“I fell in love with you a little bit, in that stupid way where you completely make up a fictional version of the person you’re looking at and fall in love with that person.”
― Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory
The duality of gay dating apps
It’s the only LGBTQ+ science fiction short story where it was a high school love story. Well…I can’t say a love story per see. “Meet-Cute” is the more accurate term. I’ve always been a fan of that term because we all had it at some point in our lives. More than once for me. So, I wanted to try my hand at creating a story solely revolving around them. That was the sole intention towards Ice Breaker.
I confess I gave in to the temptation of using cliches. I used the typical high school norms and dynamics for the characters and, oddly, it worked marvelously. To avoid spoilers, I won’t say which ones I used though, if you’ve seen enough romance movies, I can imagine you’ll be able to figure that part out fairly quickly. Even still, it has been done and I will not apologize for it. Ha ha!
Anyway, I didn’t start writing the story until I could figure out what I wanted to look at. What did I want to write about? I knew I wanted to tell a meet-cute story but I wanted to invoke a conversation. Like with all my writing, I wanted to explore the duality of a certain topic but I couldn’t think of anything. So…I didn’t write it. I didn’t write anything for about a month or so. That was until I was on Scruff.
I don’t really fancy dating apps all that much but it’s on my phone. It was one of those moments for me, I must say. Except, this time around, I didn’t end up hooking up with anybody. Instead, I ended up making a friend through the app. Still friends with him to this day. He’s actually the one with the podcast I spoke about a while back. And then…it clicked. I could take about the sides of gay dating apps.
It became simple for me because, like many others, I’ve used dating apps since college so I’m fully aware of the good and bad sides of such technology. However, since it’s technically high school romance, I wanted to keep the story grounded in reality. Mundane science fiction with LGBTQ themes, if you will. I think I did an okay job with it. But I would rather for everyone else to be the judge of that. And, with that, I hope you enjoy the story.
You can buy the book on Amazon. The link is here.
You can also learn about it on Goodreads. The link for it is here.
