With every spin of the globe, people everywhere get a chance at a new year: a time to reflect on what we've done and who we've become, and a chance to try once again to take steps toward making our dreams come true. For some, dreams can feel impossible, pushed into the periphery until life spurs the dreamer with new urgency. For author Helena Greer, it took fifteen years before she was ready to focus on pursuing her dream of writing a book.
Following her dreams
"I got a bachelor's in creative writing, and then I didn't write anything for fifteen years. I went to library school and I was building a career in capitalism and not writing," she said. The nudge that finally pushed her toward following her dreams came from an unlikely place: the Hallmark channel.
"I didn't intend to write romance novels, but I read a lot of romance novels, and I was watching Hallmark movies and got angry at the lack of Queer representation. And so I started drafting a book. I rage-tweeted about it and a friend was like, 'You could just write a book?' So I started rage tweeting about it, intending to just throw it up on Wattpad or make it available on Kindle Unlimited, somewhere where my friends could read it if they wanted, but not with the intention of publishing."
Although Greer never intended to release her work to the public, her friends recognized her talent and encouraged her to take a chance. "I have a friend who's a writing buddy; she has several books out, and we get together and write. She read it and was like, 'You know, I think this is something you should query to agents.'"
She started the publication process and persevered through some difficult times. "I queried and signed with my agent in 2019, and we went on submission in May of 2020, which was a weird time to go on submission for sure because the world was in a strange place. We sold the book to Hachette Forever. It was surprising to me because I hadn't ever written a novel before and it's unusual to publish with the Big Five [publishers] without having written anything else before. It was sort of a zeitgeist thing — not to say anything bad about Season of Love, but six Queer holiday romances are coming out this year from major publishers, so I think there was something in the zeitgeist where every publisher was looking for something like that. Hopefully, there was also some talent on my part, but there was also luck and timing that happened."
Queering up Hallmark
Greer's inspiration for Season of Love came from a desire to see more LGBTQ+ representation in Hallmark-esqe Christmas movies. To keep her novel aligned with the classic romance genre, she took notes on exactly what goes into making a Hallmark Christmas movie feel so warm and magical.
"I looked at the story beats of an average Hallmark movie. In a Hallmark movie, the main character will have an icy blonde fiancé who's wrong for them, they will go back to their hometown they haven't been to in ten years and kind of reconnect with their family and there will be a grouchy lumberjack-type person who doesn't think they can help save the business or whatever," Greer explained. "Those are all classic beats of a Hallmark movie. When I drafted Season of Love, I went by those classic beats. So, Miriam Bloom is an artist, she has this fiancé who is sort of not right for her but not a bad person, and she goes back to the place where she spent her childhood, that she hasn't been [to] in ten years, to sit shiva because her great aunt has died."
While Season of Love does follow the classic formula of a made-for-TV holiday film, Greer also made sure to "Queer it up" by altering many of the expected tropes. "She ends up inheriting part of a Christmas tree farm and they have to save it from going bankrupt, but the manager of the tree farm is this grumpy fat butch to who she is instantly attracted, and they have to learn to work together and save the farm together, and they end up falling in love. I took all those classic beats and tried to Queer them, not just in that Miriam is Bi and that she's engaged to a woman and falls in love with a woman, but I tried to Queer them more by making it a big found-family situation."
Greer also altered the traditional holiday rom-com by diving deeper into the emotional depths of her characters and exploring the reasons behind their actions. "Those [original] beats are already traumatic on their own. Like, why wouldn't you talk to your family for ten years or go home for ten years? Why would you choose to be engaged to someone you aren't really in love with? It felt to me that there was an underlying trauma that you don't get into in Hallmark movies."
Expanding representation
While Greer wanted to explore more of the trauma behind classic rom-com plotlines, she didn't want to write a story about Queer struggles. "Season of Love is not a book where it's traumatic to be Queer at all. Nobody has any trauma whatsoever about being Queer in Season of Love; they just have other family trauma. The holidays are often a traumatic time for Queer people for a variety of reasons, so I wanted the story to not just feel like a straight book that I had stuck Queer characters into but a truly Queer reimagining of a set of plot beats we see all the time."
From the beginning, the Queer representation Greer wanted to write resembled her journey, a journey that other members of her generation could relate to. "The Queer experience is big. There is no universal Queer experience, and mine as an older millennial, white, Bisexual is different from, you know, a person of color, or a younger person, or whatever. But I wanted it to feel true to my Queer experience so that older millennials, people who came of age when I did, might see themselves in it. I wanted to make sure that it was true to my Queerness in the hopes that that specificity would be something that other people could see themselves in."
In keeping the story true to her experiences, Greer excluded any adult coming out moments. "I didn't want to write a coming of age book, because they're 35. And not that people don't come out and come of age at 35, it's amazing when people do come out at 35, but I came out at 15 and so by the time I was 35, coming out was hard in my rearview mirror, and I wanted to write about adulthood settled into Queerness. That was important to me. I feel like there are a lot of beautiful narratives about coming out, but that wasn't something that I wanted to tell. I didn't want to necessarily tell another story about how sad it is to be Gay, only because for me it is very joyful, and I am very grateful to be Queer. It is one of the things that brings me the most joy in life."
