-knowing why we were different from others, but every now and then, we’d get told. We’d get knocked down a level, with cold, quick remarks in classrooms and job interviews, at parties, on dates.
But girls like me also learned early that to get by in this world, one must mold and flex with the tide of other people’s expectations. Sometimes you “do the accent” because you believe you should be able to — but more often you “do the accent” because you figure, this is how the world sees me anyway.
On Amazon, and in real bookstores, there are sub-genres for Fiction — like “African American Literary Fiction” and “Jewish Fiction” and “Women’s Fiction” — though I’ve yet to meet a writer, literary or commercial, who enjoys being bundled into one category. No one really wants to write to and about one type of person; people want to write about people, to make other people feel like people. A genre that is defined around a particular audience breeds the “idea of the ghetto,” the “idea of the kingpin,” as opposed to creating someone alive, someone precise. To write to perceived type is to pay lip service to the institutional prejudice that keeps minorities exactly where the groups in power expect them to stay.
And while I would never presume to know what Mz Lady P’s thought process is when she’s writing her books, books that may strike me as type-y (though more power to her, either way), I know I am not her. She is not me. We won’t be writing the same stories, even if we happen to share the same skin color. And that’s a good thing.
I now know what I don’t want, in my writing — to tolerate any more holes in a reader’s imagination, or a marketing team’s. Like Dev, I don’t want to “do the accent.” I think it’s possible to write a commercial story that transcends tropes and the binding language of categories. I don’t want to write “Urban” — not because Urban doesn’t exist; not because people I love and feel connected to don’t occupy that world, those pages; but because that loaded term itself isn’t quite me, and I’ve decided it’s disingenuous of me to participate in the “idea” of my own culture.
I will stay on the lookout for better words. I will keep writing for those little girls, and about those little girls, when they’re in love. But I won’t market their stories as “Urban.” Even if they do happen to live in a city.
I work at a children’s publishing house as a (very) junior editor, and the /vast/ majority of stories with POC (Protagonists of Color) fall into very defined, very trope-y “types” of characters and stories and I just…never know how to speak up or ask for more or for different representations of kids that look like me, things that are closer to home and my own experiences.
I feel like a shlub for asking but….oh God, this is kind of embarrassing…would you be interested in reviewing a 4-6 year old picture book story for your publishing house? Our very own Nicole Cliffe seemed to not mind it! If not, no worries, I totally understand!
Hey! I am…not at the point of acquiring any of my own manuscripts, but i’d be glad to give you notes?
Whenever people talk about how we live in a post-racial world and racism is over I want to say “Great! please show me the ‘Caucasian interest’ shelf at Barnes & Noble.” Also to kick them in the shins.
Thank you for this. I can agree with so much of it, though it’s been a long time since I considered myself any kind of writer.
AHHH, this! I cackle-groaned at this: “I am Black, after all; I should be able to write what Amazon tells me is Black.”
When I was at RWA 2015, romance writer Phyllis Bourne talked about how she was told her writing wasn’t black enough. The mind just boggles!
Also, a reviewer once noted I didn’t talk about race enough in one of my books. To be fair, it was a mild side comment BUT still, I was like, how much should one talk about it? 15%? 20%?
For that matter, how does one know when I’m NOT writing about race, hmmmm?
(OK, I will stop replying to myself.)
17.5%, or if the service was especially good, 20%.
Oh, wait, a book isn’t dinner, not even a yummy one like yours. I’m not flabbergasted so much as I am saddened. No one’s likely to ever calculate the percentage of race talk in my books – I’m more likely to be praised for including non-white & non-cis characters, presented without comment, because hey, what an enlightened white writer I am. I see the people around me! I notice they’re not all white! Amazing. (Note: I’m not actually praised for this, though some reviews have mentioned the ‘real’ feel of the world, which I assume is to do with the lack of billionaires and the implied diversity.)
I growl at the world for expecting you & Brittany (et al) to include race math as you tell your stories.
