books – thestationhousenotebook

Frightful Weather, Small Consolations, and Amazon Being a Dragon

The weather today was, in a word, awful.

In more words: the rain was insistent and relentless and entirely without charm, the kind of rain that doesn’t have the decency to be dramatic about it and just settles in with its bags unpacked and its feet up, prepared to stay indefinitely. There was nothing delightful about any of it and I say that as someone who does not, in principle, object to rain. This was not rain you could enjoy from a window with a cup of tea. This was rain that was making a point.

I had to go to town anyway because groceries do not materialise simply because the weather is demoralising, and the drive was exactly as hairy as the sky promised it would be. I made it there. I made it back. The house was rewarded for this act of meteorological bravery with Subway for dinner, which is not nothing. Some days the consolation prize is genuinely consoling.

The cross stitch subscription box arrived, which is exciting and being treated accordingly — which is to say it’s sitting there looking full of potential while I decide the right moment to open it properly. These things deserve the right moment. I’ll know it when I find it.

In the meantime I have been making a colouring book.

This is for the Meandering Book Nook — the wandering bookshop project, for those just joining us — and I’m not entirely sure yet whether it will become a regular fixture or whether it will remain an occasional thing. My instinct says occasional themed colouring books are probably going to be a permanent feature of the Nook’s life, because they feel right in a way that is difficult to articulate but easy to act on. We’ll see how the first one lands and go from there.

And then there is the other thing.

I would like to report that Isolated is out in the world and Bella Bruce’s author page is live and everything is proceeding beautifully on the hockey romance front. I would very much like to report that. Unfortunately what I am actually reporting is that Amazon has decided to be an absolute bitch about the whole thing and is currently sitting on both the book approval and the author page like a very bureaucratic dragon on a very unhelpful pile of gold.

I don’t have details beyond that. There are no details beyond that. There is just the waiting and the refreshing and the particular helpless frustration of having done everything right and then handed the whole thing to a platform that operates on its own timeline and its own logic and does not particularly care about your release schedule or your nerves or the fifteen years you have been carrying these characters around in your heart.

Bella is stalled. Her boys are waiting. There is nothing to do about it right now except wait.

So I am doing what writers do when one door slams shut on them: I am wandering through the other rooms. There are other projects. There are always other projects when you have three pen names and approximately a hundred books in various states of completion, and right now that particular abundance is genuinely a comfort. Something is always moving forward even when something else is stuck.

It is not the forward motion I wanted today.

But it is forward motion, and I am choosing to count it. Amazon will sort itself out. Or it won’t and I’ll have to go a few rounds with it, which is a battle I will fight when I get there. For now — other projects, more tea, a colouring book taking shape on the table, and a cross stitch box waiting for its moment.

And the cats, who are blissfully unbothered by publishing platforms and have, as ever, the right idea.

🖤 🏒

The Night Before

Today was slow in the way that days are slow when your brain is running at approximately four hundred kilometres an hour underneath the surface of everything. Outwardly: not much. Inwardly: a complete disaster, but a functional one.

I cannot decide if I am proud or terrified. Both, I think. Mostly both, simultaneously, with no clear winner.

Here is the thing that is sitting with me tonight. I come from fanfic. A long history in fanfic, years of it, and if you know that world then you know exactly what I mean when I say that fanfic readers are ruthless. Not all of them, and not without reason — they care deeply and they know their subjects and they will find the thing you got wrong at two in the morning on a Tuesday and they will have feelings about it in the comments. I have been on the receiving end of that particular flavour of feedback and it leaves a mark.

And now I am putting original work into a world that contains those same readers, and every instinct I have developed over years of that experience is quietly losing its mind.

I have been juggling these boys in words since 2018. I have done everything I can short of actually living their lives for them. I have researched and rewritten and edited and refined and had the whole thing pulled apart and put back together, and I still lie awake wondering if there is something I’ve missed, something someone will find, something that will give anyone a reason to drop negativity on my babies.

I know, logically, that I cannot control that. I know it. The logic is right there, very clear, completely accessible, and absolutely no comfort whatsoever.

But. The websites are functional. Not perfect — I want to be transparent about the not perfect — but functional, which is considerably better than where we were forty-eight hours ago. The newsletter welcome chains for both currently publishing authors are finished and in place. The things that needed doing got done, even on a slow day, even while quietly freaking out.

