• You Should Be So Lucky, Cat Sebastian
• Satisfaction Guaranteed, Karelia Stetz-Waters
• Rules for Ghosting, Shelley Jay Shore
• Season of Love and For Never and Always, Helena Greer

 
These books also deal with grief in less head-on but meaningful, thoughtful, and I think lovely ways:

• Felix Navidad, ’Nathan Burgoine
• 10 Things That Never Happened, Alexis Hall
• Roll for Love, M. K. England

 
The voracious romance readers among you may have noticed a pattern here: That is a very queer book list.
 
Now admittedly, I do just read a lot of LGBTQIA+ stories. But not exclusively, and I don’t think it’s accidental that 100% of my favorites in this particular thematic and emotional area are queer.

In fact, it’s probably because I believe in queering grief, and because queer(ed) grief is the kind that resonates with me and supports me.
 
These stories—even as they work with death and loss in diverse ways (and in different subgenres with different emotional tones)—explore grief as layered, as complicated, often as compounded by marginalization, invisibility, and a culture that belittles or misunderstands our most heart-central relationships. They talk about death-related grief in a world where there are also many other kinds of grief and trauma, where there’s isolation and mismatch and persecution and rejection, where there are deeply considered chosen beliefs and deeply appreciated and needed chosen family, where the fact of loss or the reality of emotional experiences can be and often are denied, where being seen and held in grief—getting to grieve in community—is valuable beyond measure.
 
These stories also don’t assume everybody’s grief feels the same or works out the same. It’s not a script, or linear, or normative; it’s messy and personal; it’s a place where we (have to) make our own meaning. They don’t assume that a happy ending involves “getting back to normal,” because the characters and their lives were never “normal” in the first place. They explore how grief exists in people’s particular bodies and minds, in our whole selves, and how it hurts like hell, and also how it acts as a creative force, forging new futures for us and through us and with us.
 
And they do all of that in the context of romance, the HEA genre, where we can trust that all hope is not lost. Where we’re going to see not unremitting pain and despair, but pain and despair in a broader human context of humor, love, pleasure, joy, and new versions of life.
 
Where the grief is real, and not going anywhere, and there are still possibilities ahead.
 
Bonus resources!:

• “Thanatology (Death & Dying) with Cole Imperi,” Ologies (podcast episode)
• Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett (my favorite non-romance not-particularly-queer death-and-grief book, a real treasure)
• “Queering Grief Means Showing Up in All Our Messy Glory,” Zena Sharman
• “Queering Grief: Part 1,” Jessica Esquivel

Most people think of paid writing support as something that happens after there’s a completed manuscript. That’s the norm, for sure, but investing in certain kinds of help way earlier in the process can (in some situations) actually save lots of money—as well as time, frustration, angst—later on.

Here are just a few possibilities along these lines:

• Taking a good-fit class (on writing process, your particular genre, plotting techniques, character development, etc.) early in your process can be a huge boost. Your community may have local writing classes, or there are loads online through organizations like the Loft (where I teach), Clarion West (focused on speculative fiction), Blue Stoop, Gotham Writers, and on and on. Depending on the class, you can get super useful information and strategies, structured opportunities to do planning or drafting work, instructor feedback, and/or feedback from classmates through workshopping. For example, when I teach Plan and Start Your Romance Novel, I offer feedback on planning documents, which can help students notice and solve major plot, character, and structure problems before they’re baked into a draft.
  
• Some editors offer services like the one I call Idea Development—variations on professional assessment, informational support, and ideas for next steps at the idea development and early drafting stages. These can be quite affordable because we’re not working with tons of text yet.
• For certain projects, early consultation with an authenticity reader (also called sensitivity readers) can be a big time-, money-, and stress-saver. Many writers don’t realize this is even possible, but you do not have to write a whole draft you’re worried about before you can ask for help.
  
• A bit of coaching early in the process can also help get you pointed in the right direction and make sure you have all the needed skills and resources lined up before you embark on drafting, or on particularly tricky parts of your process or project.

Many writers are also great readers and researchers. If you want to produce excellent results on a small budget, I encourage you to apply those research and reading skills to learning about:

• Your genre and its conventions (reader expectations)—by reading widely in the genre, by finding blog posts by and interviews with authors in it, and by reading books (aimed at writers but also at readers and scholars) and journal articles about it. Use that beautiful public library! Visit your local university and chat with a reference librarian! Heck yeah libraries!
• Writing craft, practice, and process.
• Revision and editing techniques. There are lots of whole books about each of these, in addition to loads of podcast episodes, articles, and videos online. Even if you feel like you’re great at them, there are more techniques, tools, and perspectives to learn.

