Miranda Levi

I had one of the strangest, funniest, most clarifying realizations at Norwescon this year.

I was sitting on a panel, talking about romantasy, talking about genre, talking about the kinds of stories readers reach for and why. Very normal panel behavior. Very writerly. Very “I know what I’m doing here.”

And then somewhere in that conversation, it hit me.

Oh no.

I write romance.

Not only do I write romance, I may have been writing romance for most of my life without fully admitting it to myself.

Apparently I needed to attend a convention as a panelist to learn something about my own books that readers probably could have told me years ago.

The funniest part is that I have spent years describing my work through every possible door except the obvious one. Horror. Fantasy. Dark fantasy. Urban fantasy. Paranormal. Speculative. Suspense. Magical weirdness. Gothic whateverness. All true, to be fair. But also? Romance. Deeply. Obviously. Almost embarrassingly romance.

Even the book I thought of as horror, the one I did not even fully realize was horror when I wrote it, is romantasy. Dark romantasy horror, if we are being honest. Which feels very on-brand for me. I do not seem capable of writing two people circling each other through danger, obsession, grief, fate, power, longing, and body horror without eventually having to admit that yes, somewhere in the middle of all that blood and myth, I am still writing a love story.

And once I saw it, I could not unsee it.

Restraint? Absolutely romance.

The Fountain of Youth trilogy? Epic romance in monstrous clothing.
Mother Nature? Also romance, just dressed as cozy speculative sci-fi chaos.
My science fiction novel may be the outlier here, but the rest of them? Oh, they have been kissing stories all along.

That realization sent me backward in time a little, because when I was younger, I wanted to be a romance author.

I do not think I said that very loudly, though.

Like a lot of people who grew up “smart” and bookish and desperate to be taken seriously, I absorbed the message that romance was lesser. That it was frivolous. Embarrassing. A guilty pleasure. Not as worthy as literary fiction, not as clever as science fiction, not as respectable as historical fiction, not as important as the books men liked to praise in classrooms and publishing conversations and cultural gatekeeping circles.

And looking back now, I want to grab my younger self by the shoulders and say: girl, that was bullshit.

It was misogyny with better branding. It was cultural snobbery dressed up as taste. It was the old trick of dismissing things women love, especially if those things center emotion, longing, pleasure, intimacy, and choice. The second women flock to something, create community around it, spend money on it, build careers in it, and speak honestly about desire inside it, suddenly someone somewhere decides it is unserious.

Meanwhile, the numbers tell a very different story.

Romance is not some tiny side shelf of publishing that survives on embarrassment and secrecy. It is one of the biggest commercial forces in the industry. Circana reported in June 2025 that U.S. print romance sales were up 24 percent year over year, with 51 million romance units sold in the previous twelve months, more than double the volume from four years earlier. The same report said romance was the leading growth category in the total print book market, and that romantasy was one of the fastest-growing romance subjects, posting triple-digit growth. Publishers Weekly later reported that romance sold almost 44 million print units in 2025, while fantasy sold 24.1 million. In 2024, romance sales had already risen nearly 9 percent.

This is not a niche. This is not a little guilty secret hidden under someone’s mattress. Readers are loudly, proudly, enthusiastically choosing these books. Goodreads even added a dedicated romantasy category in 2024 because the readership had become too big to ignore, and Publishers Weekly reported that seven of the top ten bestselling books in the first nine months of 2024 were romance or romantasy titles.

So maybe what changed for me at Norwescon was not my writing.

Maybe what changed was my willingness to name it.

Because once I let myself say it out loud, a whole lot of my work snapped into focus.

Of course Restraint is romance. It is a story about desire, tension, secrecy, power, and the emotional disaster of wanting the wrong person at exactly the wrong time.

Of course The Fountain of Youth is romance.

It is not only romance, but it is absolutely romance.

It is about an epic love story between a once-god and a human girl. It is about devotion so intense it survives death, reincarnation, centuries of loss, and the slow corruption of the man who cannot bear to lose her again. It is about belief changing the shape of a being. It is about how belief systems renamed a fallen god into a demon. It is about a woman who became something more than human for love, and the monster he became in the wake of losing her over and over again. It is dark and obsessive and mythic and tragic and yes, romantic as hell.

Romance does not have to be soft to be romance.

It can be feral.
It can be haunted.
It can be violent with grief.
It can be full of teeth.

Sometimes it is kissing in a flower field. Sometimes it is, “I crossed lifetimes for you and ruined myself in the process.”

Frankly, I like both.

That is the other thing I have learned as I get older. I am in my forties now, and one of the genuine gifts of that is that I care a lot less about being legible to people who are committed to misunderstanding things. I care less about impressing the imaginary audience in the back of the room who hears the word romance and thinks that means easy, shallow, unserious, or unskilled. Writing romance well is not easy. Writing desire well is not easy. Writing chemistry, emotional stakes, longing, payoff, conflict, vulnerability, and intimacy is not easy. Writing a love story people believe in is not easy. And writing one inside horror, fantasy, suspense, or speculative fiction does not make it less romantic. It just changes the costume.

I think for a long time I believed I had to choose.

That I could write dark books, serious books, weird books, mythic books, scary books, or I could write love stories.

Turns out I was always writing both.

Turns out the thing tying many of my stories together is not just magic, or danger, or genre-bending, or the grotesque, or the speculative lens.

It is yearning.

It is connection.

It is the question at the center of so many of my books: what will love make us become?

Sometimes the answer is beautiful.
Sometimes the answer is monstrous.
Usually, if I am writing it, it is both.

So yes. I write kissing stories.

Some of them have crimes in them.
Some of them have gods in them.
Some of them have horror in them.
Some of them have magic, monsters, sea-wives, dispatch centers, ruined men, and women standing at the edge of fate with blood on their hands.

But they are still kissing stories.

And I am finally done apologizing for that.

In fact, I think I am ready to lean in harder.

Because if Norwescon taught me anything, it is this:

I do not write around romance.
I write through it.

And apparently, I have for a very long time.