Tomorrow it goes into the wild.

I’m going to stop chewing my nails now. Or try. We’ll see how that goes.

No Big Adventures Today

This morning looked promising. I want to be clear about that — I woke up with genuine optimism and a list and everything. The day had other ideas, as days around here tend to, and by the time I’d finished my first cup of tea the showers were already building on the horizon with that particular Tasmanian determination that means they’re not going anywhere in a hurry.

So. Inside day it is.

The Pusheen situation continues to develop in unexpected ways. Miss Hopalong, having apparently decided that possession is nine tenths of the law, has dug in with a commitment that I find frankly impressive. She has abandoned her spot by the fire — which, if you know cats, you will understand is not a sacrifice made lightly — purely to maintain territorial control of the Pusheen. Pretty is presumably circling. Hopalong is unmoved. The fire burns unoccupied. Some battles are worth the cost.

My plan for today was websites. Both of them, ideally, with enough momentum to make a meaningful dent in the approximately seventeen things that need doing before launch. What actually happened was that a small ginger braincell attached himself to my dominant arm with the quiet certainty of someone who has made a decision and will not be revisited on the matter, and so I adapted (because he was Mumu’s brother and he’s grieving), as one does, and spent the time performing the last edit run on Isolated instead.

Which means the hockey romance may be done sooner than expected. Which means breathing space before the marketing push on the military romance. Which is, genuinely, good news.

And yet. Marketing.

I knew writing was work. I have always known writing was work — I have the manuscripts and the late nights and the four-in-the-morning rewrites to prove it. What I did not fully appreciate, and what is becoming clearer to me with every passing day, is that the writing is actually the easy part. The writing is the part I know how to do. The marketing is a learning curve that appears, from where I’m standing, to extend well beyond the visible horizon in both directions.

There is also the small mystery of why one of my author blogs does not appear to be picking up subscribers the way the other one is. My sister’s theory is that hockey romance is simply the flavour of the month and that explains the discrepancy entirely, and she may well be right. But I have that nagging feeling, the one that sits just behind your sternum and won’t be argued with, that I am doing something wrong and I haven’t identified it yet. I’m not going to catastrophise about it. I’m just going to quietly suspect myself until I figure it out.

Tomorrow. Websites. Possibly.

🖤 🏒

The Day the Wheels Fell Off (And Hopalong Asked Nicely)

I had a plan for today. A proper, colour-coded, very-adult plan. Blog content, scheduled posts, maybe even a newsletter draft if I was feeling ambitious.

Reader, none of that happened.

Instead, I am writing to you from the middle of what I can only describe as domestic chaos theatre, surrounded by furniture that has migrated to the centre of every room like some kind of indoor Stonehenge, waiting for an electrician who — bless him, he’s busy, it’s not his fault — won’t be able to get back to us until next week. So here we all are. Me, the cats, the cousin, Jo, and approximately four hundred kilograms of displaced furniture, just… existing together in the middle of the floor.

Jo, for her part, would like to burn it all down and start again. This is not an exaggeration. Jo has a very particular relationship with order and tidiness, and what is currently happening to her living environment is the stuff of her personal nightmares. She is coping. Barely. With the energy of someone who is very pointedly not looking at the corner where three chairs and a bookshelf are having an impromptu meeting.

The internet has been up and down for two days. Seriously, more up and down action than a cheap hookers knickers at happy hour. Two days! I will not tell you what I have been calling my hardware situation in the privacy of my own head, but let’s just say it rhymes with “Turdy McTurd Pants” and leave it at that. The connection has been spottier than a chocoholic teenager’s face, which has been a particular adventure given that we have a houseguest electrician. I’ll be honest — I was bracing for the cousin to struggle with it. She has not. She is, in fact, handling the Great Internet Outage of this week with a cheerful resilience that I did not see coming and which I find both impressive and slightly annoying, given that I am over here refreshing my connection every four minutes like it owes me money.

So. Nothing scheduled is getting done today. And I’ve decided that’s fine. Sometimes the universe puts its foot down — or in this case, pulls all your furniture into the centre of the room — and you just have to work around it.

