I live in the United States. By now, I think everyone in the world knows what’s happening here. I’m privileged to live in a “blue” state, i.e. one where policies tend to be relatively liberal and actually in the best interests of most residents, but even here we’ve been seeing signs that the “executive” orders passed this past week are having an effect. (I’m also privileged to have dual citizenship, and while I’m currently planning to remain in the U.S., I’m making sure I have all my documents in order in case I need to move to my other country…)
I don’t often get political. That isn’t because I don’t care or don’t have opinions; it’s because in addition to caring and having opinions, I have mental health issues, and I choose to prioritize my mental health over expressing opinions online and getting excoriated by those who disagree with me. And sometimes by those who *agree* with me, because they misunderstand the way I’ve phrased something.
In the meantime, while I’m privately processing the hellscape my country has become and figuring out how I can make things even a tiny bit better for people in my personal sphere, I’m also continuing to write. I write male/male romance. There are explicit sex scenes in most of my books. Which means I could very well be on the chopping block for “producing pornography” or whatever bullshit the current administration spews to find reasons to clamp down on those of us who write LGBTQ+ fiction–even *without* explicit sex scenes. Before anyone says fiction without sex scenes wouldn’t be considered pornography…as recently as ten years ago, I had a completely G-rated book, no sex scenes, not even a KISS between the main characters, that Amazon labeled “erotica” solely because the main characters were both men. (And that was released by a publisher…self-publishers get it even worse.)
But I’ve been writing most of my life, other than the several years when I wasn’t able to write because my mental health wouldn’t allow it. Most of my life, writing has *helped* my mental health. And I’m not giving up on my werewolves or my books just because the country I live in has become this… place. I don’t even have words for it.