Like many readers, Cat Sebastian first turned to romance when she needed comfort.

“When my kids were little, I had pretty severe postpartum depression, and nothing I was reading worked for me. I needed a guarantee that things were going to work out for these characters,” she tells Kirkus via Zoom from her home in Connecticut. “So I started reading Georgette Heyer, and then I went to the library and found Julia Quinn and Eloisa James and basically mainlined Regency historical romance. Contemporary books were too real—I wanted a full-on escape. I wanted the only problem to be What’s going to happen to the duke’s bastard brother? because that had no relevance to whether my children would sleep or eat. What I really wanted was a comfort read, and in the romance genre, a happy ending is guaranteed. That appealed to me.”

It appealed so much that she soon found herself writing romance fiction. She built a successful career with historical romances such as The Soldier’s Scoundrel (2016) and Unmasked by the Marquess (2018), but her latest book is her first foray into the contemporary world.

Star Shipped, published this spring by Avon Books, follows Simon Devereaux and Charlie Blake, co-stars on a long-running science fiction TV show described as “Twin Peaks in space.” Simon can’t stand Charlie, but when the two end up faking a friendship for the good of their careers, he realizes that Charlie might not be as bad as he thought. It’s a book full of sharply funny banter, satisfying character growth, and a realistic depiction of anxiety. In a starred review, Kirkus calls it a “swoonworthy contemporary gay romance” and says “it’s a warm and masterful story that proves Sebastian is adept at cozy chemistry, no matter the time period.”

Sebastian’s love of historicals drew her to try writing her own books. “The first inkling I had that I could write was when I read Cecilia Grant. At that time, historical romance was so dominated by Regency romance archetypes, but she was writing about people who were prickly or weird or just different. Her characters were fully rounded people—they were not rich or nice. And I thought, Wow, if people are reading this, there could be room for me. And then I immediately dismissed that thought because who am I to write a book?”

Then it hit her that pretty much every book she read was about straight white characters—she hadn’t realized that queer women like herself could be part of the story. “In most of those books there wasn’t even the faintest suspicion of queerness,” she says. “Of course there were exceptions, like Courtney Milan, but the genre seemed to be built for a straight experience. But then I found authors like KJ Charles…and I was so delighted to discover that there were queer historical romances. I figured I would give writing a book a try to see if anyone else liked it.”

Readers didn’t just like her books—they adored them. She’s now one of the most beloved authors in the queer historical space (We Could Be So Good won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Romance in 2024, and this year Star Shipped hit the USA Today bestseller list), and she writes across time periods and subjects. You Should Be So Lucky (2024) is a baseball romance set in 1960s New York. The Queer Principles of Kit Webb (2021) follows a retired highwayman in 18th-century London. But until now Sebastian had no interest in tackling the present day.

Amid general rumblings that the market for historical romance is drying up (“No one knows if this is true or if it’s something we say to ourselves so much that we bring it into being,” she observes wryly), Sebastian’s agent noted that there was nothing stopping her from trying her hand at contemporary.

“And I said, Little old me? I could never,” Sebastian recalls. But several days later, she happened upon a fortuitous post while scrolling—a letter from science fiction writer Isaac Asimov to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry wondered what to do about tension on the show that stemmed from Spock becoming a fan favorite and stealing the spotlight from Captain Kirk. Asimov advised putting the characters together in every scene, so that the audience couldn’t think of one without thinking of the other.

“In other words,” Sebastian says, “the relationship between these two characters becomes the journey of the show. That’s the beginning of modern queer fan fiction, basically. So I could put that in the present day with actors who don’t like one another but have to be in every scene together. If one of them wants to leave the show, what does that mean? What would that look like emotionally, to be professionally stuck together? Once I had an idea of what I wanted the story to be, it was a total pleasure to write. It doesn’t happen often [that] a book writes itself, but this was one of those.”

Romance itself seems to be in flux lately. In addition to the prevailing wisdom that historical romances are out, some are now declaring that contemporary books are dead. “When I heard that contemporaries were out, I started laughing,” Sebastian says. “Two years ago, I heard that editors were saying they were over romantasy, that if they had to put out another book with sprayed edges they were going to lose their minds. But obviously we’re not in danger of losing romantasy. So at this point, if we can’t write historical, contemporary, or romantasy, what is there? We’re literally making this up.”

But Sebastian isn’t worried. “I’ll find the book in my heart that matches what the market wants,” she says. “Star Shipped was the book I wanted to write.” And what does Sebastian want to see more of in romance? She’s very clear: she wants books that get weird.

“I want characters who are not archetypes, who feel like three-dimensional people,” she says. “Other genres get to be weird, and I want romance to be weird. I want wacky premises and annoying characters. I believe that when historical romance comes back—and it will, because everything does—it’s going to be something that we haven’t seen before. I hope that we see more diversity in every sense of the word—more voices, more settings, more time periods.”

Readers who welcomed her turn to contemporary will be thrilled that her forthcoming 2027 book, Washed Up, is set in the same universe as Star Shipped. She describes it as a second-chance, friends-to-lovers premise: “It’s about two people who were teenage actors together, and they were best friends. One of them got super famous and the other one very much did not—he dealt with substance abuse and a bad reputation. He’s gotten his life together as an entertainment journalist, and he decides to interview his old best friend, who has basically disappeared off the map.”

No matter the time period, Sebastian wants her readers to feel the same sense of comfort she felt when she first discovered romance. “The world outside can be terrible, but the world inside my books is safe and peaceful,” she says. “Cozy, safe, and warm—that’s what I’m going for.”

Kerry Winfrey is the author of Waiting for Tom Hanks and other stories.