Getting as far as you can with a good revision plan will save you money, because editors are fundamentally charging for our time and energy—it costs less to have a better draft edited, basically. And you may need fewer levels or rounds of editing to get it where you want it to end up, too. But how?

• After doing the research I was just describing, and once you have a full draft, I advise getting distance from it. Take time—weeks, maybe months—without looking at it at all. Then try reading the draft on your ereader, so it looks like somebody else’s manuscript and also so you can’t change the text or write on it as you go: Just read.
• After that, start at the big-picture level of plot, theme, character arc, only working your way slowly down to sentence-level issues in later revision rounds. Try using tools like summarizing the project to a friend, reverse outlining, or writing down each major character's story goal, motivation, conflict, and stakes to help you understand and focus on the big picture.
• Be real about your own skills and what you cannot do well, or which parts you hate doing. This varies from person to person (and even from project to project) and should guide where you invest what money you do have: how to make the most of your budget.
• Build genuine writer community and then make the most of the help you can all offer each other. If you have trusted writer friends, you can draw on the group’s skills and strengths, not just your own. Get good at asking for feedback, being very straightforward about what kind of comments you’re looking for and not looking for every time. Ask what kind of feedback others will find helpful on their own projects. Thank people! This is a long path but a good one to follow.
  

Editors generally don’t like it when potential clients ask (or tell) us simply to charge less; we think really hard about our pricing structures and have set these rates for a reason, and we also have to buy groceries and stuff. That’s not what I’m suggesting. (p.s.: If you’re wondering why on earth editing is so expensive, this blog post from editor Sophie Playle may provide useful context.)

Instead, many editors and coaches are willing to have a conversation about what you and your project really need, and then get creative about whether a lower-cost (and lower-labor/hours) service or package might work well for you both.

For example, some editors offer first-chapter reviews; I offer what I call a Partial Line Edit (a fixed-rate service that gives writers line editing on a 2,500-word passage plus a report on patterns and possible next steps); these are all intended to help guide and deepen self-editing on the rest of the manuscript. If you have a coaching relationship, you might save money by taking a few months off for independent work on the manuscript, with a plan to circle back for more support and guidance at a certain future date. Some professionals can also offer payment plans or other tweaks in their typical processes to help writers with tight budgets. It's always worth asking to see what flexibility and possibilities exist!

There are a lot of ways to define consent, and some of them kind of bite.
 
First, we’ve got blandly unhelpful dictionary definitions—Merriam-Webster tells us that consent is “compliance in or approval of what is done or proposed by another: acquiescence.”
 
I mean, okay, I guess?
 
We’ve got legal definitions, where the whole point is whether a crime or breach of contract has occurred according to some standard of evidence, and who’s liable. That is a low bar, my friends! When ordinary people talk about consent, they’re often imagining a kind of bureaucratic checkbox system, where one person (usually a man) seeks permission to do something to another person (usually a woman), so as not to get in trouble. That’s us drawing dismally on a legalistic concept of consent.
 
But there are less depressing ideas out there, too.
 
Some researchers, including social psychology professor Vanessa Bohns, want to develop a psychological definition that embraces the internal, experiential aspect of consent.
 
What does it feel like to want and to say yes?
 
What’s it like to be in consent?
 
What do we need in order to say no?
 
What does it feel like to express a boundary?
 
What does it do to us internally when we don’t feel we’ve engaged in an act freely and voluntarily?
 
Imho, these are questions romance novels already consider at length and often with immense nuance. What Bohns calls “the subjective experience of consenting” is of great interest to romance writers and readers!

Or we can consider sex educator and author Emily Nagoski’s definition, from her podcast Come As You Are:

And this longer version of a similar idea from Meg-John Barker, the author of several really cool books on sex and gender (this passage is from “The Consent Checklist”):

In these more promising perspectives, consent is about freedom, agency, boundaries, wants, and a complicated context of power dynamics and personal histories.

Why does the treatment of consent in fiction—which is, in fact, made up—matter?
 
One reason is ethical: We straight-up need better representations of consent, particularly in sexual contexts, because our culture constantly undermines consent and safety. We’re not okay, y’all: Send help.
 
We all know that romance is sex ed for a lot of people. Many many people learn about bodies and the mechanics of sex acts by reading romance novels. We’re also all learning about the ethics of consent, about what’s realistic to expect in a relationship or a sexual encounter, about what consent can and should look like, when we read and reread these stories (and indeed when we read, watch, and hear all kinds of stories).
 
But also, a thoughtful approach to consent is good for storytelling. It’s a craft tool, for fiction generally and for romance times a million. The development of intimacy and trust; how humans somehow take the risk of vulnerability, even though we’ve been hurt; what wanting feels like and does: That’s the stuff of romance. And it’s the stuff of consent.
 
