S.B. Barnes's Blog

How flawed can a main character in a romance be? Industry standards are pretty firm in that main characters in a romance need to be above...

It's finally time! I posted the cover by amazing artist Tuisku Hiltunen a while ago (check out her work here ) but here is the final...

When does escapism in romance work for you? As a lover of (queer) romance novels, today I want to talk about a very important feature:...

Little update: All four books of the Minor Penalties are now under contract, so I'm updating to include the blurbs and some other, uh,...

In late August 2024, when my husband and I finished moving into and renovating our house, a weird aspect of maternity leave finally began...

Now Second Chance is out there in the world, I'm focusing on my next project: a four-part hockey romance series. The first two parts are under contract with Nine Star Press and will be out at some point within the next year to eighteen months, so have a sneak preview here!

Book One: Two for HoldingPlaying defense never won the game—or the guy.

Tom Crowler has been captain of the San Francisco Sea Lions for a decade of failures. With no cups or trophies to show for his time in the NHL, Tom retreated into himself a long time ago, and that’s exactly where he intends to stay until he retires. But when he catches the new team superstar, Jaxon Grant, in a compromising position, Tom finds it impossible to continue hiding his deepest secret behind a bland, pleasant mask.

Jax is everything Tom isn’t: loud, flashy, the winner of multiple NHL Awards, and—oh, yeah—gay enough to get traded to San Francisco because of a potential PR scandal with his old team. At first, he thinks Tom catching him means the next trade, the next rejection for being just a little too much for other people to take. When it turns out the two of them have more in common than talent on the ice, though, Jax finds himself drawn in by pulling Tom out.

 

As animosity gives way to a partnership neither of them saw coming, Tom and Jax are left facing new challenges. Will Jax’s impulsive nature put Tom’s deeply valued privacy at risk? Or will Tom’s reticence force Jax into pretending to be someone he isn’t? And if they can’t even figure each other out, how can they save a struggling NHL team from bad coaching and internal division?

Book Two: Two for BoardingThere’s no such thing as a safe bet in hockey—or in love

With sixteen years as the San Francisco Sea Lions' top defenseman under his belt, Phil Easton is tired. After his coaches push him into playing on a bad knee and he ends up on long-term injured reserve, the chances of his contract being renewed are dwindling before his eyes. He's ready to hang up his skates when head coach Ben Morris shows up on his doorstep to help him recover. But as what starts as a short term boarding situation to help Phil get around on one leg turns into friendship and maybe more, Phil can't help noticing a few things about his coach that don't add up.

Ben Sinclair has never been a hockey fan. He's never even been a sports fan. Living in Phil's spare room, investigating a scandal at the heart of the Sea Lions' management and growing closer to Phil by the day to do a favor for his estranged family is just one of many brief interludes in his nomadic life. When his family calls in yet another favor in the form of taking in his wayward nephew Charlie, what started as a way for Ben to help Phil quickly becomes the reverse. The closer they grow, the more Ben relies on Phil for help with coaching and Charlie, going against every instinct he's trained into himself for two lonely decades.

With his own heart on the line, can Ben accept Phil's offer of a convenient marriage to keep custody of Charlie? Can Phil figure out his own sexuality in time to make the marriage real? And can both of them work together to protect the Sea Lions from a conspiracy going all the way to the very top?

Stay tuned for info on ARCs, publication dates and books three and four!

Super exciting news: Second Chance, the sequel to Heart First, is scheduled for release on February 4th! I'm really looking forward to it, I feel like with the help of the great team at Nine Star Press I got the most I possibly could out of this manuscript.

If you're interested in reviewing an ARC, I would be thrilled to provide one. Last time quite a few of the people who got ARCs didn't end up leaving reviews, so this time if you want one I ask that you send me an e-mail to sbbarnesauthor@gmail.com letting me know you want a copy and telling me where you'll be reviewing (goodreads, storygraph, amazon, personal blog etc.), just so I'm not screaming into the void here. I ask that all reviews be put up by February 4th!

And here a few hints of what is to come in Second Chance, if you're on the fence about reading/reviewing!

My tumblr followers voted for this as a blog post topic and I kinda wish they hadn't.

Let's start with a flowchart.

Tangentially related argument I could not fit into this image: People keep reading M/M romances written by straight white women and claiming they’re supporting the queer community but then turn around and call sapphic fiction “gross” (yes, that’s a thing that happened on Threads recently) and don’t buy M/M books actually written by queer men.

Here’s the thing. In my opinion, all of these arguments are true to some degree. I’m not out here to convince anyone they are wrong actually and it is totally A-OK for straight white women to write M/M romance without taking the time to consider and work through this debate. I’m also not out here to say straight white women ought to never ever write anything of the sort. For one, it would be pretty hypocritical as I am a white woman who is not comfortably disclosing her sexuality online but living in an outwardly heterosexual marriage and I write M/M romances.

