I owe you a small confession.

Hey All

My editor expected the completed third draft of the new novel by the end of May. It’s almost the end of June, and it isn’t done. There are still scenes in the final act to edit, and a couple I haven’t even written yet.

For a few days, the setback sat on me like a wet coat. The voice that knows it all took over.

You missed the deadline.
You’re behind.
How will you catch up?

Then, I reread one of the scenes I’d rushed, and I spotted why I was stuck. The suspense was working. The romance was working. But my guy, you know the one, Mr. Handsome Hero was dodging those raw emotions around his backstory. Dude wasn’t getting over that hurdle. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t shove him. My job then became digging deep to find out what he was being all macho about. What was he not addressing?

In the kind of book I write, one main character not arcing isn’t a small problem, it’s the whole problem.

In a Romance With Motive story, the danger, the love, and the self-acceptance are not separate threads I braid together at the end. They run on the same engine. What stands between my characters and both love and survival is that one moment in the mirror. The motive behind the threat and the motive behind the longing turn out to be the same motive that buried the pain in the first place. It has to work on all three dimensions.

As real people, we live our lives with the same duality. We earn every moment of pleasure. We suffer through the angst to get to the rainbow of passion on the other side.

When I rush, I lose that. I get a competent thriller and hot romance, but I also get a character who fails to earn his word count. Tidy. Forgettable. Not the book I promised you, and not the book I’d want to read.

So I’m giving the draft the surgical precision it needs. New target, another month to work out the kinks. Slower than I wanted, but honest. It’s the only way I know how to write these two people.

I’d rather hand you something that keeps you up too late because you have to know, than something I shipped on time and didn’t quite mean. That has been the entire journey since I started working on this novel again.

So, thank you for being the kind of reader who waits for the real thing.

More soon.

Ever missed a deadline?

Hit reply and tell me, were you better for it? Or did it put you even further off your mark? Drop me a line and share your setbacks and your wins.

That’s it from me this month.

P.S.: Full honesty, sometimes I listen to that voice for far too long. Sometimes it helps. Most times it doesn’t. What about you?

This month I have been deep in edits on the new book, the kind where I fix one scene, break another, and end up staring at the ceiling at three in the morning because a character refuses to behave. Thank you for being here while the book is still in that wild, secretive stage. You get the thoughts that never make it onto the back-cover copy.

The part I cannot shake is the research.

I spent months learning how cyberattacks actually happen, and I came away looking at my own life differently. My inbox. My phone. The café Wi-Fi I join without thinking. The lazy comfort of an old password that feels harmless because it is familiar.

What unsettled me most was this: the weak point is not always code. Sometimes it is history. Some breaches are not only data breaches. They are intimacy breaches. The person who knows your birthday, your first pet’s name, the street you grew up on, and the password you have never changed, is not always the one who builds the strongest lock. Sometimes they are the one who slips right through it.

Last week I changed the passcode on my phone. Nothing dramatic happened. No suspicious alert. No breach. I was standing in line for coffee, typing the same numbers I have used for years, and I had the unnerving thought that someone who knew me well enough could probably guess them. Not a stranger. Someone who had watched me unlock my phone. Someone who knew which dates mattered to me, and why. I changed it anyway, then kept thinking about it for days.

Because passwords are not only practical. They are revealing. Sometimes they are tiny confessions: a birthday, a name, a date we never fully got over, a fragment of ourselves tucked behind a lock screen and called security.

That is the part of this book that has its hands around my throat in the best possible way. My heroine walks straight into that kind of danger. She enters a world where trust is currency and half the bills are counterfeit. The man closest to her could be her safest ally, or the threat she did not see coming. And the digital trail she thinks she has buried? It is still warm.

Now I want your honest answer.

Would you rather have a partner who knows all your passwords and never looks, or one who has no access at all but checks your lock screen every time you leave the room?

And tell me this too. Is there someone in your life, past or present, who could probably still guess your password? You do not have to name them. Reply with yes or no, or tell me which question made you squirm. I read every reply, and hearing from you is my favourite part of sending these letters.

That’s it from me.

Angela

P.S. I changed my password to something no one would ever guess. It’s the name of a fictional character who keeps me up at night. I’ll never tell you which one. But she’s trouble.

I’m twenty pages away from finishing The Course of Love by Alain de Botton—a beautiful mashup of fiction and philosophy.

A couple chapters in, I caught myself wondering: when does the need for “happily ever after” begin? After the first fight? After you stop performing and start living?

That’s when it hit me: transformation works the same way. It doesn’t begin on January 1. It begins when you decide it does.

Every romantic suspense novel asks the same question: who controls your fate?

In fiction, it’s the villain. The double agent. The lover with secrets.

In real life? It might be you.

The version of you who made the rules years ago. The de facto person still running the show.

She made the rules to survive. But she doesn’t get to run your life forever. 

She built habits for hard seasons: late nights numbing the loneliness. Overcommitting to prove her worth. Playing small to avoid rejection.

These weren’t flaws. They were survival strategies. She was resourceful. She kept you safe.

But the crisis has passed. Now the solution is steadiness.

And she’s still hoarding the control you need, deciding for a future she can’t imagine. So you keep living by rules you’ve outgrown.

So who decided January gets all the power?

We did.

We treat a calendar date like it has authority. Like it can give permission to change. It can’t. We give it that power. Automatically. Without question.
  
On the journey to becoming an author, I’ve learned the hard way not to ask Monday for permission. Not to wait for January’s blessing. I decide. Then I act.