The Intimacy of Maintenance
Use leaking pipes, torn hems, and unstable furniture to reveal how sapphic characters negotiate care, authority, conflict, and the continuing work of commitment.
The Monroe Papers
This is where the ideas are finished.
The Monroe Papers are long-form essays on storytelling, structure, and the discipline of writing well. Each piece is built deliberately—examining not just what works, but why it works, and how it can be applied.
If the Monroe Minute (my blog) is exploration, the Papers are conclusion.
How First Desire Finds Its Signal
Read Girls Like Girls through 2006-era communication, grief, silence, and the careful signalling that makes first sapphic desire visible before it can be spoken.
How to Write a First Kiss Scene That Actually Changes the Story
A first kiss should do more than reward romantic tension. Use this craft guide to make the kiss change what characters know, what they can deny, and what the story must do next.
The Secret Rooms of Lesbian Pulp
Lesbian pulp covers sold scandal, and some endings restored the expected moral order. Inside, writers could still build desire, community, and queer possibility.
The Lexicon of Touch: Translating Physicality into Narrative Dialogue
Explore how fiction writers can establish recurring physical patterns, vary them across scenes, and let readers interpret their changing meaning in context.
How Queer Happy Endings Build a Future
Explore how a happy ending can answer the history of doomed lesbian narratives, shift a romance’s central suspense, and make queer domestic futurity part of the story’s design.
Beyond the Visual Gaze: Interiority, Agency, and Sapphic Desire in Fiction
Move beyond camera-eye description by showing what a character notices, imagines, decides a moment means, and chooses to do next.
Negative Space and the Architecture of Subtext
By treating silence as a structural element rather than a decorative pause, writers can transform simple omission into a kinetic narrative force. This article explores the mechanics of the unsaid in sapphic romance.
How to Score Erotic Intensity in a Scene
A practical demonstration of the Erotic Intensity Rubric, using an original sapphic scene to show how restraint, anticipation, emotional risk, and symbolism create charge.