The Spark

What better thing to write about for my inaugural blog post than the spark that got me started with my debut novel releasing in the Spring of 2025, Like Home?

If you were to ask my family or friends what I do in my spare time, they would, without a doubt, mention that I am a voracious reader (they probably wouldn’t say voracious because they lovingly laugh at my pretentious vocabulary). I have always been obsessed with stories. My mom constantly talks about how I would ask her to read to me over and over until I learned how to do it myself.

My interests and preferred genres have evolved over the years, but one thing has always remained: I love a good love story. Even in my horror novels, I love it when there’s a romance subplot. I feel that to love and be loved is one of life’s greatest joys, so I delight in exploring that through books.

In 2021, I had recently started my career teaching high school English to freshman and sophomore students. As we can all recall 2020-2021 wasn’t exactly a great time to be a teacher (or any profession for that matter), so when I got pregnant with my son in January of 2021, it felt serendipitous. My husband and I had decided that I would stay home with our kids when they were little to avoid the daycare costs and because it was something I always wanted to do.

So, summer of 2021, I packed up my classroom and drove off campus for the last time. For the past twenty-five years, I was in a constant state of motion. Suddenly, with a baby due in September (he came in October, but that’s a story for another day), I was looking at about four months of time where I had no direct obligations. No school, no work, just free time. I hadn’t had a summer off in years, and with pregnancy growing more and more uncomfortable by the hour, what better way to pass the time than to read?

While pregnant with my first child, I was extremely anxious over, well, everything. From how my life would change in ways I could only imagine to all the infinite ways things could go wrong. I was in desperate need of some happy, fun reads to distract me from my doom spiral. Enter Kindle Unlimited and the infinite number of romance and romantasy books in its catalogue. I binged those books at an almost alarming pace. I could not get enough of people finding the loves of their lives and living happily ever after (even if it was with a blue alien).

There was something so cathartic about these stories. How above all, love persists. Worlds can end, and lives can change, but love is indomitable. In a time of my life when I was experiencing a huge, unpredictable change, romance novels offered me a safe place to escape. I was literally reading a Lucy Score book while I was being induced!

Fast forward to early motherhood— Sleepless nights, endless feedings, and losing yourself in a way you never thought possible (you find yourself later, but again different story for a different day). I was still reading to pass the time, boost my mood, and feel less alone. But after my son hit his half-birthday, I started to get an idea.

What if a romance reader realizes she deserves more than what her current relationship is giving her? While my husband is indeed a swoon-worthy hero in our love story, what about the women who read romance as a way to get what they are currently missing?

I tossed this idea around for a few months, and then I started to write it down. I had never done creative writing in this capacity before. I had always dabbled, but the things I wrote tended to be short stories or poetry, not full-length novels with complex characters and individual motivations. I am not someone who meticulously plans out what I write, so I tackled the book scene by scene. I knew where I wanted Summer, my FMC, to end up, but I had no idea how I was going to get her there, or even if her story was going to be readable in the end.

All I knew was that I had to get this story out of my head. I wrote parts of it on my phone, sitting on the floor with my baby. I wrote parts of it on my laptop during naptime or after bedtime. And then, just after my son turned one, I got pregnant with my second child.

Pregnancy? Exhausting. Pregnancy while chasing around a rambunctious one year old and battling morning sickness? There are no words for the level of exhaustion I felt (turns out having pregnancies only a year apart can lead to anemia, who knew?). I could hardly make it to eight p.m. most nights, let alone write, so Summer and Ryan were relegated to the dark musty corners of my saved files, story unfinished. In other words, they went where stories go to die.

When I finally had my second baby and made it through the first six months of her life, I felt some energy return (note: I say some because two under two is not for the weak.) I started thinking about Summer and Ryan again, and wondering if I would ever get around to finishing their story.

In early 2024, I found myself desperately seeking community. I was feeling extremely lonely and uninspired in the daily grind of parenting two small children. Make no mistake, I LOVE my kids, and being home with them is a privilege and joy that I am thankful for every day. AND, it is often an exhausting, thankless job where you are constantly the last to get your needs met. I am a creative and social person, so the change from teaching students every day to spending my day with a toddler and a baby was stark.

I had always been hesitant to have a public-facing profile, especially one that discussed my interest in books. I had it in my head that no one would care, or that I wasn’t creative or interesting enough to take up space on an already oversaturated platform. However, I found myself wanting to talk to someone about the books I was reading. So, I finally took the plunge and created my bookstagram, @reading.and.ruminating.

This community of wonderful people connected me with readers and writers from around the world. Suddenly, finishing and indie publishing my first book didn’t seem quite so unreachable because here were hundreds of other people doing it and thousands of readers willing to read and promote indie authors.

So, with the support of my little community, I decided to dust off Summer and Ryan’s story. I read through and revised the 40,000 or so words that I had written two years prior (cringed a little bit) and started writing new ones. Like before, the story poured out of me quickly. It was all I could think about and I spent every spare moment (of which there were few) shaping Summer’s HEA.

Like I could only hope they would, my little community rallied around me. They cheered me on while I finished the first draft and cried with me when I typed The End for the very first time. To this day, they continue to cheer me on and offer a helping hand while I figure out the next steps for getting this book of mine out there.

So, what was the spark for my first novel? I guess it was really more of a slow burn— a lifetime of reading love stories, the mental space to write it all down, a community of supportive people, and the amorphous, indefinable place where all ideas come from.

Like Home will be coming to a Kindle or Paperback near you in the Spring of 2025! Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter to get updates on Like Home and all future books.

May your book be five stars, and your beverage perfectly made.

— Megan