To have or NOT to have..An Agenda!

That IS the question my publicist asked some time back in her facebook feed

The number of authors that responded about their beliefs and how they sneak into stories wasn't anything out of the ordinary and didn't raise any eyebrows from this editor until I received an email from one of my authors discussing his beliefs about our market at Sizzler Editions and m/m stories.

The way the email (to me) was worded made him sound like an uninformed writer so I politely set the record straight (haha) for him. He did some research and as I knew he would, he came back and confirmed my point on the topic.

I bring this up to make a point. When writing a story, the key thing is to ask yourself: Why are you writing this story? Is it to tell a great story of love gone wrong, gone right with the appropriate partner(s)? Or is it to advance an agenda?

The truth only really matters if we're talking about sales. If you've built up your audience the way any author should, then your only worry is whether your fans agree or disagree with your viewpoint. In the case of erotic romance, there IS NO ROOM FOR AN AGENDA OF ANY SORT.

Romance readers do NOT want to deal with the real world struggles of the day, nor do they want to hear some author, established or not spew forth an opinion. They want to escape into a fantasy world we create whereby the same sort of challenges can be overcome but the ultimate challenge is, can your couple make it til the end of the story?

The key of romance stories is that "love conquers all." The reason this is so popular is because our world, our reality is so fucked. As of this writing, there was talk about Prop 8 being passed AGAIN. IT failed. Three times. Gays in California do NOT want marriage. (based solely on the failure to pass this proposition) And there is talk of another proposition trying to legalize weed smoking in California, again an initiative that failed to rally enough votes to pass. On a larger scale, there's the stilted economy, trouble in the Mid East and more shit than we know what to do with.

Readers spend money on authors they trust to take them out of this nonsense. They're parting with dollars in hopes that you the author will take them on a magical journey of love, lust, ecstasy, grief, in short, an emotional gauntlet that ends with an HEA.

Yes I do occasionally sneak in my beliefs into my stories, usually as humor. How many people think John Kerry is dead and no one's told him yet? The answer? He's a vampire!

If you've got an agenda, save it for non fiction.