Another reason romance is an excellent place to explore consent is that the need for a barrier (or conflict) means these stories almost always involve difficult trauma histories, fraught power dynamics, communication problems, self-knowledge problems, or other dynamics that make consent both extra challenging to navigate and very, very compelling as a storytelling element.
 
I could talk absolutely all day long about consent as a craft tool related to character development, tension, romance barriers and resolution, worldbuilding…all the things. But for the rest of this post, I’ll bravely restrain myself and focus on one building block of solid consent representation (which feeds into all those lovely crafty things). And that is…

Weird, right? But bear with me.
 
If we list a bunch of nonconsensual (or rape) culture myths, one of the less obvious ones will be:
It’s normal and fine to objectify people and police bodies along the lines of size, shape, appearance, gender expression, and so on.
 
This is such a common habit that it can be hard to notice that it’s related to consent. But policing people’s bodies along various lines of oppression and aesthetic preference is tied up with objectifying people.
 
And accordingly, paying attention to whole people and our diverse desires is really important to a consent orientation.
 
That means that cisheteronormativity—the way our cultural imagination tends to assume virtually everyone is cisgender (rather than trans) and straight (rather than gay, bi, pan, etc.) as well as allosexual (rather than asexual)—disadvantages consent. Normativity of any kind disadvantages consent.
 
When a whole society pretends that certain desires and behaviors are just normal and to be expected, there’s huge pressure on individuals to conform, and not so much space for free choice or even self-knowledge.
 
Assumptions about who and what is attractive (or unattractive) undermine a consent orientation by putting characters in a sexual script—like we’re smashing Ken and Barbie dolls together—rather than allowing them to have their own specific wants and experiences. Guess what: The second option makes for more emotionally satisfying romance writing. Racism, ableism, anti-fat bias, and the like are all culprits here.
 
The assumption that sex is universally important to romantic relationships, and that there’s some gold standard of “real sex,” creates similar problems. And let’s be real: it’s not incredibly insightful from a storytelling perspective to just plop everybody on the same inevitable path with the same motivations and goals. It’s a whole lot more interesting to see characters navigating their paths to HEAs—and ending up delighted and secure in their relationships—when one of them is absolutely not okay with being penetrated (as in Cat Sebastian’s The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes) or has no interest in sex period (as in Cass Lennox’s Blank Spaces) or in some other way (and there are countless possibilities!) does not fit into our society’s tidy boxes and scripts.
 
A story world that assumes a diversity of experiences, perspectives, and desires creates space for meaningful—and interesting! and hot!—consent. A diverse world with plenty of room for all sorts of readers gives us bigger, cooler playgrounds for storytelling, while also doing less harm in the real world. It’s a win-win.

These (and, fortunately for us, many other) incredible romances do really smart things with consent, in part through building those big cool playgrounds:
 
Alexis Daria, You Had Me at Hola
This contemporary, starring the two leads of a TV show who meet on set, does such neat work with consent—in part through featuring an intimacy coordinator on page!
 
Karelia Stetz-Waters, Satisfaction Guaranteed
One main character, a sex educator who works at a sex toy shop, is totally at ease using her words in this arena—and works to make room for her far less comfortable and chill love interest to experience and communicate a yes.
 
EE Ottoman, Documenting Light
A contemporary romance featuring a nonbinary person and a trans man, this one has a quiet and gentle approach to consent that’s beautifully grounded in communication between two trans characters.
 
Alexis Hall, Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake
I tend to focus on positive representations of healthy, meaningful, freely given consent—and this very funny and charming novel has those. But I also admire it for its smart representation of insidious abuse dynamics and the threat of sexual assault.
 
Talia Hibbert, Get a Life, Chloe Brown  
Chronic illness and pain management are woven into interactions around consent, attraction, and pleasure in this one, and it’s just fantastic.
 
KJ Charles, A Gentleman’s Position
The romantic leads’ employer-servant relationship—and their very different perspectives on consent and power because of their particular class and life experiences—lead to a thoughtful treatment of consent in context here.
 
Courtney Milan, The Countess Conspiracy
This gorgeous historical in the Brothers Sinister series is also a brilliant reflection on the difference between wanting and consenting, and on navigating messy situations toward robust, healthy consent.
 
Cat Sebastian, literally all of her books, if I start listing any I won’t stop
Part of why I love them is their nuanced, and also hot, explorations of consent in contexts where trauma, mental health issues, and all manner of sociocultural dynamics are all very much at play.
 
And if you’d like to dive more deeply into consent, here are a few great places to start:

• “The Consent Checklist,” Meg-John Barker, or almost any of their books
• “The Wheel of Consent Explained,” Rupert James Alison
• “Self Consent: An Introduction,” Love Uncommon
• “Consent and ‘Enthusiastic Maybe,’” Emily Nagoski