The romance manuscripts, vol. 3

My mother used to hide her romance novels between cookbooks on the top shelf. Georgette Heyer, Mills and Boon paperbacks with cracked spines, one dog-eared *Bride of the MacHugh*. We had an arrangement.

I've been reading romance since SS2 and spent years apologising for it. My third year lecturer at UNILAG called genre fiction a crutch. I nodded, went home, read *Bel Canto*, loved it, but it didn't make me want to write the way Nora Roberts made me want to write.

I'm a marketing manager in Lagos. Route optimisation briefs, logistics cost reports. At 7pm I close my laptop and write.

The third manuscript is a contemporary romance in Abuja. My protagonist is a project coordinator at a federal agency: competent, tired, frequently ignored by men who are neither. Her love interest is an architect who left his notebook in her office. I've rewritten that scene four times.

Western agents ask whether African romance is a good fit for their readers, which is a polite way of asking whether it's too African. My story is set in Abuja because that's what I know.

I workshop here. I'm at 67,000 words. The notebook scene finally works.