Germany seemed to hold postgraduate degrees in higher esteem and had more cultural opportunities. I applied for a grant to do research. In the meantime, in the depths of my parents’ basement, I wrote historical fiction about German Romantic authors and worked on becoming fluent in German.

Part of my studies included reading at least one article in a German newspaper, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine, every day. It was in that roundabout way that I become hooked on the German scandal of the decade. Memorably, it was described by one journalist as Germans hanging on every moment of a scandal involving cribbed passages in a 475-page law dissertation with the fervor of Americans invested in a political sex scandal.

That is so incredibly German, but I digress. The scandal in question was the Guttenberg plagiarism scandal, which honestly was super fascinating to a person who was recently sprung from academia, living with her parents, and doing five part-time jobs. Spoiler alert, if one can spoil a 15-year-old plagiarism case that made headlines, the accused (who was Minister of Defense in Germany at the time), had his doctorate rescinded and lost his job.

It was from these headlines that On My Side was ripped. This book was written six or seven years after The Scandal. I had met my now-husband in the meantime and decided to stay in North America after all. Heather and David are the first of two marriage in crisis stories that appear in Degrees of Desire. The second is the final book, The Life We Chose, which is out August 24. We see Heather and David’s relationship begin in previous books, and by the time they star as FMC and MMC in their own story, they’ve been married a year.

Things are excellent on the surface - they get good jobs, David is a millionaire, they’re living on the same continent again. Unfortunately, things are rocky underneath all that. Heather is still pissed at him for taking a yearlong postdoc that started a month after their wedding. His huge wallet makes her uncomfortable. David has impostor syndrome and is terrified of teaching students.

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Worst of all, David’s best friend, Percy, is a total asshole to Heather. She hides the true depths of his assholery from David. When Percy is accused of plagiarizing his dissertation, things spiral fast. The Society of Fellows retroactively kicks him out, which tears our found family friend group apart. All the rocky undercurrents swirling about bubble to the surface to make things even worse.

Of course, this is a romance novel, so everyone (except the villain, obvs) lives happily ever after. But man, this one gets dicey. Fasten your seatbelts and make sure your linguistic philosophy dissertations contain the proper citations. Percy is one of my most-hated villains, so I hope you enjoy watching his fall from grace as much as I enjoyed writing it for you.

On My Side is an angsty, emotional, interconnected standalone contemporary romance. Featuring a slow-burn marriage in crisis, high-stakes academic intrigue, and a deeply devoted couple who must figure out if love is enough when their entire world is falling apart. The Degrees of Desire series is free to read on Kindle Unlimited.

But sometimes we’re not ready to be done with our favorite characters as the epilogue closes. Does Baby #3 take after our hero? Can we grab a glimpse of our formerly brooding hero as a suburban dad? Even Julia Quinn of Bridgerton fame wrote an entire book of second epilogues. I love a series of interconnected standalones for this, both as a reader and a writer. It’s so much fun to drop glimpses of other books’ couples in various Degrees of Desire books (as well as in the forthcoming Inner Circle series, which shares a universe with Degrees of Desire!).

As I’ve mentioned in a few previous posts, I changed the series order prior to publication. The OG final book was When It Was Us (then known as Fatherly), which came out last week. It’s now Book 6 in the series of eight. Before I dove into writing the Inner Circle series, I was at slightly loose ends. Trevor and Caroline are one of my favorite couples. Plus, we don’t get Caroline’s point of view in their original story.

With all that in mind, I ended up writing The Tenure Trick, a small-town cozy mystery featuring Caroline and Trevor in their happily married life. The body of a local theatre professor turns up in hilarious and unusual circumstances. Caroline is now a lifestyle creator, but is contemplating writing a book about her time uncovering corruption in the New York State Assembly. Angela’s brother Brian from The Business of Us is now a struggling reporter for Higher Education News. They band together to uncover a web of lies, intrigue, and petty whining only an academe could have produced.

This one is 100% free to read, by the way. You don’t even need a Kindle Unlimited subscription. All you have to do is move your thumb slightly, tap the subscribe button below, and The Tenure Trick will appear in your inbox.

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It’s a good 10K words or roughly 30 pages of a standard-sized PDF. It’s a fun read, but it’s not complete. If you love this preview of The Tenure Trick, please, please shoot me a note. If enough notes are shot my way, I will strongly consider finishing The Tenure Trick sooner rather than “someday when things settle down.” I do know who the killer is.