“I want to say that certain “Urban” titles are conflating a Black experience with problematic stereotypes, but then again: if these titles are written by Black people for a Black audience, what right does my light-skinned self have to police a narrative thousands of readers have found at least palatably realistic, and often five-star enjoyable?”
I ask this question All. The. Time. I have no answers either. As a publisher ultimately chasing a dollar (and a burning hope to converge dollar with quality work, or allocate a dollar to something substantive), at some point, what do you do when things that *feel* problematic are receiving 5 stars & selling well? What’s the moral responsibility there? It’s like, I don’t *want* to publish Rush Limbaugh’s childrens books, but they sell unfathomably well, and that money gets pooled into publishing something beautiful & award-winning (that drives publishers into debt because it doesn’t sell at all but feels like the right thing to do, tbh). I had a hard time sleeping at night when my job required that of me. And it was strange to be in meetings and have higher-ups respond to literally any potentially problematic idea–from literally all sides of the aisle–with “If there’s a marketplace, we’ll publish it.” I very much so struggle with that devotion to capitalism, be it right wing radioers or simplistic genre fiction tropes.
So is it being published? I realize that that is beside the point of the article but I really want to read this: ” I simply let my people speak like My People, in the voices of Allens at family reunions and in their inner sanctums. My characters crack wise about things I can’t explain to white friends; my characters have divisive opinions about The Help and The Best Man movies.” That sounds fantastic and, extrapolating from this article, excellently written.
Also, in re “genre fiction”, I’ve found that it helps to have a mental category called White Men Navel-gazing and to be really ruthless about using it.
Agreed, I’d love to read this!
Tiger Beatdown’s “Fond Memories of Vagina” is also an invaluable literary category.
Thanks for writing this – so thoughtful and thought provoking.
(side note – I really enjoy all of the romance coverage on The Toast, especially from authors of color)
This is such a good essay, and such a difficult quandary. To simply “write what you know” isn’t allowed to PoC writers, and often isn’t allowed when writing about PoC in general. It has to fit what everyone agrees is the exact correct shade of color, which is, necessarily, a stereotype.
Amazing piece, already one of the best of 2016 for me.
I work in publishing, and particularly with ebooks, we live and die by classification/keywords. In the best of worlds, this is how readers find the types of books they are looking for. “Urban” is usually lazy shorthand for black. BUT it is also how readers who want stories about black characters find them. (Notably and hugely problematically, some bookstores keep their most popular Urban Romance titles behind the cash registers for “loss prevention.” Smh.)
Interestingly, the Book Industry Study Group, which sets industry standards about classifying books has three codes that include the word “urban”: Fiction/Urban, Fiction/African American/Urban, and Fiction/Fantasy/Urban (which is a different literary beast entirely). Interesting to note that no romance categories are tagged as “Urban.”
There IS a category Fiction/Romance/African American, and several other fiction categories that are classified specifically as African American (Fiction/African American/General, Fiction/African American/Christian, Fiction/African American/Contemporary Women, Fiction/African American/Erotica, Fiction/African American/Historical, Fiction/African American/Mystery & Detective).
Just some food for thought. Would be interesting to see what BISAC categories were assigned to her books.
(Notably and hugely problematically, some bookstores keep their most popular Urban Romance titles behind the cash registers for “loss prevention.” Smh.) ahhhaha what. yikes
this post inspired me to look up the bisac categories for fiction — which I’ve never used, as I work in non-fiction. I found it interesting that there is FICTION / African American / Erotica but no FICTION / Erotica / African American. Also that there’s FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths but no similar category for male sleuths (I guess that is FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General.) Perhaps someone who is more of a metadata nerd than I am can weigh in on this.
I do love that the follow category exists:
FIC047000 FICTION / Sea Stories
“Women Sleuths” probably exists because cozy mysteries typically have female protagonists. Also because MaLe pRiViLeGe (i.e. regular ol’ Mystery & Detective titles usually feature dudez, so they don’t find it necessary to specify that it these are penis-having sleuths?).