Which brings me to the actual highlight of this entire chaotic day, because every terrible day needs one.

Yesterday, I lit the fire, and Hopalong — my little spina bifida girl — claimed her spot in front of it in her pink fluffy bed and basked. That’s the only word for it. She basked in the warm orange glow like she was on a very small, very cosy holiday, and it was the best thing I saw all day.

This morning we woke late, which meant the whole household launched immediately into that particular brand of morning chaos — feeding everyone, sorting the animals, trying to impose some kind of order on a house that is currently doing its best impression of a furniture warehouse. I was moving through it all on autopilot when I walked past the fireplace and stopped.

Hopalong was there. Quietly, politely, pawing at the glass door.

Just asking. Just wondering if perhaps today she might have her warm orange sunshine back again.

I lit the fire.

Obviously I lit the fire.

Jo could not even be annoyed about the delay to the morning schedule. Some things transcend OCD.

So that’s where I am today. Off-schedule, slightly frantic, very much typing this to clear my head rather than hit any kind of content goal. Some days are just like this — the house has its own agenda and your job is mostly to get out of the way and try not to make eye contact with Jo while she contemplates arson.

Normal transmission will resume. Probably once the electrician comes and the furniture goes back where it belongs and the internet stops performing its impression of a very indecisive yo-yo.

Until then, I have a fire, I have a cat who knows exactly what she wants and asks for it with the quiet dignity of someone who has earned it, and honestly? That’s enough.

In Which It Rains And I Have Ideas I’m Not Allowed To Start Yet

It rained today. Properly, committedly, Tasmanian-winter-is-coming rained. Which did not stop us loading ourselves into the car and heading to the Westbury markets, because reconnaissance waits for no weather system and the book van isn’t going to scout its own prospects.

The verdict: disappointing, with an asterisk.

Westbury is lovely. The drive is lovely. The idea of the markets is lovely. The reality was somewhat thin on the ground — not a great deal on offer in terms of what we were hoping to find — but the more surprising discovery was the payment situation. Or rather, the lack of one. A remarkable number of stall holders were cash only, which in the year we are currently living in is a choice that I find genuinely baffling. The book van will absolutely have electronic payment because I would like to actually sell books to people who, like most humans in 2025, do not routinely carry cash. Filed under: lessons learned before we’ve even started.

Came home damp and slightly deflated, spent the rest of the day making graphics for social media because apparently that is just my life now. The three universes require a frankly unreasonable amount of visual content and I am the person who has to create it. Future Suzy will be grateful. Present Suzy’s eyes are doing that thing they do after too many hours of screen time.

Watched a few more episodes of Off Campus in the evening. My verdict remains: it’s fine. It’s perfectly okay television. The thing that is keeping me watching is the hockey, and the hockey alone, because I am a died in the wool hockey person and we support the hockey in whatever form it presents itself. This is not negotiable. This is doctrine. The show could be considerably more compelling than it is and I would still be there for the ice time, and I will say no more on that subject except that Heated Rivalry remains undefeated in my personal rankings.

And then — because my brain apparently decided that what today needed was one more thing — I had a realisation about the Compass Point universe.

The origin series. How they got to be the soldiers they are before I got my hands on them and broke them. Except here is the thing: it already exists. All of it. Two hundred and seventy thousand words of it, sitting there, fully written, because that was the original form of Compass Point. The babies. The fledgling soldiers. The version of these men and women that existed before everything that comes after happened to them.

I wrote it. And then I made a decision.

I decided that writing broken ex-soldiers trying to rebuild their lives was more enriching than writing soldiers I was in the process of breaking. The destination interested me more than the journey. So I pivoted, and Compass Point became what it is now, and the 270,000 words went into a drawer, metaphorically speaking, where they have been sitting ever since in the particular patient way that large manuscripts have when they know their time will come.

Their time will come.

Just — not yet. I have two novels releasing in thirty days, a book van to launch, and a renovation bearing down on me. The 270,000 words will keep. They’ve already waited this long.

The future will deal with it accordingly.

The future is already making a list. 🖤

I have three additional observations about Off Campus that I feel compelled to share.