I also don’t think I have a lot to add to some aspects of this debate. There are some aspects where the voices of queer men and people of color are more important than whatever I have to say. This reddit post is a great starting point for various opinions on the matter.

When thinking about this blog post, there are only two things I think are worthwhile for me to talk about because I can actually add something to the discussion. One is general and one is deeply personal.

The general point: Desire is political.

There’s an interview with Hozier floating around on the internet where he talks about how everything is political, even a child’s drawing of a house because it reveals what a child thinks a house should be even if they live in an apartment building or a tent or some other kind of abode. I believe strongly that the stance “everything is political” must also apply to desire.

Why is that important here? Well, it’s not value-neutral that most of these books feature white men. It’s not value-neutral that the body types most often presented are “built athlete”, “motorcycle daddy” or “skinny nerd”. It’s definitely not value-neutral that the types of representation (race, culture, body type, mental illness…) in the book are often part of the “trope sheet” used to advertise the book (see this blog post about that phenomenon). The popular books in the genre define what is desirable in it, and what is desirable is, well, a buff white hockey player, apparently. But only if he still has all his teeth. No, seriously, I’ve read about a hundred hockey romances in the last year and in only one was a main character attracted to his love interest’s tooth gap.

If we accept the stance that straight white women writing about queer men is appropriative and fetishistic, we accept that straight white women cornering the market on m/m romances is a political act and that their defining of what counts as desirable is forcing a hegemonic straight vision on queer desire.

This dovetails into the “m/m romance by women is het porn in a clown disguise” argument, which, again, I don’t necessarily think is wrong. It’s certainly not true of all M/M romance, I wouldn’t still be reading and writing so much of it if I thought it was always true, but I have read a non-zero amount of books that veered into “if I think traditional gender roles are ~sexy~ it’s okay to write them with no further reflection”.

In my opinion, which, in case I haven’t made that clear enough, is an OPINION and not the be-all end-all, a lot of this stuff can and often is grounded in writers reflecting on where they’re coming from and why they’re writing what they’re writing. Like I said, there are a lot of M/M romance writers I really like, for recs look at my other blog posts or my goodreads.

The issues begin when writers AND readers come into the genre with the stance “oh I just happen to only like books with white athlete protagonists” or “oh I only like omegaverse books where the omega needs to be taken care of all the time” or “oh I only like age gap books where the younger MC is a virgin” etc etc and do not take the time to reflect on that desire being inherently political. I’m not saying it’s wrong to like any of those things and I’m not judging anyone for reading any of the above—what I am saying is that enjoying those things specifically is a result of the culture we (the English-speaking readership driving amazon’s top 100 list) live in and what it teaches us should be desirable, specifically in a way that sidelines bodies of color, fat bodies, queer bodies that LOOK queer.

I genuinely think most writers and readers of M/M romance come into it with pretty healthy attitudes about these things; I see a lot of posts asking for less commonly seen dynamics and body types, I see a lot of critical discussion about these topics. I have also read several books in the genre that struck me as racist, sexist and homophobic. Writers of M/M romance, even straight white women, are not a monolith.

The personal point: why do I write M/M romance?

Like I said, I am very much part of the problem here. So why do I still write M/M romance?

Well, again, it has to do with desire. Specifically, It has to do with my relationship to desire and my own body and my own history. As you can probably tell from the everything about me, I’ve been involved in online communities and fanfiction since I was a pretty young teenager (I made my fanfiction.net account when I was eleven and I felt like such a rebel because the TOS said I had to wait until I was thirteen).

I then went on to have what was probably a pretty normal experience of being a teenage girl. I hated my body. I was fat (I am again, there was a brief phase where I wasn’t in between, which weirdly was the time when I wasn’t online so much and also had a lot more anxiety and several retrospectively horrifying sexual encounters). I thought my vagina was weird. A male friend made fun of me for having arm hair, so I thought it was normal to shave it off. I had a crush on a classmate and everyone found out and made fun of me for it. My parents had an awful divorce and I compensated by eating my feelings, a strategy I still haven’t figured out how to grow out of.

You know. Being a teenager, inhabiting a body. It was gross and terrible and I hated it.

And at the same time, I was discovering desire.

Having had completely unfiltered access to all of fanfiction.net and then livejournal, I knew a lot about sex and sexuality by the time I was fourteen or so and the hormones were really kicking in. I saw the original Supernatural kink meme. I read a lot of explicit fanfiction. I started toying with the idea of writing my own.

