Choosing what you want.

Sometimes these things are easy to write. Sometimes they all but write themselves. If I wanted to do a bit on the Coalition breakup this week, I could probably ask Siri to write it for me. Even she couldn’t mess that up. But Annabel Crabb has already written that meisterwerk, and I had something else planned for this week anyway.

Even so, I hardly know where to begin.

Writing a private column like this, I get to choose every week what interests me. After decades of freelancing, of filing copy to meet other people’s demands, I can tell you what a rare privilege that is - choosing what you want. I suspect it’s why the magic of writing attracts so many people, the idea of controlling their world by creating another on the page or a screen.

Sometime in March or April of next year—I should probably check—I’ll hit forty years of paying my bills with writing. A hell of a thing, honestly.

But still not as surprising to me as what I’m doing next week.

I decided, about a year or so back, that I wanted to write a few romances. I’ll just sit here for a moment while you recover. Nobody was more surprised than I.

It happened by accident. I was writing a series of spy novels for Audible, and two of the characters went off script and, well, things got a little complicated. They started out as enemies and ended up making kissy face.

Apparently, this is a thing that happens quite a bit in romance novels.

Anyway, I like it when characters come to life and take over the storytelling. It leaves me more time to catch up on my Netflix backlist and the teetering stack of shame, which is the unread book pile by my bed.

It was, I will confess, great fun to watch this pair go from mortal enemies to ‘it’s complicated.’

And it was, I will confess, a little addictive.

At the end of most writing days, after hours of either grinding through political content for ASB or blowing up the world for fun and profit, I found myself playing with ideas for more of these ‘other’ sorts of stories.

We become what we pay attention to, and during my working hours, I mostly pay attention to ugliness. Even when I’m writing something fun, like a big dumb airport novel, it’s usually grown from something completely not-fun, like months of research into the critical vulnerabilities of modern cities’ food supply systems to relatively simple cyberattacks.

Playing around with a new genre—let's call it Spy Romance, I guess—confirmed for me the truth of the Milan Kundera line: “Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”

It is K-Man, it truly is. Even if those two people are on the run from a former KGB boss turned deadly international art fraudster, or chasing a rogue mysterious operator across Europe on the Orient Express and…

Whoops. Sorry. No spoilers.

As a writer, there’s something deeply satisfying about sinking into a story that runs between two points of light around which gathers the whole of the universe.

So, fuck it, I thought. Imma give this a red hot go.

I wrote two romance novels. Actual romance novels. There’s kissing. There’s longing. There may even be emotional growth. (But not for me. I’m a lost cause.) Then I started another because I’m fucking greedy for love, man! It’s coming in June.

I can happily tell you they’re not for everyone. But maybe, just maybe, they’re for you. If you think so, I’ve started a new stack over here, where I’ll be writing about these stories and the strange little creative universe they’re spawning. I’m hoping some of you might feel like writing there, too. I’d like it to be a shared storyworld. I let my daughter play around in there while I was building it, and her take on it amused me bigly.

It’s still under construction, but the paint’s drying fast. You can sign up if you want to come along. There’s sample chapters and everything:

And if not? That’s cool too. I’ll be here next Friday, grumbling about stuff and plotting the downfall of our enemies.

That’s it. That’s your column. Be kind. I’ve never been so nervous about hitting publication on a piece in my fucking life.