First: the MMC has curls. Magnificent, abundant, absolutely delicious curls that even a granny-aged woman finds herself wanting to run her fingers through. Full credit where it’s due. Those curls are doing a lot of heavy lifting for the show’s watchability and they know it.

Second: the FMC has, and I say this as a purely aesthetic observation, probably the roundest, perkiest breasts I have ever seen on a television screen. They sit there. They jiggle politely. They are present in, and occasionally almost out of, whatever scanty top she happens to be wearing in any given scene. I respect the commitment.

Third, and this is the one that actually matters:

I’ve worked out the difference. The real one, underneath all the budget and chemistry conversations. The Heated Rivalry boys lived their characters. This lot act theirs. And that distinction — small in description, enormous in effect — is everything.

HR gave us great ugly tears. The kind that aren’t pretty, that come with awkward silences and people not knowing where to look and absolute, overwhelming, unperformed joy when the moment called for it. You felt it in your chest because they felt it in theirs.

Off Campus gives me dry cheeks in the crying scenes and vacancy behind the eyes in the happy ones.

The curls remain exceptional.

Enough said. 🏒🖤

In Which I Have Feelings About Hockey Shows

I watched the first episode of Off Campus last night.

Before I say anything else, let me be clear about something: I idolise Elle Kennedy. Have done since I read the Out of Uniform series, which is when I understood exactly what she was capable of, and from that moment I have made grabby hands at everything she’s written. The woman is a giant of this genre and I say that with complete sincerity and zero caveats.

Which is precisely why I want to like the show. I really do. The cast is lovely — every single one of them — and the people in their orbit are well played and I have no complaints about the performances on an individual level.

But.

You heard that coming, didn’t you.

Here’s the thing. When Heated Rivalry wrapped its first season, some intrepid reporter announced that Off Campus was on its way as a replacement. A successor. The next hockey show to fill that particular gap.

No. I’m sorry. It really isn’t. And not just for the obvious gay-versus-het reason, though that’s obviously significant. This is something else.

Heated Rivalry was shot on what I can only describe as the most heroic shoestring budget in recent television history. Two cameras. Two complete unknowns in the lead roles — we didn’t get a recognisable face until episode three. And those two? They had chemistry that sizzled on the screen even when they were supposed to hate each other. Especially when they were supposed to hate each other. That’s the thing about rivalry done right — the friction is the heat, and if you can feel that heat in the middle of open hostility then you’re in extraordinary hands.

Off Campus has a larger budget. More established names. Better resourced in every technical sense.

And the two leads had no chemistry for me. None that I could find, anyway. I kept waiting for it and it didn’t arrive. The character I found myself genuinely interested in was the FMC’s best friend, and one of the MMC’s teammates — which is a lovely sign for the future of the supporting cast and a slightly worrying sign for the central romance, which is, after all, the engine the whole thing runs on.

Here’s my possibly controversial take: the budget increase didn’t do Off Campus any favours. There’s something about a small production that has to rely entirely on performance and chemistry that can produce something extraordinary when it works. When it doesn’t have the money to dazzle you, it has to move you. Heated Rivalry moved me. Repeatedly. While being shot in what appeared to be three locations and a car park.

I’m giving Off Campus a proper shot because it’s hockey and because Elle Kennedy’s source material deserves that much from me at minimum. The books are wonderful — Garrett Graham has been making readers weak in the knees for years and rightly so — and I live in hope that the chemistry finds its feet as the season settles in.

But I know which is the better hockey show for me this year, and it’s not a close contest.

Come back, Heated Rivalry. All is forgiven. You were irreplaceable and the replacement proves it. 🏒

In Which I Murder Two Mice in a Single Week (and Other Tales from the Editing Trenches)

I have killed two mice this week.

Not the furry kind — although given that I live in rural Tasmania with fifteen cats, that particular tally is considerably higher and I accept no responsibility for it. I mean the small plastic kind. The kind with the little scroll wheel that is, as it turns out, not built to survive the editing habits of a romance novelist in the middle of a manuscript crisis.

The scroll wheel went first. Then the clicks became increasingly non-committal, the kind of performance where the mouse would technically register the click but in a way that suggested it was doing so under duress. And then, on mouse number two, I watched the scroll wheel spin freely and uselessly like a tiny hamster wheel that had seen things it could not unsee, and I knew it was over.