From the start I was pretty open-minded about what I read, but I didn’t like to admit it to myself. I enjoyed reading het stuff, and F/F, but I felt safest reading and writing M/M. I didn’t want to deal with unpacking my sexuality, which I had kind of always known was not going to end up being completely straight (still not interested in talking about it in more detail online). I especially didn’t want to deal with having to think about my body, the body I found so hateful and undesirable, as an object of desire. How could I? I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting me. Reading about women I found attractive having sex was kind of torturous because, well, that would never be me. Write what you know? Okay, I may not know what it’s like to be a queer man but I sure knew what it was like to hate myself, I could easily put myself in Dean Winchester’s shoes and feel a lot safer about it. (Yes, the sixteen-year-old angst was strong, yes, the fic is still out there, no, I will not link it. You can do the legwork and find it yourself).

I didn’t stay an angsty teen forever. I went on to experience being desired, to start feeling more at home in my body, to find someone I loved and get married. But I still find writing M/M an easier way to delve into my own thoughts, experiences and understanding of desire. Part of that is habit, a habit I could probably break if I tried hard enough. Part of that is the simple, boring explanation that I am attracted to men. Part of that is that it remains to me the safest way to explore queer identity.

Finally I will leave you with this. It is fully your prerogative to say I am part of the problem. I will even agree with you. Just from a writing perspective, though – one thing I have always loved about writing identities I am not is finding the one kernel of shared experience I have with a character who is a different person from me and spinning that kernel out into an understanding of what it means to be human.

 

*If you want me to talk about top/bottom discourse I will need a strong drink and a deep dive into my 2020 fandom tumblr account. Not today, Satan.

About a year ago, I wrote a mini-essay on my tumblr with the title "Hockey Romances. Why?". I cross-posted it here a few months later when I got around to making this site. To this day, it remains my most popular post on either platform. At the time, I was about two months into medical leave during pregnancy and mainlining M/M romances since I was between writing projects myself, having finished the first draft of Second Chance.

I thought, oh well, I've thought about why I am so obsessed with this genre and written it out, and I even wrote a little 10k football story for a friend for Christmas to exorcise the sports romance bug (because I live in Germany, so I actually know things about football, as opposed to hockey). Surely this will be out of my system soon.

(Highly recommend Ari Baran if you want interesting themes, character growth and good hockey knowledge. Highly recommend Brigham Vaughn if you want fun, fluffy, trope-y goodness. Highly recommend Ashlyn Kane and Morgan James if you want a mix of fun, fluffy and good hockey knowledge. Highly recommend Avon Gale if you don't want to read about only rich and successful players. Highly recommend Scoreless Game by Anna Zabo and L.A. Witt if you want to cry a lot.)

Fast forward to a year later and it is not, in fact, out of my system. I wake up in the morning and check the game results from last night's hockey games (not to tell on myself but I find myself rooting for Toronto and Edmonton more and more even though I think Dallas could win this year, but also I am still an idiot about sports so who knows). Every time I catch wind of a new hockey romance, I order it, even though a lot of them have ended up being not quite what I wanted.

In a turn of events so predictable I should have seen it coming but somehow didn't, in late August I started toying with the idea of writing my own hockey romance when I couldn't find new reading material. By then I had watched tons of highlights and post-game interviews and felt as if I actually understood the game (watching actual full-length games while living in Germany and having a six month old baby is difficult for reasons like time zones and time in general being a vortex. Someday we will all be able to sit still for long enough. I have faith.)

Shortly after, I wrote a 75k draft in two weeks, typing away on my tablet in five minute increments while hanging out in my son's room listening to the toy elephant that plays the same three songs over and over again. Surely, I thought, this will finally eradicate the hockey demon within me.

By the time I had finished the first draft, I had the plots for three further books in the series outlined.

All this to say, "Two for Holding", the first book in the Minor Penalties series, is now under contract with NineStar Press and will be published at some point in the next year or so. I put Maple Leafs merch on my Christmas wishlist (would have gone for a Draisaitl jersey tbh but the Oilers colors are not for me). I have accepted that this is just who I am now. You can find more information about "Two for Holding" in the "Books" section of my website and further updates on Instagram and Tumblr, because I am constitutionally incapable of shutting up about this.

Hockey romances. I don't know why, but I have accepted my fate.

(Here is my aptly titled writing playlist for your pleasure)

In publishing news, book 2 is with its fantastic editor at Nine Star Press and I'll be finishing up with it in the fall. Release date tbd; when I know the release date I might run a giveaway with some print copies of Heart First. Until then, ebooks are half-off on smashwords until the end of July!

In writing news, I finally finished outlining book 3 and wrote the prologue. In an ideal world, there will be a total of four Hudson Valley Murder Mysteries:

Heart First

Second Chance

Third Degree

Fourth Wall

We shall see if that world comes to be. It turns out having a small human depending on you makes writing a lot harder.

Until then, if you're interested, here's the writing playlist for Second Chance:

(and a few other playlists)