The Novelist Writing a Polyamorous Rom-Com
Romance novelist TJ Alexander has published four books in three years, giving their queer characters satisfying arcs on the joyful end of the narrative spectrum. But while their stories have always focused on underrepresented identities (past protagonists have been trans and nonbinary), Alexander wasn’t convinced their publisher would be into the concept of their new novel, Triple Sec. The book has a hot bartender as its main character and all the sweetness and erotic tension of a classic beach read, but it diverges in that the central romance, as well as the secondary and tertiary ones, are polyamorous. “I thought, Well, they’re never going to go for this. But I’ll give it a shot and see what they say,” Alexander says.
To their surprise and delight, their publisher was excited about it. Alexander was thrilled to fill a gap that they felt was lacking in traditional publishing: “There are a lot of great indie books, a lot of dark romances,” they say. “I wanted to try to do something a little different. Structurally, it’s a challenge because you’re telling not just one love story but three interweaving ones.” They also wanted to demystify polyamory for readers who might have ill-informed notions about what those partnerships can look like. “It’s not this weird, scary thing,” they say. “It’s just another way, and probably a more common way than you would think, that people have relationships.” Alexander lives in New York City with their wife; here’s how they get it done.
On a typical morning:
I’m unfortunately a morning person. I found out when I started writing for a living. I need to write as early as possible before my brain wakes up enough that I start second-guessing everything. I’ll usually wake up 6, 7 a.m. at the latest. I take a shower, get some caffeine, and am in the chair by at least eight o’clock. Anytime later, the neighborhood’s starting to wake up. The building starts getting loud, the kids in the neighborhood start getting rowdy. You’ve got to take what you can get. As long as I can get maybe two uninterrupted hours of drafting, that’s a pretty good morning. I mean uninterrupted in terms of other people; interrupted by myself in terms of, like, toast. I need a little snack.
On how they started to take writing seriously:
Writing was always a hobby. I was an English major, and then I went on to get a publishing master’s. But I didn’t think that I would be on the creative side of things. I had several professors who would tell us in writing workshops, “It’s very hard to make a living doing this, so don’t try.” I remember when I graduated, and my writing professor asked me, “What are you going to do after this?” And I said, “Well, I think I’m gonna get a degree in the business side of publishing.” She was like, “Oh, that’s a real shame. I thought you had real potential.” It would have been great for her to have mentioned that at any point. I was waiting for any person to give me a tiny nudge of validation.
I was working a normal office job, and then 2020 happened, COVID hit, things shut down. My industry was hit pretty hard. When I was out of a job, I was like, Okay, I’ve been working on this book in my free time; maybe while I’m trying to interview for new jobs, I’ll try to get an agent and sell this book. So I did.
On their roots in mixology:
My parents owned a bar and grill when I was growing up in South Florida. It was a touristy, snowbird type of establishment: this huge, very old-fashioned bar where we made all the very classic cocktails. No one was drinking old-fashioneds; no one was having martinis in the ’80s and ’90s. The ’90s was just beer, beer, beer in any normal establishment. But that was a place where you could actually walk in and someone would be unironically ordering a Bahama Mama. Neither of my parents were big drinkers growing up, but they worked behind the bar, and so my mom would have little flashcards to help her try to memorize all the popular cocktails. I would be quizzing her — what goes into a classic Margarita? How do you make a Rob Roy?
In college, I worked in restaurants and bars. I still feel a kinship with the service industry as a place where people are working some of the hardest jobs in this country for almost no pay, and getting no respect for the amount of work that they’re putting into this sometimes very thankless job.
On dealing with self-doubt:
Every writer reaches a point, especially in the drafting phase, where it hasn’t clicked yet. Maybe you have a good outline, you have a good pitch. You have a good idea of what’s happening. But for me, it really takes around 50,000 words before I’m like, Oh, wait, I get it, in terms of who these characters are, what they’re doing, and why everything is fitting together. Until you get to that point, it can feel like a real slog through the wilderness. In those moments, I save a few very kind messages and emails from readers in my inbox. If I am having a really bad writing day, I’ll go into my inbox and be like, Let’s stop freaking out for one second and read what this very nice person had to say about you.
