My Love Life and the Apocalypse by Melissa Welliver
We welcome, to the blog, Melissa Welliver today who shares some insight into writing her book amidst lockdown.
Writing a love story in the apocalypse
I had never written a romance storyline before I wrote My Love Life and the Apocalypse. It wasn’t my first book, more like my fifth, so that’s sort of surprising, especially as I write young adult. I love reading romance, especially as a B plot in my favourite blockbuster YA stories. Romance tropes are also a winner with me: from love triangles to the one bed trope, I love them all so much that I host a podcast about them with my friends called The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes. So why did I avoid something I loved for so long?
Therein lies an issue I think a lot of us authors have. Embarrassment. I wasn’t embarrassed to be known as a romance writer – I see the literary mud-slinging that goes on online with belittling the romance genre, and I am not about that. It was the embarrassment of my parents reading it, my friends and family. When we write any emotional scene, we pull up those feelings from our own experiences and reflect them on the page. So with romance, it felt the same, but almost more personal. Describing the mushy stuff using my own experience of, well, mushy stuff, felt a bit too cringy to even try. So I never did.
Then lockdown happened and I was left to my own devices pretty much all day, every day, with not much else to do but write. I watched a lot of comfort films and TV over that time and was once again drawn to how much I love a good fan ship, romance fan-fiction, and mushy scenes. So I decided, why not? Not one will read this draft anyway – I’d been on submission twice by this stage, over three years, and had no bites. I was feeling a bit fed up about writing for the industry, so decided to write for myself.
I put in all my favourite things. A dark apocalypse. A dystopic civilisation. Science-fiction tech. A wise-cracking robot. Cultural nostalgia. And, yes, a big dollop of romance. An eclectic mix, but one I was craving during the pandemic and one I felt I hadn’t seen much of before. It was the most fun I’d had writing in ages – and what surprised me the most was how much I enjoyed writing the romance scenes. I totally fell in love with writing falling in love. Plus the dark dystopia and the science-fiction elements gave me enough juxtaposition to feel like it was still me, with a twist of something new.
As for the embarrassment? It went away. The characters felt real enough to me that it was more like I was describing what they were naturally about to do, rather than shoe-horning in a cringy part of my own past romantic experiences. Besides, no one was going to read it anyway, remember? I couldn’t sell a book to save my life.
Well, I guess that’s egg on my face. But I’ve surprised myself with how little I’ve cared about what other people think, especially when I’ve written something that before felt too personal to share. I found my voice, and that’s what really sold the book. I finally embraced all the things I loved, instead of editing myself for fear of being judged. So I hope you enjoy reading my whole soul, and I hope you embrace your own unedited self.
My Love Life and the Apocalypse is published by Chicken House and is available now.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.