Rather than finish the manuscript - I almost never DNF manuscripts - I embarked on writing a second series that shares a universe with Degrees of Desire. So perhaps it worked out for the best.

Do you ever wonder what happened to your favorite romance characters after the epilogue? Do you ever read or write fanfiction about them? (I am definitely guilty of that.) Let me know! And if you’ve been reading this Substack for a while and haven’t subscribed yet, be sure to tap the button and check out The Tenure Trick.

If you read Future Perfect, you might be dubious about Trevor. He doesn’t exactly show up as his best self in Maria’s time of need. Fortunately for all involved, Maria lives happily ever after with merry nerd Robert Hale. And Trevor was never serious about Maria anyhow. Or was he?

Trevor was extremely serious about Maria, as it happens. He’s just a catastrophic failure at demonstrating that. And he’s a catastrophic failure as we head into When It Was Us, the sixth installment in the Degrees of Desire series, which launched today. This is not a guy who needs a dick pic scandal and a hashtag campaign dropped onto his plate.

But somehow, some way, through the thick of his extremely complicated and busy love life over the past 18 years, he’s never forgotten or quite gotten over Caroline Villiers. And of course, they reconnect a little too enthusiastically, giving Trevor only nine months to get his shit together.

Unique among the Degrees of Desire books, When It Was Us is told entirely from Trevor, the MMC’s, point of view. I wondered while polishing this for publication whether I should go back and add Caroline’s voice, but honestly, the story is complete as told by the Trev. Caroline’s POV doesn’t add much. “Day 46: Trevor remains a hot mess. He texted me about Nutella.” Although she’s waiting for Trevor to sort himself out, Caroline’s shit is very together. As a heroine, she’s not insecure or toting baggage. Trevor is all of the above. (If you want to hear directly from Caroline, tap the subscribe button below - she is the star of my bonus extra!)

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The book was previously titled Fatherly before I finalized the titles. I actually really liked that title, but the new one clearly marks When It Was Us as a second-chance romance novel. Trevor’s story was also originally the final installment in the Degrees of Desire series. It was a nice bow on the series, but reshuffling it put it back-to-back with Maria’s story, in which Trevor plays a huge role, and places Olivia’s (Trevor’s surrogate sister) story last. This leads nicely into the Degrees of Desire sister series, Inner Circle, which launches in September. (And I have four words for you about that: hot millionaire single dad. Stay tuned.)

If you’ve started When It Was Us, let me know what you think!

When It Was Us is an emotional, high-stakes, interconnected standalone contemporary romance featuring a bisexual hero on a journey of redemption, a smart heroine who knows her worth, and a second-chance love story wrapped in an accidental pregnancy. Free to read on Kindle Unlimited

The nineties plot is a lot of fun, although it clearly dates the book a bit. Sharp-eyed readers will note that the book technically takes place in 2013, as it includes a major newsworthy event from that year. If you’ve been reading this Substack for a while, you might remember that all of the books originally took place in specific years. So, being in their early 30s in 2013 makes Roger and Iris just a few years older than I am and definite nineties high school kids. Therefore, I got to revisit the slang of my youth (you better recognize), glitter jeans, blue nail polish, purity culture seminars in public schools, and, most importantly, the music.

Roger and Iris bond over their love of indie pop. I’m over here babysitting my inbox for some unicorn somewhere to call out the serious deep cuts playing on Roger’s car stereo. The majority of their shared bands are from the Elephant 6 Collective, the history of which is an entire article for a completely different Substack. The music was about 50/50 artists trying to out-weird each other and actual, ear-pleasing melodies.

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And this is the soundtrack to rebellious suburban Iris’s fledgling classical ballet career. One of the bands from this collective (one of the few bands that is actually still active) is/was of Montreal, whom Trevor and Maria bond over in Future Perfect and When It Was Us. In my defense, I wrote this series between 2017 - 2019 while working a day job that shunted me into a back room office, where I listened to indie Pandora all day.

In the present-day plot, Roger and Iris haven’t forgotten their musical bond, nor have they changed their tastes all that much. Iris is still choreographing ballet routines to The Decemberists, and Roger is doing econometrics to the tune of Skeletal Lamping.

