Saturday, April 28, 2018

Why I write BBW romance

I got the most amazing review the other day, every time I even think of it I smile. It wasn't that it was a five star, it was that the person said as a BBW it made her feel beautiful. Good, because she is beautiful. She is beautiful whether she is a size ten, twenty or thirty. She's beautiful because she feels beautiful that's all that matters, not what other people tell she is or should be. 

She could have said she hated it and it would be my favorite review. Because for one person I did what I always try to do, make the reader feel loved for exactly who/what you are. Only days before the review I was talking to someone about them writing BBW while being lucky enough not to be BBW and it's exactly what I said. To me the point of any romance-whatever your thing is, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not rich enough, you don't wear the right clothes, you just want to be accepted for who you are, you want to believe you can have your own love story that someone will look past all the things you think or the media tells you isn't pretty and love you not in spite of or even because of, just love you with all the other stuff included. 

I write BBW now because I think it's important for women to see themselves in the world, even if it's only in books. As a writer it's pretty easy to draw on my experiences (Yes, I'm also a BBW) to help make it believable. (Some of the experiences the women went through are some I've gone through, good and bad.) In the beginning I didn't write BBW as it's own thing, I wrote it because it was a thing that kept the h from believing the H would want her-as a part of the reason for there to be conflict in the story.  When I didn't use it as conflict I tried to make my h a 'normal' size there was a size ten, an eight but even the one who wasn't she had a complex over being 'too pretty'. I swear she was based on a real person and at first I rolled my eyes, until I got to know her. I'm one of those people who laughs, smiles, teases, pops  off without giving it much thought. This ridiculously pretty chick at work who was always quiet and seemed bitchy because she was in the corner and hardly ever smiled was at my table-yeah mine, it was the best table in the tiny break room. So I sat down without asking and started talking to her. 

She looked at me like I was crazy then I got her to laugh and it was an uneventful lunch, after that I was apparently her new best friend. At first I was a little um...wait what? Then I figured out she didn't have any other friends, seriously no friends (I say that now as I don't have any friends) I was just surprised because well-you should have seen her. But no, women were jealous of her, and if she got to hang out with them it never ended well, men treated her horribly-I watched a guy straight up  tell her if she had no gag reflex she would be perfect. I told him with something as small as what he was working with he didn't need to worry about a woman having a gag reflex. When she told me almost every single guy we worked had said something gross like that to her I was  shocked  then sad. Here she was everything women are told we should be and she was miserable-life is weird. 

And that's one of the things I've always loved  about reading,  seeing there are other sides to a story I might not have known about. It's too damn easy to make snap judgments, to assume you know what someone is going through. 

But what I love most about reading is the escape from the every day, the way you open a book and just slip into another world. What I love the most about writing though is creating another world, a world where women feel beautiful no matter what size they are, a world where the good girl  doesn't finish last, where might doesn't make right, where love is what matters more than a bank balance, and best of all, where everyone gets their happily ever after.