A Summer/Beach Read Romcom…With Other Stuff, Too

When self-publishing my recent novel, Running with Hounds…and an English Degree, one of the first things I had to do was put it in a box. No, not like the whole “put it away in a box for 6 months then come back to it” deal, although I did do that during the pandemic. I mean, I had to figure out what genre to put it in for all the different places it’s available for sale.

I looked at the main elements: a female protagonist who just graduated college, 2 adorable greyhounds she has to learn how to wrangle, and 2 cute guys (even more wrangling). 😊 The main story takes place over the summer, and there’s tons of sarcasm and slapstick. On the surface, it definitely says “romcom.”

Honestly, it was the kind of story that, when I first wrote it, I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested. It felt like a “fluffy” piece, one that maybe only I would enjoy since it was based on my life. But when I pitched it to an agent years ago, she said such a “light read” was in at the time, that people were looking for feel-good stories in a troubling social and political climate. It wasn’t something I thought about then, but seeing the way people have gravitated toward it, much more so than my first book, I get it.

But then there’s this. I was talking to a friend who said, “I was surprised at all the different elements in your book. It’s not a traditional romcom. There’s a lot more to it.” This person recently had earned her Ph.D. and mentioned how much she could relate to the theme of figuring out your next step in life. At the beginning of the story, my protagonist, Denise, is in her sixth failed interview, trying to figure out how she went from star pupil to unemployable writer. She takes a job dog-sitting for a wealthy couple, which turns out to be WAY harder than she thought. And she can’t decide between 2 guys who represent different avenues for her future.

The through line of the novel is how one decides what their next phase in life will be when all life says is “NO.” Denise graduates with an oversized sense of accomplishment, confident it’ll translate into bigger and better things. Instead, she ends up back with her parents in her small hometown, desperate to break out any way she can. Once her rosy path is littered with thorns, her ego doesn’t know what to do or where to go. Thus she allows herself to be swept up by men who offer incredible chemistry but at a cost.

I’ve never been a solid genre writer. Reading different genres growing up, there wasn’t one that stood out as a favorite. I always wanted to mix and match tone and pacing and characters because I felt that more closely represented real life. Even stories with fantastical elements, as creative or crazy or fun as they were, only interested me if I could directly relate with the characters in some way. Escape was never my jam—immersion was. I always think of the line from the movie Postcards from the Edge: “I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.”

So it’s been an interesting journey with this book, because I’ve learned romance readers are SUPER specific with what they want. I’ve come across a lot of reviewers who have quite the list of demands: HEA (happily ever after) only, no love triangles, clean language, etc. As mine is not traditional romance, I’ve only successfully sold it on social media to people who have professed to being “suckers for anything with dogs” or were “looking for laugh-out-loud funny” (which thankfully has been a consistent refrain from family and friends). Looking at it from a bigger perspective, it can be sold as contemporary women’s fiction.

But genre aside, I think there’s plenty of study on the human condition. At least, that’s the story I’m going with.