Behind the Pages

Writing a Grumpy/Sunshine Romance in a Post-War Colony

It started with a feeling

Every book starts somewhere, and this one started with a single image: a woman who gives light to everyone around her, and the blunt stranger who refuses to let her burn herself down doing it. Relentless warmth meets merciless honesty. That contrast drove every choice I made.

The question underneath it was simple: what happens when the person whose whole job is caring finally lets someone care for her?

(The answer, apparently, is forty-five thousand words. You’re welcome.)

Worldbuilding on purpose, not by the pound

I love a big universe, but I wanted The Colony to feel lived-in without burying the romance under exposition.

So the details stay small and load-bearing: a bylaw nobody bothered to read, a petition clipboard at a café table, standard-issue gray clothes that everyone hates and nobody questions.

You get what you need to feel the stakes. You do not get a laundry list of technobabble.

This is a promise.

Making blunt work

Reig could have read as just plain rude, and honestly, that was the tightrope of this whole book.

Formorians don’t do social softening — that’s cultural, not a flaw — so his honesty had to come from loyalty and logic, never cruelty. His care shows up in practical ways: he fixes the thing, he reads the fine print, he stays in the room.

Tenderness that arrives slightly awkward and completely sincere is, in my professional opinion, the best kind.

Pacing the burn

Slow burn is all about timing.

Willow and Reig needed room to misread each other, to take tiny risks — a conversation that runs too long, a rule change that means more than it looks like, a question nobody’s ever asked her before.

Those little moments do the heavy lifting so that when the heat arrives, it’s earned.

I mapped those beats deliberately, and then Willow and Reig ignored about a third of my plans, as characters do.

The emotional truth of it

The real research for this book wasn’t about alien tech.

It was about how people put themselves back together after hard things — the armor we build, the debts we imagine we owe, the slow stubborn work of relearning trust.

Willow’s fatigue and her generosity come from the same place, and I wanted that to feel true even on a station orbiting a planet that doesn’t exist.

On the steam

Yes, this one’s steamy.

And like everything else in the book, the intimacy grows out of who these two are. The heat is a payoff for vulnerability, not a shortcut around it.

Willow letting herself be seen, Reig letting himself want something — that’s what makes those scenes land.

Last thought

This whole book was a balancing act: tenderness and bluntness, community and two people alone in a room, big politics and small kindnesses.

If you come away warmed by the romance and a little bit convinced that accepting help is its own kind of bravery — then I did my job.

Heart Unlocked released this week. It’s been a whirlwind as all releases are, but I’m so thankful for all the love and positive reviews I’ve gotten about it.

He stays. I hope you will too.