BloomIII

For those who haven't been paying attention, this is a recent ChatGPT output. It can do this sort of dense sensible text in images totally one shot, so don't rely on bad text to identify AI images any more.

Here is the entire interaction that produced this image:

inspired by this new favorite picture of mine

don’t wanna read about two people falling in love and fuckin’

just wanna read more about some specific characters

good news! this post is not about you. here are some posts i have seen with great regularity on this site:

no one who writes original fiction is capable of writing good sex

no one who writes original fiction understands tropes

original fiction doesn’t understand kinks

too many books are about high-stakes things and not enough books focus on character development and interaction

all of which is blatantly and on the face of it absurd to anyone who reads a lot of romance and which is what this post is about. it downplays and devalues the good work being done, especially by marginalized authors, in the romance space. authors should get paid! authors should get rewarded for originality! if you read a shitty romance novel once, i don’t care! so have i! i’ve read a lot of shitty books in a lot of perfectly good genres. if you can spend three hours sifting through pairing tags on ao3 to find the one fic that doesn’t suck, you can look through ebook previews to find something that looks good.

‘books are expensive’ is almost a compelling argument, except that romances and mysteries are two genres where ebooks go on sale for $1-2 with startling regularity. my bookbub emails regularly get ebook boxed sets with tons of different books by different authors going on sale for a buck, which is a great way to find new authors. most authors have newsletters where they let you know about sales and send out freebies. and if your library has overdrive, you can request books. you don’t have to just… see they don’t have it and give up.

anyway, here’s books:

will i ever stop recommending courtney milan’s brothers sinister series? literally never. if you prefer contemporary and don’t mind first person there’s also the cyclone series. if your local library does not have at least one courtney milan book i will be shocked. don’t worry about it if they’re not the first in a series. you can read it out of order. that’s how romance novels work. lots of her books also go on sale for the low price of free on the regular, especially the novellas.

alisha rai’s forbidden hearts series also rules.it’s got starcrossed lovers, it’s got feuding families, it’s got hatefucking, what more could you want

alyssa cole has never written anything bad in her entire life, i’m pretty sure. you want historicals? you want contemporary? contemporary but there’s still sexy dukes? post-apocalyptic? pick your poison, enjoy.

i just read this one recently and now i need to read all the other cat sebastian books i’ve acquired over the years because whenever a book is a dollar and looks like this i buy it immediately (it’s literally a dollar right now). this graphic was very helpful and i wish more authors had ones like it. it’s 2019, bring back web banners for link pages.

i discovered six de los reyes when courtney milan recced beginner’s guide: love and other chemical reactions and i’m really interested to read more of her books. also it made me realize i’d never read a book that took place in the philippines before? no one fucks in this but it’s really cute and sweet and involves a hyper-logical lady scientist, an artist/barista/bad boy, a coffee shop, and Making Out For Entirely Scientific Reasons.

bound with honor is the only book i’ve read from the regency reimagined series. the reimagining seems to be that it’s very bisexual and polyamorous and everyone fucks a lot and also there’s bondage. i am cool with this. i actually bought the whole series at some point?? i… should read these.

i haven’t gotten around to reading tess bowery’s treading the boards series (i have bought so many books) (i was not kidding about the one dollar sales) but i’ve got high hopes because look at them

kj charles is… prolific. and another author whose books i haven’t gotten around to despite owning a lot of them. i actually just bought that one on the right, just now, because i saw that it was a dollar when taking this screenshot.

As a quick ref to my Treading the Boards series - the setting is 1811, the characters all work in or adjacent to the London performing arts scene. 

Rite of Summer is about escaping the thing you thought was forever – what happens after the grand romantic gestures. (m/m, then m/m/m, back to m/m again.) 

She Whom I Love’s main characters are an actress, a staymaker and a lady’s maid. Honestly, my favourite way to solve a love triangle is polyamoury. (f/f/m) 

(Short-listed for two Bisexual Book Awards - best erotic romance and best romance.) 

That Potent Alchemy stars a dancer and a backstage effects expert. A tagline I regret not using: ‘gender is also a kind of performance.’ (m/nb)