Newsletter - June 2022

If your answer is yes, please e-mail me at sophie@sophieamonroe.com. I still have a few free spots in my advance reader team!

I hope you've all been well these past month.

Not much changes for me, sitting at my little desk in Northern Ireland. The weather is getting warmer; a relief, considering the cost of heating oil.

We did treat ourselves to a day in the city. We went into Belfast early on a Saturday morning and it was the right decision to make because it was really busy by lunch time. We went to McDonald's for lunch ignoring many lovely restaurants, including Sushi ones (😭😭😭) only to find ourselves in the middle of two women yelling at each other. I'm not even going to get into who was right, but I ended up yelling at them to stop long enough for me to get my kids out of the middle so they could keep doing whatever they were doing once I was gone. To my amazement, they did. I 5 ft nothing and not used to people doing what I tell them.

What amazes me is that, while I lived in Belfast, I thought it to be a fairly small city, and now that I live in the countryside I feel it's too big and busy for me. It all goes to show is about perception.

As for work, I am almost done with the first re-write of my MM romance. I'm literally four chapters away. 

A lot of people don't understand the attraction for MM romance, or BL, as it's called when it comes to graphic novels and Asian series. Most people who don't know about are surprised to find the majority of MM romance readers are women.

I think it's a safety thing. There is a relationship between two men where either one of them can be any number of things, good, bad, toxic, sweet, a psychopath or a cry baby. They can be a dickhead Alpha male or the sweetest of boys, end up together, fall deeply in love, and break beds no end, and all of us is 100% safe for us, female readers, because we're not involved. We are watching it from a safe space from which we can enjoy this love story, the kinks and the sex, without having to question whether it's right or wrong from our own particular circumstances are females in this society.

Of course, this is only one factor. Another one could be that women very much feel vulnerable when it comes to relationships and it is attractive to see men brought to their knees in the name of love and desire, whether in a MF romance or a MM romance. 

There is likely another million psychological and sociological factors that influence this very unexpected trend but I am definitely not equipped to figure out what they are. All I know is that I enjoy those stories too, whether in novels, fanfics or graphic novels.

I've also started taking notes for the next novel in The Elysian series, which will tell Bear's (Isabel) story. Isabel is the youngest one of the Amador sisters and the male lead is in a rock band we've met in Dreams Come Crashing. I'm quite excited to start writing that, but I've a lot of work to do before that, so I better get back to it.

I hope you all have a great month, and I will talk to you in July.

Sophie