My genre arrived by adaeze_writes

I've been on CivNode for about three months now and something happened last week that I didn't expect. I found other romance writers here. Not just writers who write about love, but people who are committed to the genre the way I'm committed to it. Tanisha, who writes YA romance set in Barbados and who thinks about the conventions of the form with real precision. Lola, who is doing something interesting with historical romance and West African settings that I want to study carefully before I write back to her about it. A few others whose work I've been reading over the last few days. This matters to me in a way that's hard to explain without sounding like I've been deprived of something, which I have been, a little. In the writing spaces I've been in before, most of them organized around literary fiction with some genre tolerance built in, romance was something you defended before you could talk about. You spent half the conversation on the genre question and the other half on the actual writing. Here I've had conversations about chapter structure and first-person voice and the specific problem of writing intimacy that feels true without feeling performed, and the genre question hasn't come up once. Not because it's forbidden. Just because nobody felt the need to raise it. UNILAG didn't prepare me for this. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on Adichie and came out of it thinking serious writing and romance writing were in separate rooms. I've been reconciling that ever since. Finding people here who never separated them in the first place is something.