Hollywood romcoms frustrated the hell out of teenage me, but I loved the romances I saw in Austen and Shakespeare it wasn’t until I started learning about things like tropes, sexism and heteronormativity that I understood where the disconnect lay and why. I gravitated pretty quickly to all things fantastic and mythological, but I didn’t really figure out my relationship with romance until I was an adult. I grew up in a house full of books with parents who wrote for a living, so it’s no surprise that I started making up stories a very young age. I did a lot of research and worked with beta readers to ensure I was handling those topics as sensitively as possible. So, through the revision process, I nurtured those elements of the book. What I wrote was honest and deeply personal, and I was proud of myself for sharing those parts of myself. I had drafted the book so fast, that I couldn’t filter myself. I’d written about my own experiences with anxiety and depression, and I’d written about a questioning twenty-eight-year-old coming to understand his queerness, which included being on the asexual spectrum. And when I awoke from that creative fever dream, I found a story staring up at me that was different than what I expected. The first draft of the book literally poured out of me– I wrote seventy-thousand words in six days. I was intrigued by the idea of writing a story about what would happen if someone like me went on a show like The Bachelor, so I disguised myself as a handsome tech genius with abs and began writing.

To be honest, neither of these elements were planned when I had the initial idea for the book.

Minority Monsters! by Tab Kimpton