On ambition:
If you would’ve asked me a few years ago, I would have said, “No, I’m just a little guy, sitting on my lily pad and smoking my corncob pipe,” or whatever. I don’t want to appear ambitious because I know how that is perceived by some people, but I do think I have ambition. I want people to read my work. I want the people who should be finding these books to find them. I want to keep making art, and in order to keep doing that, I need to prove a certain level of success.
On managing their own workweek:
Especially in the beginning, it was writing every day, on email all the time, always available for a call. But it’s publishing. It’s not brain surgery. No one’s gonna die if we don’t answer an email on a Sunday. So I’m trying to get a little better at this. More recently, writing is for weekdays. On weekends, no working unless there’s a deadline coming up. This month, I pulled up my calendar and was like, Okay, where can I have a day off? When I was working that terrible office job, I still got days off where I got to decompress. In this creative life, a lot of people think, Oh, you’re doing what you love, so you don’t need to relax. But that’s not true.
On their exercise routine:
I do yoga. I try to do that several times a week, but it’s hard to squeeze it in sometimes. I try to take a long walk every day. It’s very Dickensian. I’ll get on my shoes, my little hat, and my little fanny pack, and I’ll just put on some podcast and learn something about the sewer system in France in the 1600s. Something that’s completely separate from work, so that my brain can have something else to chew on for a second. Sometimes you just gotta have a conversation with people who are real and not fictional. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said it. You sometimes just need to walk to the store and see a dog and buy an envelope and just get out of the house.
On managing stress:
I got a haircut today. That was my self-care. I’m still working on it. I’m dealing with the stresses of publishing schedules. On days like today, when a book is coming out, you would hope that you would feel a sense of accomplishment and pleasure and have time to rest on some laurels. But this is now the busy time, where I have to do all this planning for travel and touring and events, which I love doing. But it’s a lot condensed into a very small amount of time. It’s really important for every professional creative person to have a group of friends who know nothing about your industry. Get that validation from people who don’t know what you’re talking about. It also keeps you humble. When I tell my family things that I’m doing, publishing-wise, they’ll just be like, “I don’t know what that means.”
On what grounds them:
This is kind of silly, but every night my wife asks me, “Do you want to see some good boys?” and unless I’m already falling asleep, I say “Of course.” Then before I fall asleep, she shows me the best of cute animals that she has seen on the internet that day and saved on her phone to show me. So I get none of the bad stuff on the internet, just the good stuff. All the wheat, none of the chaff. It’s the most relaxing way to drift off to sleep.
On winding down:
Because I have to cram in most of my writing in the early morning, I’m usually done working by three or four o’clock. Then it’s a lot of house-making stuff that goes on. I work from home, and I love to cook. We probably eat home-cooked meals six days out of the week, if I’m not traveling or doing any book events. By the time I’m done working, I’m usually thinking about dinner. I’ve been getting really into stir-fries recently, making a lot of tofu. My favorite way of making it is a recipe from the Moosewood cookbook. Moosewood is an amazing vegetarian restaurant upstate. You don’t even need to marinate it. You make this sauce — it’s a lot of citrus juice, some soy sauce, a little bit of herb, salt, and pepper. Then you bake the hell out of it, for like an hour. It gets toasty and crispy on the outside and then it’s all creamy.
On dealing with criticism:
I try not to seek it out. If it’s in the Bookstagram space or BookTok, where readers are having conversations about what they liked and didn’t like, I think that is a beautiful space that they should have. I do not think I am invited, nor do I want to be, to see what criticisms people have about my books. It’s already written; I can’t go back and fix things. There’s going to be another small percentage of people who are just mad that your book exists. I don’t count that as real criticism because it’s not. It’s prejudice.
On the moment they felt they’d “made it”:
I still don’t know if I feel like a real author every day. There are moments where you sit there and think, Four years ago, I would have never thought that my work would have gotten me into this position, and that’s really cool. People have sent me fan art of my characters. That was a real lightbulb moment, where I was like, Oh, people are reading these books.