Hello Lovers,
Can I call you Lovers? It’s what I call my newsletter subscribers so it feels appropriate.
I’m fairly new to the romance genre as an author. My debut came out in December 2023 and my second interconnected standalone was released in August of 2024. As I work on the final installment of the Queen City Queens series and look to the future for more stories to tell, I can’t help but look back at the way my debut novel, The Insufferable Mr. Fletcher entered the world.
I really had no intention of publishing that book. It was an exercise. A response to the many, many books I read during lockdown… no different than all the bread baking and crocheting that happened in the summer of 2020.
Why romance, of all the genres, you ask? The short answer is comfort. I’ve always been an avid reader. Always. But during lockdown, grimdark, highbrow literary fiction was beyond me. I didn’t have the bandwidth for it at all. Seriously, have you read Salvage The Bones? It’s an excellent book but damn is it bleak! No, I needed justice to prevail, the good guys to win, and for there to be a happy ending every time. Literary fiction couldn’t promise me that, but YA, Fantasy and Romance could.
That’s capital R in romance, by the way. Genre romance, like all genre fiction, has rules. The one inalienable rule is: the story must end in a Happily Ever After. (Happily For Now is also acceptable though not my personal preference.) We romance readers have heard it all before, “meh, that’s so predictable! How boooring!” and to that I say, “so?”
Law & Order premiered in 1990 and has not changed its formula in any radical way among its six spinoff franchises and two adaptations. That is over thirteen hundred episodes across 62 seasons of television. There’s obviously something to be said for the comfort of predictability.
It is, in fact, in the predictability where the challenge lives. How do you make a story interesting, raise the stakes, and make the journey worthwhile when the map is already laid out for you? When the beats – the set up, meet cute, turning points, crisis, and resolution – are so ingrained into the modern reader they know without knowing what to expect and when to expect it.
As someone who – illogically, misguidedly – decided to take that leap, I am here to tell you, it’s not easy. First, writing a novel means coming up with names. So. Many. Names! And the names can’t accidentally rhyme or be too similar, so sorry Ashley and Amanda, we already have an Adrienne and an Ali; you can’t sit with us! Then I stared into the abyss and waited for the words to come and when they arrived they mocked me with the sheer scope of my own ignorance: is a vestibule the same as a foyer? When did the internet start? Is cashmere better than merino? What’s the difference between homicide and murder? What are the flimsy shirts cyclists wear? Is it always called a tailgate? Which tea helps with cramps? I specifically chose contemporary so I wouldn’t have to do this kind of research! The government agency monitoring Canadian internet searches was kept highly entertained by me and Google.
When all the words finally, finally, arrived and the many drafts and revisions and edits were completed, I was left with Dickface, the working title to my very Toronto story about Junior, a happy hedonist with a big heart and a sharp tongue and Davis, a man who’s inability to see where he fits in makes him awkward, and all the hurdles they overcome to make it to their happily ever after.
Good for me! Job well done.
Nothing more to see here, right? Nothing except the many, many steps on the road to being published!
I kept this endeavour so close to the chest. I was paralyzed by the thought of being perceived, that someone will decide I’m Junior when I’m not. At all. This is a work of fiction! 93% of it is entirely made up, whole cloth, and the rest are stolen bits and pieces that I applied randomly for a bit of razzle dazzle.
FOR EXAMPLE: I do know a dark-haired single mom-by-choice whose mother lives with her AND I know a blonde Jewish woman, married with two kids, whose mother’s love language is nagging. Neither woman is Junior’s friend Roxanne, a dark-haired Jewish woman who has no idea who her child’s father is because she got pregnant on a debauched long weekend in Miami to celebrate her finalized divorce from an emotionally abusive adulterer and whose own loves-to-nag Mom lives with her. See how I did that?
I’ve made peace with it, for the most part, by accepting the truth of all art: it is subjective and your response to it says more about you than it does the artist.
So let me tell you what this naked kissing book means to me. While it is framed around an ‘opposites attract workplace romance’, it’s about identity: all the ways it can be expressed, embraced, weaponised, policed.
I am, for example, an indulgent wine aunt, an unrepentant grudge holder, a nice girl from Scarborough. I am first generation Canadian of Caribbean and Latine descent.
There. Easy.
Exceeeept. I spend an inordinate amount of time being asked about Jamaica. And all the tedious demands for me to “say something in Spanish” as though a language spoken by 600 million people globally is the linchpin to Latinidad. (But if you were wondering “something” in Spanish, is “algo”.)
And, what about the first gen people who do have Jamaican heritage? Filipino? Indian? Chinese? Nigerian? The many who are too Canadian for “back home” but constantly othered here in their own backyard? People whose parents decided that the safest route was assimilation and so did not give their children the gift of their mother tongue? People whose parents shook off the tethers of the past, and threw themselves and their offspring into the “hockey and Timbits” idea of Canada?
This first gen paradox barely scratches the surface and in it, we are all Junior.
But even that isn’t the complete picture. I’ve heard my nieces say they’re Irish even though their grandparents were born in Canada and I’m fairly certain their great-grandparents were too. My godson, however, is eight generations Canadian and he’s constantly faced with the “no, but, where?” I’ll let you take a wild guess and connect your own dots on why that is.
I think about my brother’s best friend who married a lovely woman with big, strawberry blonde curls, eyes that are the blue of a summer’s day and a complexion pale as the freshest cream. (Did you like that? It was very romance-y.) This blue eyed redhead who cannot be left in the sun lest she immolate, is half Pakistani.
I think of celebrities like Tom Morello, Tori Kelly, Mariah Carey, and Slash who are half Black, Keanu Reeves who is half Chinese-Hawaiian, Darren Criss, Olivia Rodrigo, and H.E.R who are half Filipino. Or Mark-Paul Gosselar who is half Indonesian. (In the name of matrimonial harmony, I am obligated to point out that Eddie and Alex Van Halen are also half Indonesian) Society has decided what their identities are, denying them their heritage, regardless of their expressed lived experiences.
This was the foundation for Davis.
Identity is a tricky thing. There is still sexuality and gender conformity to contend with. And since the fundamental distinction between race, culture, and nationality still keeps so many people in a chokehold, I can’t do more than encourage you to do the work of unravelling those threads. What I will say is Identity – yours, mine, ours – should be celebrated and embraced. It should be worn proudly on all our sleeves without fear of persecution and without the burden of outsider expectation.
And so, if you decide to read my naked kissing books, if you enjoy a little social commentary with your smooches, then I hope you enjoy my work and take from it this truth: no one has the right to tell you who you are – it’s simply not for them to decide! Be your most authentic self every day in every way possible. It’s no less than you deserve.
About the Author
Lindo Forbes is a first gen Canadian who lives in Toronto where you can find her at her day job or procrastinating on social media – sometimes both, simultaneously. She speaks enough French to not disgrace herself when she visits Montreal but not enough Spanish to please her abuela. She’s also been known to spend her free time working on her works-in-progress, battling with the Libby App, thinking of varied ways to corrupt her nieces and nephews, holding grudges against fictional characters and celebrities she’s never met, and/or searching for the world’s best street food with her husband.
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