To the writers whose worlds became part of our life,
Your books are part of my life.
For real.
My sister Linda gave me The Hobbit when I was a kid, and that was it. I was gone. I read everything I could get my hands on. Long bus rides to school became time in other worlds. My fantasy shelves became the most valuable thing I owned.
When I met Nylena, she read my books.
That still feels like one of the most romantic things that ever happened to me.
Getting married changed the way I read. I started looking harder at stories through a woman’s eyes. Anne McCaffrey had already shown me women with power, women with wants, women with dragons. Women at the center of their own stories.
I wanted more of that.
Then I found Magic Bites in the fantasy section and brought it to Nylena. Thank God for cross-marketing. I might have walked straight past one of the most important reading turns of my life.
We fell in love with Kate Daniels.
Ilona and Gordon, Kate and Curran got us through the door. Andrea and Raphael, Derek, the kids, the pack, the clan leaders, and all those complicated loyalties made us want to stay. I cared about the people around the central romance. I wanted their stories, too.
That is why the novellas mattered. They gave us more time with people we had already made room for.
A world becomes something different when you care about who else is in it. The people who argue, show up, make a mess, and somehow become family. That is the part I carried with me: the feeling that the story continued beyond whichever room we were standing in.
Then we learned that Ilona Andrews was Ilona and Gordon, a husband and wife writing together. We already loved the books. Now the people behind them had handed us another possibility.
Maybe Nylena and I could build something together, too.
One novella led to more authors. More authors led to more worlds. We read, listened, waited for releases, and followed these characters for years. Your books became places we could go together.
Patricia Briggs gave us Mercy and Adam. Anna and Charles. Bran. Stefan. I love both Mercy Thompson and Alpha and Omega. I love having more than one door into that world, more than one kind of strength, and more than one family to care about.
There is a local pleasure in it, too. We live in Walla Walla. Mercy’s world is rooted in the Tri-Cities, and Walla Walla is part of its fictional landscape. These are places we recognize. The supernatural is having a very busy time in our corner of Washington.
Jeaniene Frost’s Night Huntress books gave me Cat and Bones. Especially Bones, who apparently needs no assistance making himself memorable. The attraction matters. So does the fact that I want to spend time with the people having it. That is what keeps me following a world beyond one book and one couple.
Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter world gives me angels, dangerous power, formidable women, and Elena and Raphael. The heat is smoking. But I love the size of the world around it, too. The power. The women who possess it. The sense that desire belongs inside a world this dangerous and this complicated.
Whenever I worry that I have put too much heat on the page, I remember Nalini is already out there and I am still getting my books ready. That buys me a little courage.
I have not finished Guild Hunter yet. No spoilers. There are still books waiting for me, and I intend to get back to them.
You are different writers. That matters. Each of you gives me different people to love, different kinds of power and humor and longing, and another world Nylena and I can carry into our conversations.
More men should read these books.
I mean that.
They put you inside women’s anger, desire, loyalty, fear, power, humor, grief, and choices. They taught me that love stories can carry war, politics, survival, sex, family, and consequence. They helped me see how much a story can hold when its women are allowed to want a whole life.
Your books made me a better reader.
They made me a better husband.
They helped make me a writer.
My reading has kept growing since those first discoveries. These writers belong in the story by name, too.
Shannon Mayer, that means Rylee Adamson and Pamela. I love Pamela. Following her into the Questing Witch books is another reason I keep coming back to this idea: when the people around a main character matter, their own stories matter. A world gets bigger because you care who else lives there.
Sarah J. Maas, Feyre and Rhysand. Their romance belongs in this conversation. So does the family around them in A Court of Thorns and Roses. The attraction draws me in; the relationships around it give me somewhere I want to stay.
Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean books are part of Nylena’s reading life. Violet and Xaden are on my list, and I still have to make my way to Onyx Storm. There are so many good writers, and only so many hours. I am looking forward to catching up.
But these early discoveries still feel like home.
Now I am building Breath, Blood & Chain, with Nylena beside me. My sharpest truth teller. My creative partner. My person. I want the people in these books to matter beyond the scene they happen to be in. I want desire, humor, difficult loyalties, and the families people make for themselves to carry real weight.
You helped show me how much was possible.
A woman could carry the blade.
A woman could want.
A woman could be angry and funny and sexual and damaged and brilliant and impossible to erase.
A monster could be tender.
A romance could change the fate of a world.
A man in the story could become worthy of the woman he loves.
That is a hell of a thing to give a reader.
So this is me saying thank you. For the central romances and the people around them. For the novellas that sent us looking for more. For the years Nylena and I have spent in your worlds, and the conversations we brought home.
Someday, I hope I write something strong enough to sit near the work that changed my life. Sharing a shelf, a reader recommendation, a table of contents, or even a passing conversation with any of you would be bucket list shit for me.
That is the honest truth.
With deep gratitude,
Gunner Tomei