(Obligatory reminder that man =/= penis-having and penis-having =/= man).
Are BISAC codes changing soon / been recently changed? I saw something on a message loop a few weeks ago but I don’t remember exactly what – something that affects romance, anyway.
Amazon keywords for KDP (self-publishing) suggests using ‘interracial’ and/or ‘multicultural’ in romance, and ‘interracial’ and/or ‘urban’ in erotica – those are their current categories (in addition to vampires, highlanders, triangles, western, mystery, etc.)
Thank you so much for this. As a biracial writer who doesn’t always look / sound like a recognizable stereotype, I have struggled with “participating in the idea of my culture” so much, both in my writing and in my own self-presentation. I’ve always felt like I don’t have the right to represent this culture when other people’s experiences may have been more authentic than mine, whatever that means. It helps to know that writers like you are grappling with this representation of race / culture as monoliths and finding ways to portray your own experience, whether or not it fits into or breaks from white stereotypes of how that experience should be.
I just want to say, you write some wonderful, evocative prose.
Thank you for writing this. So many of the ideas resonated a lot with me, and I’m so grateful that you were able to make these words sing.
But… but… I thought “urban” just meant that when the elves show up they ride motorcycles and the Master Vampire of The City wears sexy tailored suits?!
Oh wait. Wrong set of tropes. My bad.
(Slinks off to nerd cave in Shame.)
But seriously. Using “Urban” as a euphemism for “African American” is some serious bullshit.
but it begs the question, where are all the black elves in urban fantasy? ( but seriously, do y’all have any reccs for diverse urban fantasy?)
Nalini Singh, Marjorie Liu, Shelly Laurenston and Alisha Rai all write diverse UF/PNR. No elves that I can remember, but lots of shape shifters and some other mythical creatures.
Charles De Lint’s Newford series is somewhat racially diverse (iirc)
If you like steampunk, Meljean Brook’s Iron Seas series is pretty diverse. And Jeannie Lin has a steampunk series set during the Opium Wars (that I haven’t read yet but it’s gotten good reviews).
Alyssa Cole has a dystopian series that I also haven’t read yet.
Amelia Gormley’s Strain series is not for everyone (post-zombie-apocalypse fuck or die m/m with a lot of dub-con sex and surprisingly good world building) but it is racially diverse.
Apparently I was just hanging out in my nerd cave, waiting for someone to ask me this. Now I’m going to be thinking about black elves all day – the closest I can get is the Pooka that the_other_Kate mentioned, and that bothers me.
I forgot, I need to go read more Jeannie Lin – I read the first of that Opium Wars series & liked it a good deal.
Thea Harrison has some black elves in her Elder Races books, doesn’t she? She’s white herself, but I remember her world as being somewhat diverse.
I haven’t read Thea Harrison yet. One more to add to the list.
I’ve only read Jeannie Lin’s historicals, but I really enjoyed them. I’m looking forward to the steampunk.
SHADOWSHAPER. I’m still reading but <3 <3 <3
IIRC the new Bordertown collection (YA, edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner) has some POC protags. I don’t remember many details though sadly, I read it quite a while ago.
It is interesting that “urban fantasy” doesn’t really imply black characters at all.
No implication, but there are probably more PoC than in the average fantasy novel. My current purse book is Jim Hines’ Codex Born. This discussion made me realize that of half a dozen characters introduced,so far, one is a half-Nigerian teen, one is a brown-skinned dryad, and one has a Sikh name (no accent). The werewolves, the magician and the wendigo all seem to be white.
I’m a white lady who doesn’t read romance novels, and there is SO MUCH in here I never have to think about, and I LOVED reading it. You write beautifully and thoughtfully.
It’s sometimes an audition euphemism, for sure. “Can we hear it a little more urban?”, I guess because they’ve learned you can’t say “hood” or “ghetto”… You can be all “hey I went to Horace Mann, I went to CUNY” but that isn’t urban enough apparently.
