Book Two Is Out of My Hands (Send Chocolate)

I just sent Love Struck, book two in the Pink Matchmakers series, off to the proofreaders.

Cue confetti. And mild panic.

This one needed a little extra massaging before I felt brave enough to hit send. Some books sprint to the finish line. Love Struck? She strutted… stalled… demanded better lighting… and then finally stuck the landing.

I’m lucky that first drafts come fast for me. I’ve trained myself not to polish every sentence as I go. That way lies madness—and unfinished books. Draft first. Fix later. Trust the rewrite.

Around the three-quarter mark, though, this story bogged down. The energy dipped. The spark flickered.

So I stepped away.

I did some printmaking. Took long walks. Let my brain wander.

And just like that, the story came back online. The final chapters poured out, sharp and sure, like they’d been waiting for me to catch up.

The Rewrite Magic

Revisions are where the real romance happens.

That’s when I zoom out and read the story as a whole. I listen for rhythm. I check pacing. I hunt plot holes and redundancies.

(Like accidentally “discovering” a location twice because I forgot I’d already sent the characters there. Oops.)

And somewhere in that process, I fall in love with the characters all over again.

Meet Love Struck

Love Struck is a Pink Matchmakers: Notorious story—a rock star romance with sharp edges and a soft center.

Marissa is a global pop star. She’s talented, exhausted, and being harassed by an ex who refuses to fade quietly into the background. Desperate for a moment to breathe, she slips away from her bodyguards in disguise and ends up doing what any burned-out superstar might do:

Getting tipsy in a casino bar.

Enter Matteo.

Casino owner. Controlled. Powerful. Absolutely not amused by the “Discount Casanova” getting handsy with her.

He steps in.

He rescues her.

And then he falls first. Hard.

Fame is always a delicious dynamic to explore—the isolation, the performance, the constant watching. Pair that with a morally gray casino owner with quiet mafia ties? Even better.

Matteo doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t waffle. When he decides she’s his, he commits.

Marissa, of course, is not making it easy.

And Now… We Wait

Now the manuscript is out in the world, in the capable hands of my editor and proofreaders.

This is the vulnerable part.

You hope they see what you saw.
Feel what you felt.
Fall a little in love too.

While I wait, I do what I always do:

I start building the next world.

New characters. Emotional arcs. Quirky side characters. Settings that feel like home. I disappear into the fantasy and forget that it’s winter. Forget that it’s Friday. Forget the real world for a while.

Because that’s the magic of writing romance.

You get to make people fall in love.

Over and over again.

Lily Writes