Do you need to know or care about late-1990s indie dream pop to enjoy or understand this book? Definitely not. The crux of the matter is that a washed-up prima ballerina crashes her high school ex’s tenure drama in the middle of the night. An earth-shattering, terrifying thing happens a few days later. No one moves on. Instead we flash back to the 1997-1998 school year and tease out the reason our high school sweethearts turned sour.

The two plots run parallel for most of the book. The Ardmore-Merion Math Ninjas compete for the gold in the past while Roger prays for tenure as an adult. Teenage Iris battles her parents for permission to attend the Philadelphia Creative and Performing Arts magnet school. Adult Iris is completely unmoored after a Grade 3 ACL rupture derailed her ballet career.

Are they wiser and more mature as adults? Um… Maybe? Not entirely. But what fun would it be if they sat down at Roger’s dining room table for a civilized conversation before being emotionally prepared and also making a ton of bad decisions first?

Stop Your Memory is Book 2 in the Degrees of Desire series. It’s a deeply emotional, angsty, interconnected standalone contemporary romance filled with forced-proximity tension, an opposites-attract academic clash, and a second-chance love story fifteen years in the making. The entire series is free to read on Kindle Unlimited.

Robert and Maria are both classicists. Any Classics nerds out there on the greater internet? Are your careers in law and marketing going okay? To clarify, since I’ve been asked whether it’s “classics like Shakespeare or ‘57 Chevies,” Classics is the study of ancient Greece and Rome. Robert studies the Silver Age of Latin Literature (roughly 18 - 133 AD or CE). Maria specializes in Hellenistic history (323 - 30 BC or BCE).

As always, you don’t need to know or care about arcane academic subjects to understand the book. At its core, the book is the story of a very messy, flailing former academic hotshot (Maria) and the kindly stable nerd who’s adored her since grad school (Robert). If you love a wholesome good-girl heroine, Maria is… Probably not for you. She flames out of the UNESCO Young Professionals Program only to somehow wind up accidentally making out with a grad student at her new job. She gets wasted on cheap tequila. Until she and Robert start dating, she has a friend with benefits, Trevor, who’s kind of a jerk. (But watch for his redemption arc in When It Was Us, out July 27!)

She makes poor choices, in other words, but I love Maria. She actually does mean well. I also love sweet, socially clueless Robert. He’s not the socially awkward wreck Conrad is in Baby, Unexpected. He has a lot of guy friends. Talking to women just happens to be very much not his skill set. It lands him in A Situation, the poor man.

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Once Robert and Maria finally get on the same page as far as mutual attraction, they decide to fully “nerd out.” This was one of my favorite exchanges to write, as I love nerdy banter. They reference the stories in their high school Latin book called fabellae, which is just Latin for ‘stories.’ These were basically little skits that used the vocabulary words.

In high school, ever the jokester and writer, I took the characters from the fabellae and placed them into less salubrious situations. The Latin dictionary bore fruit like ‘brothel,’ and thus “Quintus and Marcus Go to the Brothel” made its rounds through my amused study hall. No adults ever cottoned on to this underground Latin writing market, unlike Maria’s parents in the book. My friends and I merrily wrote PG-13 stories about Quintus and Marcus that we thought were absolute filth. The fabellae are currently living their best lives somewhere in my basement because of course I have them 25 years later.

And finally, as I mentioned last week, my favorite fun fact is that the lost work of the Greek playwright Menander that Maria discovered to earn hotshot status is the story upon which Strings Attached is loosely based. Unfortunately, the play being discovered is entirely fictional, and it remains only known through a Latin translation. I just hope whoever discovers it one day has better luck in the job market than Maria. And also perhaps stays away from both grad students and tequila.

Future Perfect is out today! It’s an angsty, witty, interconnected standalone contemporary romance featuring a chaotic academic heroine, a quietly devoted hero who falls first, and a sweet, slow-burn love story years in the making. Find the full Degrees of Desire series on Amazon - all the books are free to read on Kindle Unlimited.

When I reshuffled the series order prior to publishing, I made Strings Attached Book 1 in the Degrees of Desire series. Who could resist a physicist pretending to be a lobsterman having a summer fling with an economist pretending to be a barista? And then meeting on campus in the fall as their real selves…

One of the fun things about this story is the small-town cozy meddling that happens early on. The series is primarily set in Boston, which is a great setting for any academic romance, but I loved creating the fictionalized version of Southwest Harbor, Maine you see in Strings Attached. The market clerk knows Paul has the hots for Emily because the clerk went to school with him. Emily’s boss at the coffee shop has, shall we say, a past with Paul. Everyone knows the house where Emily is staying. Small towns are the best. Especially when you and your summer man decide to get a little frisky at the town fireworks.

