I write about two guys falling in love. However that should happen. More often than not, it’s on the sweeter side. There’s not a lot of heavy angst. Just two guys meeting (or who already know each other) and then falling in love while they go through some stuff.
And it seems my stories are a particular length. You won’t see any 100,000 word epics from me. My plots aren’t that intricate. My characters aren’t that complex. I use as many words as I need to tell the story, and no more than that. So my wheelhouse seems to be the novella length book. Average is about 30k. Which is (very) roughly about 100 pages. I’m very comfortable with this and happy about it. I’m not going to pad my stories with scenes that aren’t necessary just to have more words. But neither do I have a strict word count (unless it’s a sub call) to which I’m trying to write. When I write the story, I have a goal sometimes, but ultimately, it will take as many words as it takes and whatever that is, I’m happy with. (Though, yes if you look at the WIPs page, I’m aiming for something a little longer with my next one. At the moment it feels like a longer story, but that could all change.)
It took me a while to get to this point. I looked at what everyone else was doing, and I put this immense pressure on myself to be like them. That all the hurt and pain and angst and long, drawn out, word heavy books made it real. And they are. Those books are very real. And they make you feel and hurt and have satisfaction when you get to the end (I love reading those books!) But it took me a long while to get to the point where I could accept that my stories are just as real. (Which is silly, because sometimes I’m in the mood for shorter and fluffier so it makes sense that other people would be too)
Now I’m in a place where I have embraced what I write and how I write them. (I wrote about the how here.)
And if all that sounds like your kind of story, then please, check out my backlist.
Kris T. Bethke--Author of M/M Romance 