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I get asked a lot why I don& #39;t make the characters in my books explicitly asexual and aromantic if I talk so much on here about fictional representation of strong platonic nonromantic nonsexual relationships, so for #AsexualAwarenessWeek #AceWeek a 
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1. I& #39;m very much a write-the-book-you-want-to-read author--I wrote Archivist Wasp with teenage-me as target audience--and for whatever reason, implicit aroace rep is my preference as a reader. I don& #39;t really know why.
2. While it& #39;s super important to have that representation for aro and ace readers, it& #39;s maybe equally important to show readers who are neither aro nor ace that M/F friendships are still ENTIRELY VALID for EVERYONE and that making them default to romance in fiction is DAMAGING.
3. M/F friendships too often (in fiction, in real life) get treated like a stepping-stone to romance. Platonic relationships are never given the same importance. I& #39;ve lost count of how many books/movies take a perfectly great pair of besties and shove them into romance together.
4. As an aroace person I am perpetually on the hunt for books/movies/tv/comics/games etc that show relationships that would have made the world make a little more sense to teenage-me. They& #39;re hard to find.
5. What teenage-me needed and never really found was depiction of ride-or-die platonic relationships. I had no idea that being aro/ace was a thing. I& #39;d try to explain to friends this idea of being fascinated by a person but with zero sexy/romantic intentions. They were...confused
6. And for all the books and movies and games I consumed, there were no fictional relationships in any of them that I could point to and go THAT. THAT& #39;S THE THING. The closest I came was maybe war movies, possibly the only genre where nonromantic nonsexual intimacy is normalized.
7. But so I went through years of thinking I was fucked up somehow, surrounded by all these media templates of romance- and sex-centered stories, or platonic relationships between women, or between men, but between men and women? Nope. Confusion intensified.
8. So yes, it would have been very very helpful if I& #39;d known what being aromantic or asexual was, back in my teens. Would have made a lot of things clear. And I& #39;m a big believer in normalizing the fictional relationships we want to see normalized in real life. And yet.
9. The older I get, the more fed up I am with the idea that ONLY aromantic or asexual people should be in nonromantic or nonsexual relationships. That if you are open to the idea of romance or sex, then there& #39;s no reason for your relationships not to default to that. I hate it.
10. So I write ride-or-die M/F platonic relationships without a single hint of sex or romance--relationships that could be read as aro/ace OR as platonic relationships for their own sake. Regardless of sexuality. Because we badly need to see that represented too. At least I do.
11. The last straw for me was when I was pitching Archivist Wasp & getting rejected for being a YA without romance or sex, and "teens will find nothing to relate to" in a book like that. The teen I used to be got VERY ANGRY INDEED & decided: this is the hill on which I shall die.
12. And so I decided that this is the kind of relationship I& #39;m going to write forever. Recognizable as aro/ace to readers who see themselves in that, but hopefully relatable to others who are in strong M/F friendships and are tired of media treating that as Potential Romance???
13. Anyway, that rambled on longer than intended! I& #39;m really bad at talking about myself, and I don& #39;t draft tweets so this is pure messy stream-of-consciousness. But this is a question I get asked regularly and I wanted to take some time and set down a comprehensive-ish answer.
14. I& #39;ve been fortunate enough to (eventually) find great homes for these books that 100% entirely ignore sex and romance (even in YA!) and I& #39;ll always be grateful. But I had to walk away from agents who said they could sell that first book easily if I just wrote a romance in.
