Some UnHinged Reflections on Romance
I know I promised to write about the agent crisis last week. And I will! I will. Later. Because, home at last, it’s been all hands on deck to keep up with work, the edits for said agent crisis, and prepping for another trip. So instead I offer this blog two things from this week I keep revisiting because they make me laugh.
So while at the conference, I took place in a critique group for the first 10 pages of a manuscript. Let this be a preamble to the agent saga, as what I chose to submit reveals my mental state at the time. Did I send in the already written synopsis and 10 pages of my completed Cinderella manuscript? No. No, I planned on that one gathering dust on a shelf for a year yet.
Instead, I coughed up the first 8 pages (not even 10, but I only had two weeks to write something!) and no synopsis of a new urban fantasy idea. I knew my first lines were so-so, but I want you to guess where the editor camped.
If I’d gone in to file a police report, what was I to say? Yes, that’s me. Twenty-eight-year-old addict, with half a job, compromised magic and only three cats to soften her spinsterhood. Yes, and I think I witnessed the most high-profile murder of the year last week.
“Spinster at twenty-eight?” the editor asks, and looks at me with a concerned pinch between his brows.
Genuinely, it takes me a minute to realise why these details bother him. And why the silence in the room smacks of awkward pity as much as concern.
Then I realise every person in this room has 20 years on me at least. I probably look like the babiest of babies in the wake of their wisdom. Like the high schooler who despairs at love because no one has asked them to prom. Because they think I’m writing about ME.
Like I’d spell out my own biological clock and love angst in the FIRST LINE of my novel. I mean, give me some credit. I wait until at least chapter 3. (No fact checks, please).
Worse, I know nothing of the marital status of these critique partners (as it should be), but suddenly I worry that I somehow managed to offend everyone twice over: insulting both age and love life in a pair of clauses I meant to be entirely separate.
“Oh,” I say, quickly (too quickly?). “It has nothing to do with age.”
His look is dubious. Everyone else is dead silent.
I hurry on. “No, I mean, spinsterhood is a bureaucratic status you file for in court.” I say in that irrefutable voice fantasy authors use when questioned. I build worlds, it says, what do you mean eight moons are confusing?
I botch my way through explaining a society where mage families need x many political marriages per generation for good mage genes. And how our FL doesn’t think she should propagate with her drug problems. And, as being a soul mage make casual sex off limits (the silence in the group is wide eyed now), she decides to takes herself out of the marriage gauntlet entirely by declaring herself off limits and single. A spinster. Forever.
The only other fantasy author in this group writes time-jump historical. I realise to a contemp romance crowd I must be stark mad, so I finish it all off with a laugh.
Señor Editor’s smile remains a little pinched, maybe amused, maybe puzzled? Hopefully not disturbed. “Oh. In that case. I mean as long as there is a reason—“
He cuts himself off. And he is probably too kind to even think this, but I hear in the wake of the way he clears his throat ‘a reason beyond your own marital status’.
Indeed I do, sir. I promise. I mean yes, you sit down at the typewriter and bleed. But I have more blood in me at 25 than fear of spinsterhood. I think?
I’ve revisited this conversation multiple times since, and remain anthropologially amused. So I thought I’d share.
In other not-spinster news, my jet lag brain had me all worked up last night. My next trip is to Ukraine, and I’m chatting with a guy from the US Navy. (Please, Lord, tell me no one I meet on Hinge ever reads this). So he asks me my whereabouts in Ukraine, and I realise he might know more of what I’m getting into than I do. I’m intrigued, as I don’t know a lot of people with whom to discuss the war, but tell myself I’ll respond in the morning. It was late, and I lose my filter after midnight.
But then, laying there, with a maybe-too-late coffee in a body convinced we’re still in Denver, watching the fan spin overhead, I am suddenly gripped with one of those future scenarios that feel harrowing and inevitable at this hour of the night. That writer’s brain glitch hitting play on an absurd narrative that has no pause button.
Here it is: something will happen while I’m visiting Ukraine this week. And—this is how you know this thought is wildly selfish, out of proportion and irrational—it’s not the state of the war I am worried about, or even the safety of my friends, my team, or my little self. It’s that I’m convinced somehow this Navy ship is going to float its way to central Ukraine and I’m going to run into Mr Hinge THERE and have to say hi or something while I’m shot or running from whatever else occurs to my imagination, and I mean what would I even say?
Let this be quoted when people ask what is wrong with my generation. Watching the fan spin in the wee hours of the morning and contemplating a war zone, it is social anxiety about an implausible scenario with someone I don’t know well enough to care about that has me sweating bullets. Not fear of death or anger at the injustice of war or even a sanctified indifference. Just how to flirt on the fly
Yikes. I do promise my morals recover a sense of perspective in the morning.
To make matters worse, this scenario is feeding another irrational 3am fear I have.
A few months ago, I realised two guys I was messaging would consistently go dark at the same time. Navy lads. At sea. At the same time. Two from the same ship!? Hinge, why was there not a warning label??
Maybe one day I’ll share this whole debacle on here, but for now all you need to know is I have thenceforth lived by speaking to only 1 Army, 1 Navy, and 1 Airforce guy at once. Screw the skewed population of English speakers at US bases in Southern Spain! On which note, have I mentioned I am kind of anti-gun and a pacifist, so our romance might be doomed before its dawn? Sigh. So, dear Conference Critique Group, I promise my attempts at a love life are even more botched than you’d first think.
Anyway, returning to my 3 am spirals. I have since been weirdly convinced I’ll meet both these fellows at once which will inevitably short-circuit the few flirty social skills I have and somehow endanger national security in the process.
But now, this old spiral + jet lag + this innocent Navy chap’s queries about my travel plans have all collided.
Last night, I was lost in a Hinge triangle (it’s the don’t-really-know-you-but-we-met-in-a-dating-context sort of triangle) with two Navy lads and, making a rogue appearance, the Airforce guy from last year, all running from ultimate evil in a war zone while I try to keep up on the play therapy my team is bringing me out for in the first place!
Finally realising the Cliffs of Insanity are unscalable at this hour, I decide to put myself out of my misery and just respond to the blasted Hinge text from this poor guy in the first place. Nevermind that lack of sleep impairs the prefrontal cortex as much as three shots of tequila and I‘ll inevitably overshare.
Well, I ramble as I feared I would. Drop a cuss word and feel out his religious affiliations. Then apologise more than once for both. I just count my blessings that I didn’t mention politics, pacifism, or our potential four-cornered love triangle in a war zone. I just decide to post it online instead?
Hm.
The Jetlag Cliffs of Insanity
Conclusions from this probably still jet lagged ramble:
The S word (spinterhood shhh) retains its social poison. I can feministly rage about this later, but will wait for the sake of the world until I have more sleep.
I will switch spinsterhood to celibacy in the urban fantasy idea. Nothing like some religious sexual language to open a novel. Hopefully it will seem less like I am connecting her age and marital status. Or, more importantly, my age and marital status.
After a embarrassing fact check, I will move the writing-as-therapy Hinge reference in the urban fantasy to chapter 3. MagesMatched.com shows too much of me too soon.
Find me some military suspense authors. I demand a story involving Hinge and a war, please. I don’t want to live it, and loathe love triangles with all of my being (hence the 3am nightmares), but wow would I pay to read that.
wait Maybe I should write about a love triangle from MagesMatched.com who chat online but meet in a war zone? 0.0
Avoid all Navy ships for the foreseeable future. It’s skewing my plotting methods.
Mercifully, this is the end. At the least until my next visit to the 3am palace of implausible but terrifyingly shallow scenarios.
