In May of 2017, I started seriously planning out the project that has become the Romance MFA. I began reading Pamela, looking for Best Of lists, and tallying my writing projects–published, unpublished, half-written, and twinkle in my eye.
A year later, I’ve taken in a lot of information! I’ve read 33 books, including 3,500 pages from my Romance MFA syllabus, amassed a RSS feed with 150+ romance blogs, found 45 romance podcasts, and followed countless discussions on the Romancelandia regions of Twitter. I’ve learned a lot, along with getting a sense of how much I have yet to cover…
I’ve also been developing my own thoughts, with 35+ blog posts published on the books I’ve been reading, along with romance discussion topics, such as the alphahole trope. On the fiction front, I’ve written about 100K words, the majority of which make up the nearly-finished draft of what will be my first full-length romance novel, a historical sports romance set in Gilded Age New York.
My plans have changed from where I thought would go a year ago. I had intended to finish a historical novella and continue work on an unpublished trilogy under an old pen name. Instead I decided to focus on a clean start with the historical romance, which I started writing in October. I wrote about why I’m switching to romance on my personal blog, and I’m happy to report that, eight months later, I have no regrets about dropping the tragic novella and I can see what a mess the trilogy is—they are fairy tale retellings, and fairy tales don’t hew to the same lines as romance novels. No wonder I was having trouble finishing those stories!
Where will I be in another year?
I still have 25 books left on my syllabus, including three books on genre and craft which I’ve been reading in bits and pieces. From here, it looks like the Romance MFA will be a three year program, rather than the two I originally thought it would take to read the books. By next May I’ll expect to be finishing up my selection of Regencies and moving to the Bodice Rippers of the 1970s. I’ll finally see what Woodiwiss was all about…
Because of the high demand for promotional options in the romance genre, I’ve already scheduled one thing and set a publication date in December for the first book in the historical sports romance series. By next May, I should hopefully have the second and third books out as well. It’s frightening to type that, but I’ve started writing book 2 already, so it is plausible!
In addition to the reading and the writing and the reading, I will continue following along with conversations in social media, sending chapters to my writers’ group as fast as they will read them, and sharing resources as I find them. Hit me up on Twitter – @RomMFA – if you want to chat!