Great article, Brittany. This: To write to perceived type is to pay lip service to the institutional prejudice that keeps minorities exactly where the groups in power expect them to stay. – I see this so much lately, this idea of separate but equal, with those in power patting themselves on the back, lauding their segregation. Pointing to the nice little corner where diverse voices are allowed to exist, so long as they stay in their niches. Or, hey, if you don’t like your niche, you can write about shifters or aliens, because then the (mainly white women, or so the reports still tell us) mainstream romance readers won’t be discomfited.
I’m such a grump about it all. Or a self-pub banner-waver, though even there you still have to fit within Amazon’s keywords or their algorithms won’t let you be visible to the readers I’m positive are out there who would love to read a story about the people who you choose write about.
>> I ache a little realizing what I’ve been made to lose in the muddle of my obsessive, is-this-ethical inquiry: the fact that I do love being Black, and believe there is something special and worth capturing of even this broadest definition of my experience.
I love this line. Thank you for this.
I struggle with the sexual and racial politics of writing romance. I have done pretty well “writing to market” aka hitting the tropes, but is it really cool that I am writing about naive virgins falling for emotionally available billionaires? That all my characters are white? I want to write lead characters of color but then my book won’t fit neatly into the billionaire nich or the rock star niche. It will have to appeal to the “inter racial” audience. And good luck finding a stock photo that fits. Is it better to make a side character a POC or is that wirse? I, and a lot of other writers I know, would love to write an Asian hero but readers respond that Asian men aren’t sexy.
It’s tough to decide between chasing the dollar and doing what feels right. We all have to draw the line somewhere. For me, that’s 100% consensual sex every time (enthusiastic consenst and or agreed upon safeword), a heroine who finds any of the hero’s possesive traits annoying rather than sexy, a hero who supports the heroine’s ambitions, safe sex, and never ever any abortion shaming.
It really does suck that my subgenres are all white all the time, and that I’m too much slave to the dollar (I want to buy a house, dammit) to be willing to challenge it.
Thanks for reminding me why I never pay for romance fiction and just stick to fanfic.
Romances I want to read are too difficult to find most of the time. Fanfics are tagged really, really well most of the time.
Totally off topic, but why are there so many automobile mechanics in Urban Fantasy?
Back when this phenomenon really started and these books were mostly available in street corner bookstands and beauty parlors in New York, a local paper did an expose and revealed that the two most popular authors were white ladies from New Jersey.
I remember being wildly unsurprised.
Courage takes many forms and every person defines honor for his or herself. More power to you in your search for balance.
Great article. The word urban fiction has been problematic for me. I’ve only written one romance short story. All of my other stories focus on hoaxes, deception, and scandal. I don’t make direct references to my characters’ color or ethnicity since my stories are a mirror of the world, and I want my readers to identify with those characters. Trying to pick a genre for my stories has been a challenge. I have never been one to pigeonhole myself. Recently, I changed the category for one of my stories from fiction/erotica to urban crime. Time will tell if this will attract more readers. But you continue to write the stories your way and don’t allow anyone to categorize your work. Continued success in your works.
Despite all our efforts to write good books regardless of genre, tropes, and themes, the industry will always lump us all into the same categories, simply because we are black authors. This disheartens me in many ways, but then it is the reason I write exactly whatever the hell I want. Damn the establishment!
Despite all our efforts to write good books regardless of genre, tropes, and themes, the industry will always lump us all into the same categories, simply because we are black authors. This disheartens me in many ways, but then it is the reason I write exactly whatever the hell I want. Damn the establishment!
It's a legal, masculine coded working class job most people have heard of that still makes decent money.
Not saying female auto mechanics aren't rampant in urban fantasy, but a lot of Urban Fantasy Heroines are Tomboys who are Not Like the Other Girls and Not Fussy or Prissy as their main characterization. So their job is male coded to show that.