I had the title before I had almost anything else: Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince. I still love that title. Next came the tagline: “a gay superhero teen romance.”
It has been pointed out to me that Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince bears precious little similarity to a “romance novel.” That’s probably because I have never been able to actually read a “romance novel.” Nothing against them. I just can’t get through one. The book just doesn’t follow the conventions. Despite the fact that it occurs between the defective clone of a snake-themed supervillain and the defective clone of a Superman parody, the romance in this novel is based on my own experiences. It’s not about heaving chests and the rest. That’s not to say it’s a brilliant and amazing work of pure originality, either. It’s as derivative as any romance novel, but it bears a closer resemblance to the work of writers like Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, and early Harlan Ellison than it does to Stephanie Meyer. Writers I actually love.
That’s entirely my bad. I had meant for it to be more like Twilight.
What I had before I had the title and the tagline was the desire to make money with my writing, and an elevator pitch: “Twilight with superheroes and supervillains instead of vampires and werewolves.”
The goal was to make myself one! million! dollars! with such a commercial idea.
But I just couldn’t go there. I just couldn’t do that. I ended up writing something that I would actually like, rather than something I could cynically market. (Whether or not my original idea was as commericial as I imagined it would be is another question — one I’ll never be able to answer; I may have just saved myself a lot of disappointment and misery by failing to write what I thought I was going to write).
I still love the title, and I still love the tagline, but it’s becoming pretty clear that calling the thing a “romance” is keeping readers — the kind of readers who would enjoy what I am writing, anyway — away. Even though there’s a romantic relationship at the heart of the thing. It’s not a romance novel. And calling it that is weirding people out.
So what should I call it? I’m keeping the title. But the tagline needs to be changed. Here’s what I’m thinking:
a gay superhero teenage romantic comedy
Or does that open up an entirely new can of unmeetable expectations?
Mr. Manley 
Honestly, I actually feel like “romance” is pretty spot on, and I’m not sure adding “comedy” to the mix makes things more accurate. I mean, SBLSP has been funny at times, but a lot of the time it’s also scary or uncomfortable or weird. Which I think is crucial to how it’s being built. “Romance” feels right to me because it says that you’re engaging genre conventions and building narrative focus around the relationships characters have with each other or themselves. I might say “weird romance,” which could be an awesome subgenre all its own, of which SBLSP might be an early example.
Romantastickal Fiction