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 copy of *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 told our class that genre fiction was a crutch. I nodded and went home and read *Bel Canto*, which I loved, but it didn't make me want to write the way Nora Roberts made me want to write. So. 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 set in Abuja. My protagonist is a project coordinator at a federal agency: competent, exhausted, frequently ignored by men who are neither. Her love interest is an architect who accidentally left his notebook in her office. I've rewritten that scene four times. The publishing industry still treats African romance writers as a subcategory of a subcategory. Western agents ask whether it's a good fit for their readers, which is a polite way of asking whether it's too African. My story is set entirely in Abuja because that's what I know, and nobody seems interested in funding that decision. I workshop here. The feedback from actual readers has been more useful than any writing group I've attended in person. I'm at 67,000 words and the notebook scene finally works.