We’re back!

It’s finally official! Our new website is finally live!

For those of you who are new to G.L. Tomas, need a refresher on G.L. Tomas, or aren’t new but just need a much more recent update on everything G.L. Tomas, this post is for you.

Who are we?

Guinevere and Libertad. Years ago, we popped into the book blog world as Twinja Book Reviews, one of the few book blogs that only reviewed books with marginalized characters. Like many book lovers, we were also writers. It took years for us to take the leap of faith and publish our first book, a YA fantasy/science fiction novel named “The Mark of Noba”.

Since then, we’ve found that while we still really love YA, as we’ve gotten older, our love for romance novels grew through our better understanding of them.

Romance has always been a well-loved genre. Romance and all its sub-genres is a billion-dollar industry for good reason. But it has taken trial and error (and a lot more reading!) to find ourselves in a genre with so many authors.

Our first romance series’ featured messy romances. At that time, we were both navigating modern dating culture and writing books that reflect it. Same Page, our first published romance was as messy as it got and F*THS, the start of our second series kept up with the tradition of that style.

They were both real stories, things we had either gone through or with those around us had gone through. Over time, we still believe people really connected to those stories (or at least how we wrote them) but after some hard times (mentally) we took a 2.5-year stint away from releasing books.

That 2.5-year stint included reading close to 600 books between the both of us, researching genres, sub-genres, tropes, and asking ourselves a whole lotta questions about where we saw G.L. Tomas go from there.

A major challenge for us both was deciding whether we wanted to focus on series’, standalone, short books, or long books. Whether we wanted to launch a new pen name that focused on things G.L. Tomas doesn’t normally focus on (sorry for our YA readers, but G.L. is now in the direction for our romance). Hell, we still don’t know the answer to all those things.

One thing we’re sure of though? Our romances will always center on a Black female heroine (no matter where she falls in the diaspora) and every love interest she has will love the living crap out of her!

Maybe it sounds less radical when you say it out loud, but we’re just in weird times (to be honest, we’ve always been) where Black women have this hard time being praised for the things that make them, them. We know not every Black woman’s experience in the love department is not a horror story, but we just want to contribute to the many stories that center on Black women falling in love. No matter who she chooses.

So if that sounds like what you’re up for, stay tuned!

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