Two mice. One week.

In my defence, I have been editing.

Not in a pleasant, let’s-refine-the-prose kind of way. I mean deep-trench, where-did-that-paragraph-go, I-know-I-wrote-this-scene-but-I-cannot-locate-it-in-any-of-the-seventeen-iterations-of-this-document kind of editing. Some of my current manuscripts are on their fifth or sixth pass. What that means in practice is that I have taken scenes out and put them back in. I have moved chapters around like furniture in a room I’m never satisfied with. I have cut a beautiful paragraph because it slowed the pacing, grieved it, come back three days later and pasted it into a different chapter, realised it didn’t work there either, and the paragraph now lives in a document called good_bits_dont_delete.docx along with seventy-three other orphans.

The scroll wheel is the victim of all this frantic up-and-down-the-document activity. The endless hunting. The it was here a minute ago. The scrolling up to check a character’s eye colour because I’ve used three different shades across six drafts and I cannot be trusted with continuity.

Here is what nobody tells you about being deep in multiple series simultaneously: the books start to blur. Not in terms of characters — I know my characters the way I know my cats, which is to say completely and with great fondness and an awareness of exactly which ones will cause problems — but in terms of where things are. Which version has the scene. Which draft kept the subplot. Whether that line of dialogue was cut for length or moved to a later chapter or exists only in the document called backup_backup_REAL_backup_FINAL.docx.

The mice are paying the price for this structural chaos.

I have ordered replacements. Possibly two, on the theory that I might as well accept who I am as a person and an editor and plan accordingly. I am also looking, somewhat desperately, into better document management — because while I love the chaos of a novel in progress, the chaos of losing a novel inside itself is a different and less romantic experience.

If you’re a fellow writer who has also achieved the impressive feat of scrolling a mouse into an early grave, I would love to know I’m not alone. And if you have a genuinely foolproof system for tracking what you’ve moved, cut, or buried alive in a miscellaneous document — please, for the sake of the mice, tell me about it in the comments.

The cats, at least, are fine. Thriving, even. Possibly because they do not edit.

Suzy is a romance novelist writing as Bella Bruce, Avery Beckett, and KS Buckley. She lives in rural Tasmania with fifteen cats and an increasingly unreasonable number of half-finished manuscripts. She also runs Of Fables and Fantasies, a wandering mobile bookshop.

The Homeless Plot Bunny

I have a problem.

Not a serious problem. Not even an unusual problem, if you know writers. But a problem nonetheless.

I have a plot bunny and nowhere to put it.

It arrived the way they always do — uninvited, poorly timed, and entirely too comfortable making itself at home in the back of my head. It’s a cowboy series. Historical, probably. Maybe fantasy. Possibly both, because apparently I have no instinct for simplicity. The details are still fuzzy and the world is still mostly smoke and suggestion, but the feeling of it is there, which is usually how these things start.

And here’s the thing about cowboys.

They’re a little bit magic already, aren’t they? Before you add a single supernatural element, before you build a world or a magic system or decide what lives in the dark beyond the firelight — there’s already something about them. Those impossibly narrow hips. The broad shoulders. Just enough stubble to read as rugged rather than untidy. The particular way a man looks when he’s capable and quiet and not particularly interested in proving either. Cowboys occupy a very specific space in the imagination and they have done since I was a child watching westerns and feeling something I couldn’t yet name.

I’ve wanted to write them for years. You may remember I mentioned this.

The problem is that none of my four authors are immediately putting their hand up.

Bella took one look and went back to her hockey rink. She’s not wrong — her universe is full and loud and has very specific energy, and cowboys don’t quite fit the frequency. I respect the boundary even if I’m slightly annoyed by it.

Avery is considering. There’s an argument to be made — your protective soldier and your weathered cowboy are not, at their core, entirely different creatures. Both capable. Both carrying something. Both with that particular brand of quiet competence that I find endlessly compelling to write. Avery’s thinking about it. She hasn’t said no.

But if the magic comes — and I think it wants to come, I think that’s part of what the bunny is asking for — then it might really belong to Tara. Tara’s whole world runs on the old magic, the wild magic, the kind that lives in landscape and bloodline and the spaces between things. And there’s something about the American West, about that particular quality of vast and merciless and beautiful, that feels like it could hold that kind of magic very naturally.

