By 8pm most days I have negotiated with a six-year-old about leotards, refereed a baseball-glove dispute, and said my own name in three different tones of exhaustion. Then I open a book about a woman who gets to be furious, powerful, and desperately loved, and something in my chest unclenches.
It hands you a world with rules, when yours has none
Motherhood is improvisation, all day, every day. A romantasy world has rules: a magic system, a court hierarchy, a bargain with a price. There’s something deeply restful about stepping into a world where the chaos has structure, even when the stakes are higher than anything in your actual life.
The heroine gets to want things out loud
Most days I don’t have the bandwidth to want anything out loud; I’m meeting everyone else’s needs on a schedule. A romantasy heroine wants, loudly, unapologetically, and gets to chase it. Reading her do it is its own kind of release.
It is permission to feel something that is not logistics
So much of a mom’s day is logistics: who needs to be where, fed what, by when. A good romantasy scene demands you feel something instead, grief, longing, fury, want, with no task attached to it. That shift alone is the escape.
It is not an avoidance of your life. It is a refill for it.
I am a better mother to my own two kids after twenty pages of someone else’s impossible world than after twenty minutes of doomscrolling. Escape, used right, isn’t running from your life. It’s what lets you walk back into it.
From a self-pub + traditionally published author
Start with the free Fantasy Romance Starter Kit
The 5-part chapter framework, 10 hook examples, a worldbuilding cheat sheet, and a guided writing prompt. Free.
The path from here: the $7 Hook Vault (10 opening-line patterns) → the $67 first-chapter Workshop → the Full Book Blueprint.
