What am I Writing, What am I Reading? - An Introduction to me and my reading habits.

I love to read. I have always loved to read, ever since I was able to. However, I have also always been a picky reader. 

I remember being in Year 3, aged 8, having to get special permission to borrow books from the 'older-years only' section in my school's library, as I had read all of the - few - novels meant for my age group that piqued my interest. I liked the darker or more mature stories, and my favourites were those by an author called Sophie McKenzie, who introduced me to both the worlds of thrillers and teen romance. Then, later, in year 5, I of course, discovered the sensational Hunger Games series along with everyone else.

In my Secondary School years, my attention shifted to older young adult fiction; the darker and/or sexier, the better. I wanted the content of adult fiction but with characters my age. I became enamoured with Dark Crime fiction once again, with the 'I Hunt Killers' series by Barry Lyga, 'The Cellar' by Natasha Preston, and 'Stolen' by Lucy Christopher being standouts. Reading 'The Cellar' and 'Stolen' especially inspired me so much that I ended up writing my first proper, decent short story, which I called 'A Letter From the Grave'. An updated version of this short story won me my only writing competition prize in 2018, so I have a lot of affection for these novels.

As I left preteenhood and entered teenagedom for real, and my sexuality started to become unavoidable, I began reading more and more romances, all of which felt somewhat boring and empty to me. Then I finally bit the bullet and read my first Lesbian Romance - out of academic curiosity, of course - and that opened up a whole new world for me. Regrettably, I'm not sure what these books were because I was too anxious to note that I'd been reaching such materials, and I cannot remember the titles.

Also during this time, I read 'Forbidden' by Suzuma Tabitha, my introduction to truly taboo fiction. Unfortunately for teen me, it isn't an easy subgenre to find in the library's Young Adult section, and ultimately, I had to tread the scary waters of the internet to scratch that itch. In the end, 'Forbidden' and a novel called 'Tampa' by Alissa Nutting were the standouts.

Finally, the last significant discovery in my reading growth that led to the taste in novels that I have today was an accidental joy. Having no money and having pretty much cleared out my town library's YA section, I was scouring for decent free books on iBooks and downloaded 'Introductions', the first in the Ghost Bird series by C.L. Stone. From what I've seen from other readers of this series over the years, it's a common introduction (pun not intended) to the both widely loved and widely hated subgenre of Reverse Harem Romance...

From there, I read many good and many terrible reverse harem stories, always favouring those with other relationship(s) within the harem, often categorised by warnings of ‘MM’ or 'sword-crossing' at the end of the blurb. Eventually, I discovered a series called ‘Rise of the Iliri’ by Auryn Hadley (now also A.H. Hadley). This series was the best and most engaging reverse harem series for me, since reading the two ‘Academy’ series by C.L. Stone, and immediately after finishing I went searching for more by the author. This is how I discovered that my dreams of queer, polyamorous, fluid romances in fiction weren’t impossible. Auryn’s ‘Path of Temptation’ series, and Kitty Cox’s ‘Shades of Trouble’ series. Both of these had relationships not dissimilar to a reverse harem - one woman, multiple men - however the men also have meaningful romantic relationships. In the case of the POT series, the narrative also relies on fluid, open relationships. For me, a wonderful break from the very intense possessiveness that is often present in monogamous or reverse harem stories.

Now I am a member of Auryn Hadley and Kitty Cox's patreon and check out their releases whenever they may come, but am always on the lookout for new authors that are also open to exploring the wide array of possibilities within human relationships. Furthermore, now having comfortably found my niche, I have gone back to also reading all kinds of novels, with and without relationships, both classics and 'booktok trash'.