From Volume 1:
Alice is the Imperial Princess Regnant of the Galactic Empire. At 22, she has been thrust into power after her father (the Emperor) and her two older brothers have all died in various ways. Her Imperial Chancellor, Lord Rupert, does everything he can to support her, but has somewhat different ideas about how the Empire should be run than did his late Emperor.
Alice has one major problem: She cannot be crowned Empress Regnant until she marries and produces an heir. (In fairness, it’s the same way for the male heirs who succeed the throne while unmarried; they remain Princes Regnant until they marry and produce heirs.)
But Alice, being kept busy three days a week by interminable audiences with petitioners, and the rest of the week with what she terms “mostly busy work”, has no real way to meet boys — well, reasonably eligible boys, anyway, and of her own age — with whom she might eventually take up and form a household. And she chafes at the necessity of trying to rule, hands-on, an Empire so huge it cannot be truly ruled by any one person to begin with.
Literally, she just wants to leave people alone, as her father and his predecessors did for centuries.
Then, into her life walks the Crown Prince of a planet many, many parsecs away from the Capital Planet…and her life begins to take on a life of its own…
BBESP (as I am firmly wedded to calling it) is my attempt to write a Japanese-style “light novel”, which is basically a series of novels, about 50,000 words long, all with the same title and all following the escapades of a group of characters. They exist in a number of genres, as it happens, I like the shoujo and seinen genres primarily (these are aimed at young girls and young to young adult boys, respectively). If I were to classify BBESP with a Japanese demographic tag, it would probably fit under shoujo/romantic comedy. You also find a lot of high school manga under that label. But it’s been described variously (mostly by other people, and I just picked up on it) as a:
Libertarian Science Fiction Space Opera Regency Romance Light Novel
Which is a mouthful, and, well, none of it is wrong.
The books are all around 240 pages long and generally begin with a short prologue carried over from the previous book and a “cliffhanger” ending to link to the next book. When I started, I meant to write three books. Now I don’t know where this thing is going to end. As of June 2026 there are four books available and at least one more planned, but the “one more” could turn into more than that. So all I can do is shrug and say, “Come along for the ride!”
