The border between m/m romance novels and m/m literature more generally isn’t always clear, and oddly enough I stumbled over a few m/m romance titles while looking at m/m lit on Amazon.com. One of them intrigued me, so I put it on my Christmas list. It certainly wasn’t great literature, and in places it wasn’t even that well written, but it amused me. There was something about reading love stories that involved my kind of people (okay, not too close to my kind of people because the story in question was a “paranormal” romance dealing with gay werewolves) that appealed to me. Whatever artistic problems the book had, it also had likeable characters and enough tension to keep me turning pages.

After that, I found a few more titles, some that were great stories and some that were complete and utter crap. I hesitate to use the word addictive, but there was certainly something compelling about reading stories—all kinds of stories—about normal, happy, and healthy gay men in loving committed relationships. There are no Boys in the Band in m/m Romancelandia, no doomed queens tragically ending their lives. Sometimes the guys in these stories have to earn their happily ever after, but they get one. It’s a convention of the genre, so much so that my publisher brought out a special line because let’s be honest, sometimes (often?) love doesn’t work out.

I took one thing from the horrible books, however, and that was the conviction that if that were all the higher the bar was, I could do that. I’ve been a writer pretty much my entire life, with some non-fiction credits to my name, only one or two things I was particularly proud of. I’ve got a number of novels “in the trunk,” as they say, things that need help or that just aren’t—quite—right for one reason or another. So while Rocking the Boat is my first published novel, it’s not my first novel by a long shot. Some of those may seen the light of day, but most probably shouldn’t without considerable reworking. But I learned a lot as a writer while reading m/m romances, things that will make their way into virtually anything else I write.

I chose rowing as the backdrop for my own first contribution to the genre because they say write about what you know, and I’ve been rowing on the masters level for eleven years at this point. My club shares water with a collegiate crew, too. It’s a great place to row, really.

Then I discovered something about this genre that still puzzles me. Approximately three quarters of the authors are women, although this is changing as gay men discover it. Likewise, the majority of the readers are heterosexual women who for whatever reason like reading about boy on boy action. Believe it or not, this has caused some controversy about whether or not heterosexuals trying to appropriate the gay experience. Personally, I don’t care about the gender of the mind that produced the story so long as it’s a good read and gets the details about being gay right.

In any event, Rocking the Boat was released at the end of February of this year, and seems to be selling well enough, whether to women or to gay men. The follow-up, Tipping the Balance, is just about ready for submission to Dreamspinner Press, and I’ll update my various blogs when I have a release date for it. In the mean time, there’s writing and rowing.