I grew up reading British children’s literature, adventure stories that almost never had an element of romance at all. I came to love stories for the joy, excitement, and yes, the lessons they gave me. Imagine my shock and disappointment when, after clinging to children’s stories for as long as I could, I discovered that the marker of more mature stories was romance. That wouldn’t have been such a problem if the books I had been reading also had good stories to accompany the romance––as some do––but I found more often than not that a romantic relationship was the story. It’s an interesting idea that our sense of completion and things being right in the world may be associated with the fulfillment of romantic interest. But certainly romance is not the only story worth telling, and I set out to prove that in the first book of the Evolution of Control series.

In /Amphibious/, the loving and healthy relationships that are foregrounded are actually familial relationships and friendships. It’s not that the romantic element doesn’t peek out every now and again. That element seems to be ever-present in daily life––in some fashion or another––and I wanted to do justice to it, but romance does not have to be central. The reader may judge how well I have constructed a narrative world in which love is central and romance is not. The question is: what does this decentralization of romance achieve?

Decentralizing romance in my novel encouraged me to allow the narrative to grow deep roots. As the first book of the series, Amphibious needs deep roots. The rest of the series will stem from this book. And (spoiler alert), there will be romance later in the series, but I wanted this to happen after I had already established that there are many things worth caring about in the narrative world.

The nebulous presence of romance on the periphery of Amphibious’s consciousness gives the narrative a sense of hopeful potential, but it does not overpower the rest of the story. There are other elements of the story that deserve the reader’s attention––things like survival mindset, self-knowledge, overcoming trauma, race relations, trust, and friendship. These things are important parts of life, and they are well worth our attention both in the narrative world and in real life. By foregrounding them, I hope to encourage readers to open their eyes to the many different elements of the narratives in which we live. Our lives are complexly layered, and that is something to celebrate!