So for now the cowboys are living in the hallway. Waiting to find out whose door they belong behind.

I’ll let you know when someone claims them.

The Four of Us

Let me explain something, because it’s probably overdue.

If you go looking for me on the internet — the writing me, not the fifteen-cats-and-a-rainy-view-of-the-Western-Tiers me — you will find not one author but four. Bella Bruce. Avery Beckett. Tara Benson Boyd. And KS Buckley, who I share with my best friend and writing soulmate Karen, because apparently one of everything was never going to be enough for either of us.

There are two reasons this happened, and I’ll be honest about both of them.

The first is that when I was going through university they hammered one particular rule into us with genuine conviction: one author cannot write in more than one genre. It confuses the reader, they said. It’s messy, they said. A brand is a promise, they said, in that way academics have of making marketing sound like philosophy. I absorbed this so thoroughly that even when I eventually threw most of what I learned about publishing out the window, I kept the pen names. Turns out they weren’t entirely wrong — each of my four writers does have a genuinely different voice and style, and keeping them as separate people works better than trying to shift gears inside the one identity. My brain seems to agree, even when the rest of me finds it absolutely exhausting.

The second reason is simpler and considerably more personal: there are parts of my family who would mock me mercilessly for writing romance. The smut, they’d call it, with that particular tone that means they think they’re being funny. I’d have had a pseudonym regardless of genre rules, just to keep the peace and my dignity intact. I simply didn’t anticipate that one pseudonym would quietly become four.

So: Bella Bruce writes sports romance — hockey, mostly, though her universe has expanded to include rockstar and movie star romance because apparently I have no restraint. Avery Beckett writes military romance with thriller tendencies. Tara Benson Boyd writes whimsical fae romantasy. And KS Buckley writes magical realism and detective noir — that one belongs to Karen and me together, in theory, though the distance between Portland and rural Tasmania is doing its level best to complicate things. We have the people. We have the story. We just need to nail down the magic system and the grit, and then we’ll be properly on our way.

There’s a funny thing about KS Buckley’s main characters, actually. Sharp-eyed readers of Avery’s books might notice something familiar about a pair called Marc and Finn. Those two are, in their own way, a version of KS’s world — the same essential people, living a different life. And if something about them seems oddly familiar beyond that, well. You might be thinking of a certain television show. Our plans for these characters never quite fitted the fanfic box, even when that’s where we started out. There’s no shame in fanfic — none whatsoever — but that is absolutely a tale for another day.

This is probably one of the last times I’ll lay all of that out here. This blog is not my writing life — it’s the brain dump that keeps me and the four authors living in my head from collectively losing the plot. You’ll hear about the writing on series launch days, because those make me nervous and excited in equal measure and I tend to spill over a bit. Otherwise, this is just me. Suzy. Clan of three humans, fifteen cats, an indeterminate number of chickens, and a view of the mountains when the weather allows.

The four of them can look after themselves.

Of Fables and Fantasies — Or, How I Accidentally Became a Bookseller

I want to tell you something that happened this morning, and I want you to know that I am fully aware this is not a sensible thing.

We bought a bookshop.

Here is how that happened.

I went to see the owner of a wandering bookshop — think food van, think wheels, think the ability to turn up somewhere entirely unexpected and hand people a romance novel — because I had a perfectly reasonable question. Would she be interested in stocking my books? Simple. Businesslike. In and out.

I came home having promised to buy the whole thing.

I’m not entirely sure how. These things happen to me more than they probably should. The shop is called Of Fables and Fantasies, and I suspect the name didn’t help — once I heard it, some part of my brain had already decided this was mine. The rest of the conversation was just logistics.

So here we are.

For those of you keeping score at home, the current job description reads something like: romance novelist, publisher, blogger, small-scale farmer, cat wrangler (fifteen of them, don’t ask), and now — bookseller. I genuinely do not know who I am any more, but I’m having a very good time finding out.

Now here’s the part I’m especially excited about, and I want to talk about it properly before we take over because it matters to me. Really matters.

I want Of Fables and Fantasies to champion romance. And I want it to champion Australian romance writers.