As the title of this post suggests, there’s more than one kind of fireworks happening that evening. I was sort of intimidated going into this book’s spicy scenes because the OG Book 1, Baby, Unexpected (now Book 4), has some pretty steamy encounters going on. I set the bar high for spice. On the whole, I’m happy with the way the spice turned out in Strings Attached. I think Paul and Emily are happy, too.

Spice aside, a lot of chatter has been taking place on Goodreads about all the science and math conversations in this book! I laughed because yes, maybe it is a lot. It was definitely a lot of research. I’m a romance author. Science and math are hardly my middle names, so I had to do a lot of fact-checking. An Easter egg in the book is that Paul, who studies cosmology (the study of the universe), is an extremely sharp dresser. My brother is an actual, real-life physicist and swears this is true! Apparently, all the other branches of physics look upon the cosmologists with envy and try to keep pace with their fashions.

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In the book, without giving too much away, Paul and Emily both have their own valid reasons for the deception. In trying to get away from the stress of her impending divorce and career worries, Emily randomly blurts out that she’s a barista. Paul is trying to atone for a family situation. The idea for that atonement came from an ancient Greek play.

I was a Classical Languages major in undergrad and ended up reading a lot of New Comedy, which is basically the ancestor of modern romance plots. Tropes like grumpy/sunshine, “convince her father,” and many more all came to us by way of ancient Greek New Comedy. And people call romance fluff!

Paul’s storyline was pulled from a play called Heauton Timorumenos (say it five times fast), which was translated into Latin by the Roman playwright Terence. The original was written by the Greek playwright Menander and only survives in fragments. Fun fact, y’all - this is the lost play that Maria from Future Perfect (Book 5, out July 13) rediscovers to make a name for herself in academia. The title translates to “The Self Tormentor.”

You can read about the play more in depth on Wikipedia if you’re interested, but the super complicated plot involves a guy punishing himself for his role in a family drama by doing manual labor. Kind of like a physicist who spends the summer working in his family’s lobster business instead of in his cosmology lab. And they said I would never use my Classics degree.

Have you read Strings Attached yet? Drop a comment below before you dive into the rest of the series. The entire Degrees of Desire series is available exclusively on Amazon and is free to read on Kindle Unlimited.

For most people, it’s a fascinating, bizarre headline about medievalesque political maneuvers playing out in 2026.

For me? Same, but also it felt like the universe was peer-reviewing one of my romcoms.

In The Business of Us (Degrees of Desire Book 3), the female main character, Angela, is a brilliant, hyper-focused economics fellow at Harvard. On paper, her life is seamless: high-powered career, fresh doctorate, sharp wit, and a bright future in her field.

But her baseline for “family drama” is entirely unhinged. As she puts it, “I grew up in 1570.”

Angela did the ultimate runner. She completely cut ties with her “rad-trad,” ultra-conservative family to build a life in the modern world. She thought she had successfully outrun the guilt, the rules, and the heavy expectations of her upbringing.

Until her brother suddenly drops out of the seminary he departed for earlier in the book (against Angela’s advice) with a shocking revelation. Suddenly, her carefully curated academic life and her family’s radical theological world collide.

Full disclosure, Angela’s family isn’t SSPX in the book. They’re actually more ultra-traditionalist than that. What’s that? How much worse could it be than defying the Pope?

A lot worse, guys. Sedevacantist (one of my favorite things in the book is stoner MMC Matt trying his damndest to pronounce this word) groups like the SSPV aren’t that worried about defying the Pope. They actually think he’s an imposter.

Let’s hear from Angela and Matt themselves on this one:

“But what is all that other stuff?” Matt asked. “It’s Catholic, right? My mom hated religion, so I don’t know much about it. Are you Catholic?”

“Not technically,” she said. “Although my parents might beg to differ. We did Catholic rituals, but the church we went to isn’t recognized by the Vatican.”

“Oh, weird,” he said. “Why not?”

“My parents are sedevacantists,” she said.

