u/lilithskies

How did you choose yours, and is there any story or strategy behind it?

Let's talk about it!

I'll go first. I thought about a woman crying on Halloween, and what type of super natural entity that could introduce her to ... in a sexy way of course.

Well, it's the elephant in the room right now. I want to open the floor for us to all share our predictions, apprehensions, rants, and other thoughts on AI and it's potential impact on romance writing.

It's a fine line for creatives of all disciplines. It's always a topic of discussion, so let's discuss it.

What's working for you?

Well the title is pretty self explanatory. Let's talk about the challenges that come with writing.

Let's talk about main male character height some more.

As we all know, love interests over 6 feet are all of the rage. I'd like, no love, to know how much that matters to you as a reader, and if it matters at all.

Please, share where you land on shorter male love interests and whether height changes the fantasy for you.

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This is a spin-off of last week's thread: Are Short King MMCs Unpopular, or Does Romance Just Refuse to Give Us Any? (Part 1)

Comments that summed up the spectrum of feed-back:

>The rizz required to be a short king is almost impossible to write. You can’t be a brooding doofus as a short king. Short kings operate on a level of hyper-competence that even women have not yet achieved. Tall mmc/bad rizz has a direct correlation (goofball charm) but short mmc/bad rizz will get you blacklisted from publishing

u/mossymeridian

>I don’t think it’s that complicated. Society has considered height a marker of male attractiveness for a long time. It spans cultures and centuries.But I appreciate the authors who can write a hot short king!

u/LaMaltaKano

>There are a lot of short male characters in fiction that are very popular with women, like Levi from attack on Titan, so I am going to say it’s an induced demand thing.

u/volvavirago

>Not anything. A man can be a 2-dicked purple dragon-shifter who's 5000 years old but doesn't know what a kiss is, but he can't be unmasculine, unless it's MM and and only in the role of the audience self-insert, not the love interest.

u/Synval2436

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If you are publishing or building an audience on Inkitt, Royal Road, or Wattpad, how is it going for you? I’d love to hear about your reach, reader engagement, discoverability, monetization, and overall experience.

Romance loves a tall, possibly giant, MMC. It's a running joke in communities like r/romantasycirclejerk

So I want to hear it from this community why you think Short Kings make infrequent apperances in the genre ... where just about anything goes ...

Do you think it comes down to:

✨Reader's preferences ?

✨Authors assuming all readers prefer tall MMCs?

✨Publishing and market trends?

✨ Romance genre tradition

✨ Societies ever present ideas about masculinity and attractiveness?

✨Or something else ?

Let's Discuss & Dissect Short Kings in Romance novels 🗣️🗣️🗣️

Some writers publish in multiple sub-genres while others max out in one. Do any of you publish in more than one?

Romance writers come to the front.

What's your favorite romance sub genre to publish/write in?

As many of you know, F/M romance will let the MMC be almost anything. A vampire king. A fae warlord who massacred a million people. A garden-variety rapist vigilante. A stalker. A billionaire who loves violence. A problematic hockey star. A possessive monster. A man who threatens to burn the world down.

No matter what he does, the narrative will usually find a way to justify, romanticize, or work around his behavior and flaws. So why can’t the same imaginative grace be extended to the female main characters of romance?

This is one of the things that consistently gives me the ick about romance: the sheer imbalance in character variety. Somehow, even in a genre built around limitless fantasy, it is still the women who are expected to behave.

Some specific gripes I have about FMCs in romance:

• No Morally gray or genuinely morally black FMCs
• She can want power, but usually only for a noble or feminine-coded reason (i.e. save the children instead of revenge)
• She can enjoy sex, but the MMC often has to be the first, the best, the only one who makes her feel this way, or the person who finally unlocks her sexuality.
• She is still expected to pass the basic “good girl” test: nurturing, forgiving, relatable, morally better than the man she loves, and often ultimately interested in motherhood or conventional relationship goals.

It's tragic for the genre as a whole we can't have any range because even in fiction women fantasize about being well-behaved & validated by patriarchal standards for feminine existence.

If you had to guess between these two groups of women, who do you think is shaping majority of the trends, narratives, characters, heroes, heroines, power dynamics, and HEAs, that dominate in romance?

Girls, Gays & Theys of culture. We meet again.

I am musing this morning on what you'd want to see more of in Monster Romance. I am just nosy.

Personally, more multiple love interests, more series like Ice Planet Barbarians but with better writing, less first person POV overall

Writing can be full of surprises even after planning everything out. Did any of you have this happen? I've started off with one vision for my couples but things turned out completely different as the story went on ....

Sometimes an entire story starts with one scene you cannot stop thinking about. What was the scene that made you realize that you needed to write a whole scene around it?

Women are the majority of romance consumers. If an imaginary nefarious group wanted to popularize or normalize certain ideas to women wouldn't romance be the perfect place for that?

Dark romance/DR, and trad wife themed stories are the two genres I have seen people theorize about. They are the easiest target.

What do you think?

I am on the fence with how I feel about with connects.

Is it strategic to outbid everyone so you're at the top?

It all starts to feel a bit scammy to me considering the factors that go into bidding on jobs. I know that people do hire you, but at what cost? Depending on the frequency of applications the dollar amount for connects starts to add up.

I'd love to hear people who get hired on upwork consistently and their perspective on it.