Taking the time to listen – to myself

Sometime last year I realized how tired I was of endlessly discussing romance novels online.

Yeah, there I said it.

Okay, to be fair, it wasn’t so much talking about them altogether as the repetitive way we romance fans tend to beat some topics surrounding them to death at times. That may or may not sound like a strange, rather contradictory thing to say, but it’s a true one, nonetheless. Then again, I also considered that maybe it had more to do with personal perspective than actual topic repetition. What I mean is simply this, as both a longtime reader of romances and someone who has been online talking about them for almost two decades, I decided that maybe, just maybe, I needed a tad bit more than simply a short, quick break from the “fandom” – and it is a fandom, no matter what some choose to think.

To put it bluntly, I gave myself permission to back off and explore the rest of my life, both reading and non.

It was very liberating to discover that even though I wasn’t constantly reading romances, I was still finding romance themes in just about everything I watched or played or did, which in turn gave me the freedom to squirrel that knowledge away like acorns for the long coming winter, literally and figuratively.

So, long story short, does any of the above mean that I’m done yakking about romance novels?

Are you people freaking nuts?

I have a house full of the things. What else am I going to talk about?

Heh.

Well, in truth, that is the real question that I started pondering this last year. If I don’t talk about romance novels on this site, what the heck am I going to talk about? What do I feel comfortable talking about? Because there are both some major and minor choices available but did I want to use this site for them. It took me a while but I finally came to terms with the fact that I’ve always felt like I was holding back the rest of my “self” whenever I talked about romances online and in particular on my own site. So why had I even started it in the first place? I made myself answer some hard questions and discovered some interesting answers. One was that I was always attempting to do things the way everyone else was doing them even when I thought I wasn’t. That set me back but also made me reevaluate something major. Seems like I needed to take this time to figure out that there are more sides to my “reading” than romances and that what I truly needed to do was to talk about them and a whole lot more besides. Let my true self go, as it were.

To be perfectly honest, romance novels aren’t the only books crowding me out of house and home.

OTOH, the thing is the concept of Romance (notice the capital R) is threaded through most of my interests in one way or another. Now chew on that one before we get back to it in greater detail in coming weeks. I’ve also always been curious about how so many things besides The Relationship are crammed into romances and so many other novels that never get talked about, too.

And I’m not talking about that sex thing either. Another thing to chew on.

There’s more to life than books. OTOH, there’s a lot to learn about life from books.

This could be an interesting year.

Oh, and before I forget it – Happy New Year.

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