“Sed…” Matt scratched his head. “Seventh-day Adventists?”

“No,” she said and repeated it more slowly. “Sedevacantists. It’s from the Latin for ‘the seat is empty.’ They think the Pope is an impostor.”

…

“Seriously.” Angela shook her head. “There’s some crazy stuff floating around, crazier than this, even. Some guy in Kansas claimed he was the true Pope, and he walked around in a Pope outfit and everything.”

“Maybe I should try that. It would totally get people to the brewery,” Matt said. “Hail, Pope Matthew.”

“It’s not a joke. This stuff is completely real to these people, and they take it seriously. Good lord, do they take it seriously.”

“So, your parents thinking the Pope is fake gives you nightmares about the Society of Fellows? And why’s the Pope fake, anyway?” His eyes were intent, no hint of dopiness or mischief.

“It’s hard to explain,” Angela said. “I guess what you have to understand is that I grew up in 1570.”

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The guy with the Pope outfit walking around in Kansas is completely true, by the way, although the person has passed away since The Business of Us was written. I did find out as I was researching this article that someone has succeeded him.

Why is this even a thing? Most people would assume that ultraconservative groups would be more likely to do what the Pope wants. Obedience being a virtue in the religious realm and all.

The issue here is with Vatican II. Back to you, Angela and Matt.

“You’ve heard of Vatican II, right?” He nodded. “Well, my parents hate Vatican II.”

“No shit? I thought Catholic people loved that thing because it made everything easier. I mean, I don’t know what it made easier, but that’s what I heard.” Matt sipped from the water glass he’d gotten for her. She didn’t mind.

“Not all of them love it,” she said. “Honestly, I get that part. Vatican II really changed things, and people were as militant about enacting those changes as my parents are about staying in 1570. It turned centuries of doing the exact same thing completely around. People just went crazy updating stuff. There’s a lot of dissension and ill will about it, all these splinter groups that broke off.” Angela took the water glass back. “Sedevacantists are just one of them. They say Vatican II was so heretical that no one who’s into it could possibly be the real Pope. But this isn’t really the point. The point is that they’ve taken their love for something aesthetically beautiful—the Latin Mass I was talking about—and their desire for something rooted in history, and they let their hatred for Vatican II and modernity completely overtake their reason. They’ve made tradition into something incredibly ugly.”

The irony, at least to me, has always been that instead of working together to preserve the beauty of tradition and the things they love, the splinter groups have chosen to quibble for going on 60 years over the minutiae of this doctrine and that canon law passage. They could be a real force in bringing back tradition, and instead they’ve settled for being a bunch of surly defiant weirdos.

That’s not to say that every single Latin Mass group is comprised of surly defiant weirdos. The FSSP and ICKSP (so many acronyms, these are the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter and Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest) are in full communion with the Pope and are not breaking any rules. It’s not 1570 in an FSSP parish. And like Angela, I understand (to a limited extent) those who feel threatened into surly defiance by modernism or think the post-Vatican II Mass lacks reverence. However, acting like Angela’s dad in the book (or wearing a Pope outfit to the minimart) is not the way.

When we think of romantic comedies, we usually think of lighthearted misunderstandings or classic tropes like enemies-to-lovers or fake dating. I love myself a trope - The Business of Us is a workplace romance/friends-to-lovers/opposites attract story. But I’ve always believed that the best chemistry happens when characters are carrying deep, textured, and highly specific emotional baggage. Matt also suffered during an extremist childhood of the opposite kind.

Watching a woman who can confidently lecture a room of Harvard economists try to navigate a modern relationship with her polar opposite stoner/slacker/fledgling brewery owner while simultaneously dealing with a family crisis rooted in an incense-drenched underground religious movement is a beautiful, hilarious, and heartbreaking mess. For the story, I really wanted to explore a different vein of “she fled her conservative upbringing” than we usually see in fiction. Speaking of tropes, it’s always the evangelical Purity Ball in novels and never 1570.

And in 2026, it turns out that real-world drama is just as wild as fiction.

Are you following the recent Vatican news, or did you grow up in a hyper-specific subculture that you’re still unpacking? Let’s talk about it in the comments!

This piece features two brief passages excerpted from Chapter 6 of my book, The Business of Us. Find the complete Kindle edition and read for free on Kindle Unlimited exclusively on Amazon.

Last week, I told you about the way these books haunted my hard drive for eight years.

