Cooper West ponderings

The Appeal of Poly Stories

Jun 9, 2013 | Editorial, Writing Update

I was recently talking by email with my friend and fellow author Sarah Madison about current projects and upcoming releases. She has gotten some fantastic reviews for her excellent book Boys of Summer, which she self-published, and she’s busy working on new M/M stories, a never-ending cycle we were companionably complaining about.

(I mean, as much as we love writing our stories and enjoy our characters, it still gets to be “a job” sometimes, when you are bogged down in difficult scenes or drowning in boring but necessary edits.)

I mentioned my own future venture into self-publishing, which will be some books in the “poly” or “ménage” category of male/female/male. It is a type of romance story I love reading and I love writing.

As a girl/young woman, I always got frustrated with the traditional romantic triangle where a girl has to choose between two awesome guys. For me it was always a question of why can’t she have it all? Never made sense to me, and on many occasions I felt the endings of those stories were forced in order to comply with what is, to me, a rather arbitrary rule about romantic relationships being composed of only two people.

I mean, I get that the one-on-one version of romance is what most people want. I’m not saying that’s wrong, in any way shape or form. But for some people, like me, it’s more of a restriction than an ideal. I could never find the stories that represented me and my desires, though.

In fact, it’s still hard to dig up those stories. The epublishing phenomenon has made it possible, but the category is very small and limited. Which means, of course, that my audience is probably pretty small. *sigh*

Well, this is more a labor of love type of project anyway! Ten to fifteen years ago, I would not have even had a hope in hell of getting my stories published, at all. Now I have that opportunity, and I’m going to grab it!

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