Why Did I Write A Romantic Comedy When I Don’t Read or Watch Romantic Comedies?

I get this question occasionally when I’m selling copies of my book The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy from the trunk of my car:  Why did you write a romantic comedy when you don’t read romantic comedy novels and you don’t watch romantic comedy movies?

It’s a fair question.  And I guess my answer is pretty good because the ‘trunk of my car’ sales of The Sunset Rises have been decent.

Short Version: Because nobody would have read my memoir.

Long version: For about 35 years, one of my few goals in life was to write a novel.  Just one novel.  During my 30 years of teaching, I wrote several rough drafts of different ideas, but I never could quite get a finished story that I was satisfied with.

After I retired from teaching, I started writing a memoir that bounced between childhood memories and war stories from my teaching years.  I was really happy with the quality of my writing, but one day I realized that nobody would ever read my book.

It was kind of a jarring thought: Why would anybody read my memoir?  

To most people, I would just be another retired English teacher who had an unfulfilled dream of being a writer.  There was almost no point in pouring so many personal thoughts and experiences and emotions into a memoir that nobody would read.  Plus, my memoir wasn’t even a novel.  Finishing my memoir wouldn’t have even been fulfilling my writing goal.  What a waste!

But I also liked some of the elements in my memoir.

At the time, I had just finished up a blog serial called “Awkward Moments in Dating,” where I (usually) embellished some stuff that had happened to me back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Even though the views on these stories were hit and miss (as the views are hit and miss with most of my blog posts), I believed most of these blog episodes were engaging .  

“Awkward Moments in Dating” didn’t get this blog a lot of hits, but it got a high percentage of binge stats, which tells me that the few readers who find an episode will read through several of them and finish the entire story.  That in turn tells me that the readability of those blog posts is high (as opposed to when I diagram sentences written by Charles Dickens or James Joyce).

Then another thought hit me.  I could disguise my memoir as a romantic comedy, kind of like how Kurt Vonnegut ‘allegedly’ disguised his ‘memoir’ of his experiences at Dresden as a science fiction novel in Slaughter-House Five.

No, I’m not comparing myself to Kurt Vonnegut.

No, I’m not comparing The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy to Slaughter-House Five.

I’m just doing something that Kurt Vonnegut did in a different way.  And I’m pretty sure Kurt Vonnegut had read some science fiction before he began writing science fiction novels.

Nothing is guaranteed.  Just because I wrote a romantic comedy doesn’t mean anybody will read it. People who know me might read The Sunset Rises: A Romantic Comedy just because they can’t believe I wrote a romantic comedy of all things, and they have to see what I did with it. But that only gets me so far.

The next step is to get people who read romantic comedies to read The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy when The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy is different from most romantic comedies (from what I’ve heard about them) in a lot of ways.

Part of that next step is also to get people who DON’T normally read romantic comedies to read The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy when there’s no way for the readers to know ahead of time that it’s unlike most romantic comedies.

But that’s for another blog post.

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I think my short version is the more effective answer.

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For those who can’t buy The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy from the trunk of my car, you can find it here on Amazon!

Or I can send you a signed copy myself!