I'm feeling especially grateful and happy-weepy for the three romance novels I released this year, so I thought I'd do a little overview of each one!
Book: Not the Marrying Kind
Release Date: January 8th
Summary/Tropes: Type A, punk-princess Fiona Quinn – who is obsessed with getting married – falls for her childhood friend -- cocky bad boy (and anti-marriage) Max Devlin -- while they plan a benefit show to save a famous punk rock club in NYC.
Vibes: Sexy, sparkly, feel-good, sweet and packed with tender, funny love. Ambitious good girl learns to embrace her inner wild child. Charming bad boy falls head-over-heels in love for the very first time and can’t figure out why his heart feels so fast or his palms keep sweating. Also, he can’t stop doing awkward finger guns every time she smiles at him. Late-night concerts in the city. That feeling when a cover band plays your favorite song. Crowd surfing. Opposites attract. Bad boys on motorcycles. Sex in supply closets. One hell of a record collection.
My favorite moments: The meet cute on the fire escape. Roxy and Edward’s sex swing in Chapter two. Goth wedding dress shopping. Pop and Angela’s date in Central Park. When Max sees Fiona dancing to The Clash and his heart explodes. That first kiss (!!!!). The sex scene on the motorcycle that isn’t even a sex scene but it’s as hot as one. The Quinn sisters defying gravity. When Roxy shows her mom her wedding dress. When Fiona shows up on the motorcycle and Max tells Mateo he’s been crying at love songs and eating ice cream every night. That fucking HEA.
Line most highlighted by readers: “My cocky, commitment-phobic bad boy wasn’t at all what I thought I needed. But he was everything I wanted in this world.”
My favorite lines: “She appeared crystal-clear beneath a shining spotlight, dancing and singing without a care in the world. This was Fiona unchained and without a plan. This was Fiona in her birthright, the daughter of musicians, a child raised in music venues and on tour buses. In my seven years on the road, I’d seen some epic natural beauty. I’d watched sunsets over canyons and sunrises on desolate beaches, had ridden my bike through famous mountain ranges and across wide deserts. And Fiona Quinn dancing to the Clash was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”
What Max and Fiona taught me: As the Quinns would say – chase your joy and don’t give a shit. But also, the many drafts of this book taught me that it’s okay if it takes a few tries to get your characters right. Trust your characters, trust your process, trust your muse! I was 65k into the second draft and Fiona and Max were *still* off, so I had to hack through the weeds back to the beginning and painfully rewrite it another couple of times until their love story became obvious. I have a clear memory of sitting on the couch in Vermont (summer 2020), and going through that fire escape Meet Cute line by fucking line, over and over, again and again (“okay so Max says….this, but then later Fiona does this so the reference would happen here…which means he actually says this, now, instead of that, here. And then the next line would be…) I couldn’t just plow through it. I couldn’t ignore what they trying to tell me. I had to listen better, is all. I try and listen better now (in all things).