This Spells Disaster

I can’t ignore the fact that the plot revolves around a character being given a love potion. If love spells or potions existed, they would be a serious threat to bodily autonomy, yet many stories that include this type of magic disregard that potential or even treat such magic like a joke. Seeing as I spent years in school studying consent and sexual assault, this always left me uneasy, and when I got the idea for this book, I was determined to make sure that didn’t happen. After all, at their very best, romance novels show what healthy consent can look like.

gathering witches was an awful lot like herding cats, which was probably why they got along so well

“You think I’m funny?” Intentionally? Did she want the answer to that?

Having sex dreams about a friend was . . . awkward, and a new-to-her dilemma.

Was this about the practice kiss? It had to be, didn’t it? And it didn’t sound good. We have to talk was never good. If Rory was her real girlfriend, that would sound like a breakup was on the horizon.

T-shirts with cheesy sayings (resting witch face)

Nausea bubbled up her throat again, and Morgan had to shut her lips. If Rory was being affected by a love potion, then Rory actually couldn’t have consented to kissing her. She’d not only violated Rory’s will, but her body.

“Although,” Rory added as Morgan’s mood started to improve, “and I will say this until you get sick of hearing it, you don’t need to create anything fancy to be someone special. You don’t need a noteworthy potion to be a noteworthy person.”

Like many people I know, I didn’t realize I was queer until my thirties. This, in spite of me spending my teens and early twenties insisting that one day I’d fall in love with a person, not a gender. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a writer, it was books that made me realize a truth that now seems so obvious—both the books I read, and just as importantly, the ones I kept being drawn to write without understanding why, until the epiphany poked me in the brain and I finally went, “Huh, well I guess things make sense now.” (What I’m saying is, earning a degree in psychology emphatically does not make you any better at introspection.)