Let me start with something that might surprise you if you’ve been living under a rock, or possibly just in Australian literary circles: romance is, by a significant margin, one of the biggest-selling genres on the planet. In 2024 alone, 51 million print units sold in the US market. Romance sales were up 24% year on year. Seven of the top ten books of the year were romance or romantasy titles. At many publishing houses, up to 70% of revenue comes from romance. The genre is not just surviving — it is carrying the book industry on its back, and has been for years.

And yet.

In Australia, romance gets shat on from a great height.

I’m going to say that plainly, because it’s true and it’s been true for as long as I’ve been writing, and I am tired of dancing around it. Romance authors are not considered writers. We are considered purveyors of smut. Our books are not shelved respectfully in literary fiction. They’re not reviewed seriously in the broadsheets. They don’t win the Miles Franklin. We are, at best, tolerated. At worst, openly mocked.

I know this from experience. When I did the first subject of my Bachelor of Creative Writing — which I completed in 2021, in my forties, surrounded by twenty-somethings — the professor asked each of us what we wanted to do with what we’d learn in the class. I listened to them all go around the room. They wanted to write poetry. Speculative fiction. Literary fiction. They were going to be the next Shakespeare. The next James Patterson. Grand ambitions, every one of them.

When it was my turn, I said I wanted to write romance.

The whole class laughed at me.

Not a polite chuckle. Actual laughter. Because I didn’t want to write real books, did I — I wanted to write those silly Mills and Boon things you buy at the supermarket. I sat there and I felt the embarrassment of it, that particular heat that comes from being the odd one out in a room full of people who think they know what good writing looks like.

And then my professor shut them up.

I don’t know why you laughed, she said. She’s the only one with realistic aims and knows where the money is.

I have never forgotten that. Not the laughter — or not only the laughter — but the fact that it took someone with authority in the room to make them stop. That says everything, doesn’t it? About who gets to decide what counts.

Here’s what I want to ask, though. George R. R. Martin writes explicit sex scenes. So does Cormac McCarthy. So does virtually every celebrated male literary author you can name. Their work is considered serious, important, literature. But a romance novel — which is largely written by women and largely read by women — is smut. The genre that outsells everything else on the shelf. Smut.

You’ll forgive me if I find that a little convenient.

Romance is not smut. Romance is rural and gritty and funny and heartbreaking. It is military and sports and contemporary and historical and supernatural and everything in between. It is romantasy with magic systems so intricate they’d make a fantasy purist weep with envy. It is chick lit that makes you snort-laugh on public transport. It is second-chance love stories and slow burns and found families and grief and hope and, yes, desire, because desire is part of being human and pretending otherwise is not literary sophistication — it is just snobbery.

I want Of Fables and Fantasies to be a place where that is understood.

I want rural romance on those shelves — stories set in the landscapes people around here actually live in. I want sports romance and military romance and contemporary romance and romantasy and chick lit and every flavour in between. And I want, wherever I possibly can, Australian authors. Writers who are here, working in this country, telling stories rooted in this place, and who deserve so much more recognition than they get.

Because here’s the thing about romance — about any fiction, really. Part of what it does, part of what it’s for, is letting readers feel themselves inside the story. And there is something that happens when you read a book and the landscape is yours. When the light looks right and the place names are familiar and the characters feel like people from your street, your town, your life. You’re not just reading about someone else falling in love. You’re falling in love in a place that belongs to you. Australian readers deserve that. They deserve to pick up a romance novel and find themselves in it — their country, their voice, their world — not just borrowed landscapes from somewhere else.

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know how successful I’ll be at sourcing. I don’t know how many authors will want to be involved, whether logistics will cooperate, whether the universe will smile on me or laugh at me. But we are absolutely ready to give it a red hot shot, as we say in this part of the world.

If you’re an Australian romance author, or you know one, or you are one and you’re reading this with a slightly raised eyebrow — come find me. I want your books on my shelves. I want your stories rolling down Tasmanian roads in a little van with a beautiful name.

And if you just want to follow along and watch me figure out how to run a mobile bookshop while also writing novels and wrangling fifteen cats and growing vegetables and generally attempting to do everything at once — well. You’re very welcome here too.

Of Fables and Fantasies. Watch this space.