But actually, Baby, Unexpected has had a longer journey. The characters have been around since 2003! At age 19, I wrote a campus novel called The University, which was as cringe as it sounds - an unhinged piece of work with roughly 15 plots. One of these involved professors Wes and Laure Ivy, who remain Alexa’s parents with their names and professions intact 23 years later. Wes and Laure had a daughter who married a Harvard economist after an accidental pregnancy.

I took this idea and ran with it during my post-freelance creative streak. The basic premise stayed intact, but of course, some heavy editing ensued. Alexa got a little older. Conrad got a little younger. I used to love the ‘age gap couple’ trope far more than I do now. Do you like reading age gap couples? It has to be an otherwise level playing field for me - similar sexual experience level, can’t have met when one of them was a minor, no massive financial disparity. I would never want a big age gap IRL, but uh, I’m not really down for an accidental pregnancy either, and that’s a trope I love.

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The biggest change and the thing that took the hardest to work out was the fact that Alexa actually was some type of paid escort in the OG manuscript. Who knows why? I was nineteen when I came up with it. Even though she was doing this on a very limited basis to spite her parents, that wasn’t what I wanted for her. Frankly, I also didn’t think readers would love this for an FMC. The problem was that it created some delicious tension between Alexa and Conrad and their motives for meeting up at Mezzo that first evening. Finally, I hit upon the idea of it being a rumor and introduced the character of slimeball Landry. I was pumped to solve the problem this way and add a new layer to the campus scrutiny aspect of the story.

The fact that Alexa was a high achiever who wanted a quieter life than everyone else wanted for her was also accounted for in the 2003 manuscript. Maybe this was prophetic because I am feeling this right now in my own life with corporate burnout. If you’re struggling with burnout, too, I hope things work out for you and that reading the book helps!

This book also has, in my own opinion (and my husband’s haha), the hottest spicy scenes of any Degrees of Desire book. The scene that leads to the titular unexpected baby is a personal favorite love scene. Definitely easy to see how our main couple might forget to reach into the bedside drawer in the heat of passion.

Anyhow. I hope you enjoy the fully edited 2026 version of Baby, Unexpected. If you’d like to linger in this universe, check out Books 1-3: Strings Attached, Stop Your Memory, and The Business of Us. (Alexa and Conrad appear many times in each of these, so you will get to see them living out their happily ever after, and maybe meddling to ensure everyone else gets an HEA, too.)

If you are one of the early birds who read Baby, Unexpected today, please consider leaving an honest review or star rating on Amazon to help fellow readers find the book.

If you haven’t already, please take a quick second to subscribe to this Substack. I will never spam you, and you’ll get a free cozy small town HEA story (10k words!) immediately delivered to your inbox with my thanks.

The floodgates of creativity opened. I was at leisure (ha, but actually, I had a toddler by that point) to get back to my true love of writing fiction. As a notoriously speedy writer, I turned out the entire Degrees of Desire series between May 2017 and late 2018. Then I moved on to write the Inner Circle series (coming Fall 2026, subscribe for release dates).

I went on to make a huge hash of trying to publish the Inner Circle series (more to come on that). Degrees of Desire was left to languish in obscurity on my hard drive. Not because I wasn’t happy with the books. I’m thrilled with them! They’re so much fun! I’m not entirely sure why they got pushed aside, but honestly, I’m glad they did because I can bring them out for you now, when the time is right.

So, I’m the woman who sat with eight finished, completely publishable manuscripts on her hard drive for eight years. Which is poetic, I guess?

Fun facts about Degrees of Desire:

It was originally called the Cambridge Series.

The books were initially set in specific years! Only Baby, Unexpected survived this on the cutting room floor. The original series order was different, too. I swapped it around to make sure my readers are getting the tropes they crave in the order in which they crave them. The OG series order and setting years are:

Baby, Unexpected (1999); Strings Attached (2006); The Business of Us (2009); On My Side (2012); Stop Your Memory (2013); Future Perfect (2015); The Life We Chose (2017); When It Was Us (2018)

Several of the books had different working titles - Baby, Unexpected was called Chasing Ivy. The Business of Us went through a ton of titles, but landed on High Society before its published title was locked in. On My Side was called Copycats. The Life We Chose was originally Alchemy, and When It Was Us was titled Fatherly.

