I owe so many thanks to so many people right now.

First, the first two people who beta read this (in a most unusual fashion): Michelle Hart and Lyssa Dawn. They read bits hot off the keyboard and gave invaluable feedback and suggestions, all of which I took with gratitude. This was a tough book for me. (Aren’t they all, though?)

Big Mistake was conceived, as so many of my projects are, as a book that would be “easy to write.” Writing is so hard for me that I’m always in search of this beautiful mythical unicorn, the easy-to-write book. I have yet to find it; imagine that. Every book is hard in its own way, and they’re never as hard as when you actually sit down to work on a book that, when you were kicking a faint scrap of an idea around in your head, you were sure would practically write itself.

So the genesis of Big Mistake was literally just me looking at a list of romance tropes, wondering which would be simplest to write. I settled on friends-to-lovers, because easy-peasy. They’re friends, then they get drunk, then they shag, and voila! Love story. I had the lemon-drop scene in my head from literally the moment I conceived of Beck and Garrett, and I figured the rest would fill itself in pretty easily.

But, as usual, I came up against a real-life hard wall: When was I supposed to write this thing? I was teaching classes and writing literally four other books. Maybe I needed a co-author?

There was one person who jumped at the chance to co-write it with me, but she was also writing a bunch of other books and then had some medical issues—and meanwhile, not to be crass but I needed to get this book written and published so my family could, you know, eat.

Enter Laney. Laney is a machine. If Laney decides she’s going to do something, she sits down with her calendar, moves shit around, makes room for the thing she wants to do, and then—get this—she does it. Gee, who’d’ve thunk it?

One day, I hope to be like Laney.

When she heard I was looking for someone to write the first draft of my next romance, Laney looked at her calendar, waved her magic wand, and said “I can do that next week.”

Next week?! I’ve got literally four scenes outlined.

Okay, move up “outline Big Mistake” on the To-Do list.

I sketched out a quick chapter outline, thought it looked pretty solid. But then I ran the outline by Nikki Quinn (who was at the time my go-to romance reader). She took one look at my outline and said “Well that’s great and all, but what’s the reason they’ve never seen each other as sexytimes material before?”

Uh … I don’t know? Because I said so?

Sigh.

I gave her a lot of not-great reasons, and in trying to get myself back in her good graces—Nikki’s smart, you guys, wicked smart, and she doesn’t suffer fools lightly—I realized that in my quickie outline I had moved further and further from my original idea. As the story stood now, Beck and Garrett weren’t best friends; they were people who’d known each other, but not terribly well, then got drunk and had sex.

Well, that’s a fine story, I suppose, but it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. The story I wanted to tell was about two people who had been real, true, best friends all of their lives and then took that next step together. Nikki made me understand that I hadn’t done what I set out to do. Was it even remotely believable that, without some other obstacle, they would never have looked at each other in that way before that night? And since the answer to that is obviously no, what stopped them?

Thank God I am surrounded by so many smart people who save me from myself.

Back to the drawing board. Beck’s illness came into being, along with her family’s protectiveness and Garrett’s family’s protectiveness. Garrett’s sense of responsibility, aka his savior complex, came into sharp relief for me when I realized that Beck, as a grown woman, didn’t need that shit anymore. I understood that she would have to confront the people in her life and present herself as a person who could act with agency, someone who no longer needed to be coddled like a newborn chick.

So once I had all that in place, off the outline went to Laney. And I’ll be damned if she didn’t write the first draft in a week.

Then I took three months to write the second draft. Oops.

This wasn’t Laney’s fault. She wrote exactly the story I’d given her. And I did fine with the first half of the second draft, doing most of it in a crazy week-long vacation in San Francisco. But just before I came home, I got to a scene I realized should absolutely not be there. Talk about big mistakes; this was the biggest. I had ruined both characters and I didn’t even like them anymore.

You know what happens when you pull the pivotal scene out of the middle of your novel? Yeah, I didn’t know either, but I sure figured it out — with Nikki’s help, again. She read the whole first half and gave me more excellent feedback. So I changed the middle, which meant changing the end, which meant changing the beginning.

So much for easy.

So … many thanks to Laney, obviously, and again I’ll thank Michelle and Lyssa, who let me know that the beginning at least was solid as hell. And I’ll thank Nikki again, though she won’t see it. She doesn’t beta read for me anymore, and I’m going to feel that loss keenly — though not as keenly as I’ll feel the loss of the hilarious political memes she would send me on Messenger while I was sleeping. Friends are more important than any beta read; take that to the bank.

You should know that Laney will be publishing a serial this spring; those of you who loved The Billionaire’s Contract won’t want to miss it. It’s about a sexy alpha billionaire, and I know how you love those.

As for me, I don’t have any idea what’s next. Laney and I have ideas for Bri and Levi, and we absolutely love Tasha (who wouldn’t?)—but I don’t think I’ll return to Blue Swan Cove for a little bit. I’ve got some other stuff percolating, and I’m gonna do a little nonfiction thing to cleanse my palate, then make some decisions.

If you want to know what I decide, you can keep up with me by joining and/or . Whatever I end up doing next, I hope it will be something you really love.

And I hope you loved Garrett and Beck. :)