Many people don’t know that before my debut rom-com Hate Mail and upcoming release The Proposal Project, I wasn’t writing love stories and happily-ever-afters. In fact, quite the opposite. I was writing thrillers centered on villains and anti-heroes. The main characters in my stories were good people who did bad things and had to find a way to overcome what they had done.
Writing thrillers was fun. I enjoyed exploring people’s psyche—what makes a good person make bad and dangerous decisions, and then throwing all sorts of crazy obstacles at those characters while they try to climb back out of the mess they’ve created. I had good feedback from beta readers and even received several full manuscript requests during my time querying the thrillers I wrote.
So, why did I stop writing them? You’re probably wondering why I switched to romance of all genres.
The simplest answer is that I got tired of all the rejections. I can’t (and won’t) count the number of form rejections I received, but it was a lot. When each full manuscript request ultimately ended in a rejection too, it was disheartening to say the least. But I trudged on, determined to become a published author one way or another.
After querying the three different thrillers I wrote over the course of a few years, and receiving rejection after rejection, I decided to take a break—from thrillers, that is. In 2021, I started writing a romance based on an idea I had for ages. In the beginning, I was writing it just for fun. I had no intention of sending it off to any agents. In fact, when I finished writing it, I hit ‘save’ and then went right back to writing another thriller!
Even as I wrote the next book, I couldn’t stop thinking about the romance I wrote. It was so much fun, and even though I considered myself a thriller author at the time, I could feel romance pulling me in.
It wasn’t until four months later that I opened the file again and thought to myself: hmm, this is pretty good. I decided to dive back into editing it, and by August I felt like Hate Mail was ready to send to agents. In September, one of the first agents I had queried responded with interest, and in October I had an offer of representation.
In one of my conversations with my agent, she told me that I would be expected to continue writing romance. I didn’t mention that I had been writing thrillers before all this. I knew by then that romance was the genre I wanted to stick with anyway.
When I look back at those old manuscripts that I wrote before Hate Mail, I do so with a different set of eyes. I feel like I have learned a lot in the four years since I finished my first draft of Hate Mail and it’s easier for me to accept the reasons that my previous books never got picked up. I count them as practice now. I wasn’t ready to be a published author yet, but those books helped shape me into the writer I am today.