The last time I tried querying a tradpub agent was for Baby, Unexpected/Chasing Ivy back in 2017. A huge, noteworthy agent requested the full manuscript (omg was I pumped), but she rejected it on Valentine’s Day 2018! Of all the daaayysss to reject a romance novel. I was really upset at the time, but honestly, her rejection email that said ‘best of luck as you continue to write’ was something I found very encouraging. I’m glad in retrospect that this didn’t work out. I love publishing contemporary romance for Kindle Unlimited and being hands-on in the process.

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The moral of the story is that I let EIGHT BOOKS languish for EIGHT YEARS. It’s about damn time they saw the light of day.

If you’re reading this, thanks, and please consider subscribing - you’ll get my 10k word second epilogue to When It Was Us (no spoilers and it will make sense if you haven’t read the book yet). It’s a peek into the future of Trevor and Caroline’s cozy small-town HEA, but also there is murder. Hilarious murder. Caroline, as well as Angela’s brother Brian from The Business of Us, are on the case. The story is 100% free for subscribers, and the download link will arrive in your inbox via the welcome email.

Speaking of rapid release! The first three books (Strings Attached, Stop Your Memory, and The Business of Us) are already available for all your binging needs. Next up is Baby, Unexpected, which drops on June 29. This is obviously an accidental pregnancy romance.

Future Perfect goes live on July 13 - there is currently an ARC campaign live for this book on Booksirens. The book follows the epic career collapse of classicist Dr. Maria Lyons, who winds up tending bar at Fowler Aleworks, the brewery that Angela and Matt open in The Business of Us, and where Roger and Iris drown their sorrows in Stop Your Memory. Her nerdy former classmate - now hugely successful - walks up to her bar. Robert has always pined for her, and this time, he’s determined to make his move. If you’d like to join the ARC team for Future Perfect, please reach out - happy to share my Booksirens link!

Also available for preorder right now is When It Was Us, one of my absolute favorites. I cried writing it. I cried editing it. I cried formatting it in Kindle Create. I hope you love it, too. When you read Future Perfect, watch out for Trevor Miles - When It Was Us is his redemption arc, and dear God, does he need one.

The final two installments (both marriage-in-crisis stories) will also be live for preorder soon - On My Side and The Life We Chose.

Read the Degrees of Desire series on Kindle Unlimited for free

In better news, the advance reader copy of Strings Attached was accepted over on Booksirens! It’s live now, so if you’re interested in an early look at Paul and Emily’s story - here is the link to read the ARC.

Whether you read it as an advance reader or are waiting for it to drop on KU, I hope you enjoy.

P.S. What’s your craziest car story? The guy at Jiffy Lube, where I took the car initially to get the check engine code read, had never seen a squirrel-chewed engine before, but apparently it’s incredibly common? A day job coworker is dealing with this exact same thing this week. My car was stolen from outside my apartment in undergrad and was found by the Pittsburgh Police after they’d spent months ticketing it for illegal parking rather than running the plates to discover it was stolen. So, that’s somewhat crazier. Please comment with your insane car stories.

Is your summer TBR looking for a few good nerds? The first three installments of the Degrees of Desire series - Strings Attached, Stop Your Memory, and The Business of Us - drop Monday, June 15! They’re available for preorder if you prefer to own your ebooks. They’ll also be part of Kindle Unlimited for those who binge.

Strings Attached follows brilliant economist Emily, who comes home from the grocery store to find her husband’s secret (very pregnant) wife in her living room. She flees to coastal Maine and into the arms of a hot lobsterman named Paul. Little does she know that Paul is actually a hot physicist at MIT.

Stop Your Memory throws buttoned-up Roger (also an economist) into a cramped apartment with his high-school ex, Iris, a ballerina whose career was tragically cut short. A citywide tragedy forces them back together as they grapple with their past (look out for the deranged way Iris tried to get expelled!) and their uncertain present.

The Business of Us stars Harvard Junior Fellow Angela (another economist, obvs) and lovable stoner Matt. When Angela takes a job in Matt’s startup brewery to pay down her student loans, she doesn’t expect a) the business to last, b) to fall in love with her polar opposite, or c) her estranged brother to return for a final reckoning the second A and B are finally squared away.

More is on the way - a new Degrees of Desire title drops every other week, all summer long! Hot Nerd Summer is underway.

Learn more and preorder