What If? by Robyn Nyx

I’m so lucky that my wife is also a writer. This wonderful journey we’re on, these events we organise, the authors we help to publish: all of it, we do together. And when we’re writing our books, we love putting Easter eggs in them from each other. Madison Ford, my intrepid investigative journalist from Let Love Be Enough turns up to report on the destruction at Vatican City in Brey’s Fury’s Death. In my latest romance under Helena Harte, Sanctuary, you’ll find a rescued horse that hails from the ranch in Ally McGuire’s July release, Heart of the Storm. So when she thought “What if I checked in with my characters?” and wrote her short story for this year’s SapphFic Eclectic, A Love Letter to My Creations, it wasn’t a leap for me to answer that with A Letter to Her, where Luca from Stolen Ambition has a little rant at me.

What’s wonderful about having so much fun with our writing is that we’re free to do that now. We have our own categories on Amazon and Ingram and everywhere else that sells books. We’re recognised and celebrated. We’re in mainstream bookshops. We’re on TikTok! All the young queers can find our books and see themselves within the pages, experience sapphic lives through our words. And isn’t that as important as it is amazing? When I was a kid, I couldn’t have dreamed of going in to a library and requesting a book about lesbians who were movie stars or stunt riders or FBI agents and who got their woman and their happily ever after. And now? We’re everywhere, and that’s just as it should be.

And that’s why this anthology is so important to us. It’s why this is our fifth year of creating a completely free anthology of new and established authors for your reading pleasure. Because words hold so much power, and publishing something so positive like this is absolutely essential for our continued march toward total freedom and equality for all the world over.

Maybe you could share your experiences of why sapphfic stories are so important to you. We’d love to read them.

SapphFic Eclectic Volume Five will be available via our Butterworth Books website from Monday 1st July, 11 a.m. GMT