When I was a child, my father read Asimov and Zelazny to me. As a teenager I gravitated toward writers like [China] Mieville, [Charles] Stross, and [Tad] Williams because they wrote the genres I loved—science fiction, (future) fantasy, dystopian, occult—without a romantic element. I didn’t want to read jaw-dropping, gears-turning stories which were then “bogged down” by needless romance. I was there for the story, after all.

In my late twenties and early thirties I realized that reasoning wasn’t entirely correct. There were some stories I would have liked even better if the little romance the author had added to them had been between two women instead. Why couldn’t these kick-ass women come home to women? Why couldn’t they fall for one of their female traveling companions instead? The males that were featured as love interest could all have been women without harm to the story–so why weren’t they?

Once I pursued a writing career of my own, I realized I wanted to write the stories I wished I could read (or in case of fanfiction, the stories I wished I could see). My motivation to write comes from the desire to build worlds that are somehow more (or less) than our own. I want to write stories where the miracles of our world have a perfectly logical reason in the supernatural or divine. I want to discover what it means to be human when humanity is no longer a given. What I am drawn to is discovering what remains of a person when circumstances strip away all they thought they were.

Now I’m getting my “writers legs”, I know I want to write within the genres I loved in my youth, but instead of the mainstream inclusion of a heterosexual romance, I want my heroines to fall for other heroines. I want it to be the messy, chaotic, glorious experience falling in love is without subtracting from the story these characters play the leads in.

What I want to add to the amazing body of literature already out there, both to the mainstream fiction written within the genres I am drawn to and lesbian fiction as a genre onto itself, are stories where women turn to women once they stop the apocalypse—be it a global or personal one. I want to write the stories I wish my father would have had at hand to read me as a child: riveting tales with a heroine who kicks ass and just happens to be gay.


Photo by Peter Hershey on Unsplash