I Love That Girl follows four young adults navigating the emotional highs and lows of the complex relationships that evolve between high school and early adulthood. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I love this question, yet it’s also a tough one to answer succinctly: Back in 2012, I wrote a novel during NaNoWriMo. Actually, it felt like it wrote itself! That book was I Love That Girl. However, it was a different story with different characters. Those characters were grown-up versions of the teens in another one of my books that, at the time, was unpublished—Till It Stops Beating. Fast forward to 2018, and Till It Stops Beating is published by Black Rose Writing. In the years in between, I rewrote that novel from the 2012 NaNoWriMo with brand new characters and an altered storyline. The only thing that stayed the same was that it was told from 4 different points of view of 4 long-time friends. Not only that, at the advice of my agent at the time, I “spiced it up,” and it became a romance book. I parted ways with that agent and obtained a publisher on my own, The Wild Rose Press, who is publishing it on January 1, 2025. I like to think that I Love That Girl is the book that the main character of TISB would have written if I ever wrote a book about her as an adult. So it’s not a sequel but more of an “inspired by.” By the way, Till It Stops Beating is available on Amazon, as are the three other books in that series.

There is so much to be said about love in this book. What do you hope your readers take away from your story?

Love is love regardless of sexual preference and sexuality.

One of the main characters, Gwen, struggles with the fact that she has fallen for her best friend, Andy, who, way back when, was briefly her boyfriend and who, at that time, came out as gay and ended their relationship. Now, years later, they are reunited under interesting circumstances and find themselves falling for each other again. When Andy comes out as bi, Gwen struggles to fully understand what that means.

There is an old Yiddish proverb: “We plan, God laughs.” This applies to the other couple in the novel, Ethan and Nori. They each have a plan that will change the course of their relationship, and when they struggle to reveal their “secret plan” to each other, life steps in and changes everything. In love and life, we try to control things that we ultimately can’t. Ethan and Nori’s relationship is an example of that.

What were some of the emotional and moral guidelines you followed when developing your characters?

What an interesting question! Overall, I allow my characters to have their own life, so to speak. I may not agree morally or values-wise with everything they do, but that’s okay. That’s art. Emotionally, I allow my characters to act out and behave imperfectly because that’s authentic. I write characters that people can relate to. Morally, I can’t have protagonists, the characters who drive the story, be abusive or sociopathic. That’s just not my jam as a writer!

Can fans look forward to seeing more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?

I am working on two projects. The first one is another New Adult romance influenced by some of the great first love stories I read as a young person—Forever by Judy Blume and Endless Love by Scott Spencer.

The second is a memoir, part romance story, and part self-help book. I know it sounds a little odd, but my life has been part romance story and part self-help book!

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