10 Years Since Leicester City Won the Premier League

I finally got a chance to listen to the Totally Football Show's episode looking back at Leicester City's history English Premier League triumph in the 2015-16 season. They published it a week or two ago, but my podcast listening was disrupted for a while, so I wasn't able to listen to it until this weekend. It was a good reminder of that exciting campaign, if a little sad to also consider the stuff that's happened to Leicester City since then.

I followed it all from this side of the Atlantic, because I'd moved to the US by then. In a way it was better to follow it like that, because the results were there to look at when I woke up on weekends, and the Guardian's Football Weekly was usually ready when I woke up on Monday mornings to catch up on their discussion of the weekend's action. Though it also must have been fun to be a football fan watching Leicester City's campaign unfold as it did in real-time.

The podcast talks about all the stuff that made up the ingredients for Leicester's season - from assembling a team of genuinely good players from unlikely sources, to the hiring of Claudio Ranieri after a sex-tape scandal involving the son of the previous manager, Nigel Pearson. But it also makes the point, which I didn't know, that Leicester's form for that title-winning season was actually a continuation of the end of the previous season, when they'd been anchored to the foot of the table for most of the year and only pulled themselves out of the relegation zone in the last couple of months of the 2014-15 season.

Which leads to speculation about whether Pearson could have overseen the run at the title, or if he was too conservative to go for it. That question can't be answered, but it's also true that when Leicester hired Ranieri, he was coming off a disastrous four-match run as the manager of the Greek national team, which had ended after his team had lost to the Faroe Islands. That was on top of Ranieri's reputation in England as the "tinker man", who always futzed around with his lineups to the detriment of actually winning stuff - and it has to be said, he'd never won a league title until that season with Leicester.

One thing that the podcast didn't go into too much detail about, although they did touch on it, was how that season turned Tottenham Hotspur into one of the "big six" sides for many years, on the strength of players like Harry Kane and Toby Alderweireld and Jan Vertonghen, among others. It feels odd to think about when you consider that Spurs are in active danger of relegation - as I type, they're in 18th place in the league table, a point off from safety, having conceded a late equalizer in this weekend's match.

Spurs are, in a way, traveling along a similar trajectory to Leicester City, which saw a lot of things go well that season, but neither team was able to capitalize on those positives in subsequent seasons. Leicester suffered some off-pitch tragedy as well, such as when their owner died in a helicopter crash right outside the stadium, but there were a lot of decisions that didn't pan out as the club's executives hoped - and Spurs did it to themselves as well, in hiring a selection of managers post 2016 who each left the club weaker than when they left - last season's Europa League triumph notwithstanding.

Leicester's story is one that repeats itself every few years, at different league levels: a team that overextends itself to chase success, and then finds itself suffering relegation and financial chaos. But, even though Leicester is currently in danger of relegation to English football's third tier, at least they can boast that their grasp for the stars actually paid off and led to a league title.

How to Write Romantasy, by Jenna Moreci

I've already written about how romantasy seems to be everywhere, but now that I've started writing my own, I've had a lot more opportunity to think about how it's built. My Instagram feed has a lot of discussion of tropes - both over- and under-used - and I've taken inspiration from Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses series and Rebecca Yarros's Empyrean/Fourth Wing series. Inspiration, in this case, being both stuff to try in my own story and stuff to avoid.

But the other week I was poking around my local, Kepler's, and found Jenna Moreci's How to Write Romantasy, and snapped it up on a whim. I was already about 80,000 words into my own, but the layout of Moreci's book appealed to me. I've since read a chapter or so every day, and just finished it today, so I thought I'd give some thoughts on it.

The first thing to say, which I think the book does well, is to define the key aspects of both the romance and the fantasy genres, and from there, to define the two sub-strands that define romantasy: romantic fantasy and fantasy romance. In short, romantasy is essentially fantasy that doesn't work if you take out the romantic parts, and romantic fantasy puts more emphasis on the fantasy part, while fantasy romance puts more emphasis on the romance part. The differences are in the world building and when the leading couple gets together.

It's worth noting that this passage, which occurs early in the book, reflects what I've read elsewhere. My impression is that Fourth Wing is a little more romantic fantasy, and ACOTAR is maybe a little more fantasy romance, but I suspect the lines are more blurry than I'm suggesting.

What I thought was really well done about the book, however, was in its discussion of structure. It uses the classic Freytag structure:

1. Exposition
2. Rising action
3. Climax
4. Falling action
5. Resolution

Moreci looks separately at how fantasy and romance stories fall along this structure, and then combines them to show how romantasy should flow from one act to the next. She then talks over several chapters about how to create a good central relationship, ranging from matching the two (or more) romantic leads with one another to building that chemistry between them, to putting obstacles in their way, in the shape of both fantasy tsuris and romantic tsuris (as an aside, I've been warming to the potential of that word, "tsuris", which is Yiddish for something between trouble and grief).

Because I was already well into my own story, I used How to Write Romantasy more as a map to ensure I was hitting all the right notes, rather than to get ideas or anything else. But as I said, I liked the description of structure, especially because Moreci treats structure not as a strict prescription but as a general guideline of when things are meant to happen.

Now, I wrote this blog to talk about this book that I enjoyed, but also, it's because I've been thinking about what exactly I'm doing here, writing in a genre that I'd never properly read before about December and that is dominated by women. And then, this morning, I found this article in the Guardian. I agreed with the author's general thesis, that straight men aren't really writing sex anymore, although I thought he could have ventured beyond literary or highbrow fiction and talked about genre - though I can't think of too many recent SFF novels that contained much sex.

The exception being Joe Abercrombie's Age of Madness trilogy, though those scenes don't have the same goal as sex scenes in romantasy (or indeed romance), ie to deepen intimacy between the principal characters. Which I guess means I'm saying that the Guardian article could more profitably have been a discussion of why straight men aren't writing romance.

Answer: because straight men aren't reading romance. But also, maybe we should be? Both reading and writing romance and romantasy, I mean. Instead of writing porn, we could be writing about what sex means to our characters, and what it reveals about them - which strikes me as just as valid a subject matter as thinly veiled allegories of the Byzantine Empire or the Industrial Revolution, especially when elves and dragons are involved.

Bringing it all back to my original point, I think How to Write Romantasy is a good primer for anyone delving into writing the genre, though you should also read the genre, to get a sense of what other authors are doing, what works for you and what doesn't. Go and get it from your local bookstore rather than on Kindle, though!