My wife has always said that when I start going to Thursday morning coffee with Ember, Hailey, and Charlie for real, she’ll know I’ve gone crazy. I love my characters, and that’s especially true for some of the first ones I created.
I’ve said this a lot, but The Chicago Series wasn’t supposed to be a series. I wrote Fresh Start as a stand-alone and then, wrote Eva’s story. While I was writing The Best Lines, I got the idea that Eva could be friends with Hannah and Alyssa from Fresh Start, but that was the extent of it. Then, I got to the first chapter, where Ember is having coffee with her two best friends, and I had this feeling deep in my gut that Charlie was in love with Hailey.
I had no plans of writing any more books – period – at that time. I was just writing The Best Lines because I had the dialogue and scene enter my mind when Ember and Eva met, and I needed to get it out. Then, suddenly, I felt like I needed to write about Charlie and Hailey, so I did, but I wasn’t prepared to call it a series. I’d never written a series before. Hell, I wasn’t even publishing yet. The words just fell out of me, though.
I wanted the book to be realistic. When one of you has been in love with the other for a decade, there’s a lot to work through and adjust to when things are finally all out on the table. So, there’s more angst in this one for that reason. There’s ten years of history to work through and first perfect dates that make you nervous because there’s so much on the line. There’s the worry you’ll never stack up to the person your best friend has loved forever, and the worry that even if they say they want to date you now, you might never compare to their first perfect girlfriend. I wanted to show all of that to make what they find together worth it.
Writing it allowed me to introduce other characters like Summer, Lena, and Emma, and that was how The Chicago Series was born and led to The San Francisco series. In a way, Just Tell Her was a catalyst for so many other books because after San Francisco, I wrote Tahoe, and they’re all connected. After Tahoe, there was Boston, which has a small connection to this universe.
All of that happened because three fictional friends had Thursday morning coffee together.
Just Tell Her
Chicago Series Book 2
Genre: Contemporary Lesbian Romance
Release Date: May 25th, 2018
Formats: Kindle, Paperback
Length: 106,600 words
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