Including Bi characters was also very intentional on Greer's part. "I wanted to have some specific Bi representation. Miriam talks in the book about what her Bisexuality looks like. The second book, which is coming out next year, has a Pan character, and it is important to me that multiple-attracted people get stories that show the complexity of them," she said.
Not only did Greer want to show Bi representation, something that is sometimes excluded from the Queer romance genre, but she also wanted to include Jewish representation in her holiday novel. "My dad is Jewish, and I grew up in this big extended joyful Jewish family, and we get more sad Holocaust books about Jews than we get joyful [Jewish] families, so that was important to me," she explained.
"As someone who has never religiously celebrated Christmas, it just feels like a fish-out-of-water time of year because the entire world is filled up with Christmas stuff," she said. She decided to write about the Carrigans, a Jewish family who works on a Christmas tree farm, to show the nuances of what family time in December can look like. As she looked more into the culture around Christmas tree farming, she made an interesting discovery, "It turns out, and I didn't know this when I started writing, but a lot of Christmas tree farms are owned by Jewish families, and so, you know, I just wanted to have a warm, big, vibrant Jewish family because that was something I grew up experiencing."
Greer also wanted to write about a young person involved in her faith, something she doesn't often see in romance novels or Queer media. "I have been involved in progressive faith communities my entire life, and a lot of my adult friends are also really involved in progressive faith communities. And I don't see a lot of that in contemporary romance, outside of inspiration romance, which is not progressive communities of faith. I don't necessarily see millennials involved in their church as part of their progressive life very often, but it is a big part of me and everybody I know, so I wanted to show that in faiths other than Christianity," she said.
Greer's favorite tropes
Even though Greer admittedly "Queered up" a lot of the traditional beats of a Hallmark holiday story, she is a sucker for good romance tropes and made sure to include some of her favorite classics. "I love forced proximity, which this book is. They have to work together; they are staying at this inn that's 160 acres of wooded land in the middle of the Adirondack National Forest with, like, four other people they know, trying to save a business in the middle of winter. They are forced to interact with each other all the time. I think that allows for a lot of shenanigans to happen because they're forced to be together."
Another trope Greer enjoys is second chances. "I love second chances and marriage in trouble books. I think it's a hard trick to pull off, and I'm always interested in how the author can get the audience to believe that characters should be together if they broke up before, because I think in real life I'm always like, 'Oh, no, you tried that, don't go back.' So they've got to sell it to make me believe in a second chance." This trope is one she's been toying with for her next book, a sequel to Season of Love.
"We are continuing the Carrigans' Christmas books. The second book is set up in the epilogue of the first book. Miriam and Noel inherit the inn with two other people: Miriam's childhood friend who is the son of the chef and handyman who works at the inn, and Miriam's cousin Hannah. Hannah and Levi, the childhood friend, have fallen in love while Miriam has been gone for ten years and [then they] had a horrific breakup. Levi left to go be a cook on a boat, and Hannah had been feeling sad at the inn about the breakup. Now they all own this business together, and Levi is going to come back, and they are going to have to figure out their issues and see if they can fall in love again," she explained.
"It is a Queer m/f couple; Levi is Demi and Pan. I think it's very similar in style [to Season of Love]. There's some trauma they're dealing with, mostly with each other, because they've known each other all their lives and they had a terrible breakup and now they're trying to be together but there's a lot of shenanigans. You want to root for them, but you also want to shake them for being blockheads. And that's fun."
While Greer enjoys the tropes of forced proximity and second chances, her favorite trope is one she lived. "My favorite trope in the world is fake dating because my husband and I fake-dated when we first met, and you know, it worked. You've got to give it its due," she said with a laugh. "Those are probably my favorites, both to read and to write. This book is forced proximity; it gets called enemies to lovers although I think they're more antagonists to lovers. They don't like each other much when they first meet. Workplace romance, which I'm always like, 'Ew, why would you get involved with someone you work with?' but I wrote one. They own a business together, accidentally. I love that. I know not everyone likes instant love, but they have sort of this instant lust for each other, and I think it's interesting when you're instantly attracted to someone to have to figure out how to like them or even if you like them, or how to get along with them when you're attracted to someone immediately. My next book is a second chance, so I don't know, maybe I'll get to write a fake dating book someday."
Greer is excited to continue writing romance novels for the LGBTQ+ community, especially ones that take place over the holidays. "I don't see any of my adult novels being about heterosexual people because I've never been a heterosexual person and I just don't know how I would write those books," she said.
The holiday season is a season of love for Greer, who celebrated her wedding anniversary last week. "My wedding anniversary is two days before Christmas," she said. Much of her fiction stems from real-life inspiration, and her love life is no exception. "I have been married for eleven years now, but for our first anniversary we went to a cabin in the snowy mountains and we had no internet, nothing but a jacuzzi and a fireplace and snow for three days, which was an incredible date. But I also think it would be really fun to do that [in a book], but for two people who don't know each other who have maybe booked the place for the same time and are then stranded in the snow together. I'm like, actually, that would be a great book; there's a jacuzzi and a fireplace, this is a great romance novel," she said with a laugh.
Season of Love is out now, and a great read for anyone looking to Queer up some of the stale traditions of the holiday romance genre, embrace new love, and take new chances in the new year.