on “too much”

Well, it happened: I got my first “too much” text about my book.

I want to be clear that the rest of this post isn’t me being passive aggressive about that commentary, because her feedback was overall helpful, and even if I don’t like it, it’s accurate (more on that later). This isn’t a reactive “well screw you for not thinking my work is perfect!!” to a person I genuinely consider a friend, so much as a realization that I was having an irrational reaction to a couple of her words.

So here’s how it happened: a friend of mine read Bergamot & Bygones the day it came out, like an angel, told her coworkers to read it, and then provided some feedback to me. Now, said friend is in publishing, so she has her credentials, and it was helpful feedback, multifaceted. Those two words were really just a small part of it, and are super warranted and ultimately, I think it’s unsurprising that it landed that way.

So why does ‘too much’ bother me?

It could be that I’ve heard it before, as have most women, I think. But more likely, it’s its shadow: not enough. Too much of one thing always feels like it’s hand in hand with not enough of another, and that is a deep fear of mine. I didn’t expect it to extend to a romance novel, but it did, and I took a minute to sit with why and how that was so discomfiting. Someone telling me that, around the 80% mark, my book is just an excess of orgasms, is factually correct. It is what I wrote, it is what I intended to write, so why did I feel any type of way? Because it made me wonder if I should’ve done more.

At the end of the day, I didn’t.

I wrote a smutty, tropey, romance/erotica novel, that taught me a heck of a lot about writing, and myself, and stuff I hadn’t healed from that I thought I had. It’s now on me to be okay with the fact that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. And that’s hard for me, someone who’s deeply socialized to be amiable and amicable, and never neither. But that perfect daughter, that pure-as-driven-snow debutante, doesn’t write the kind of book I did. She certainly doesn’t share it. So, yeah, I let go of my opportunity to wallow, because I published the damn thing. If someone reads it and has fun with it, truly that’s all I could hope for. If someone gets to that 80% mark, and decides it’s too much, that’s also very okay.

That being said, I’m working on the next one, and I’m sorry to say, it’s even more of the same.

P.S. if someone’s too much is your just enough, then Bergamot & Bygones is out in paperback today.