About

Books. Words. Love. K-pop.

My love affair with writing and words started young. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of preschool trips to the library for story time and coming home with stacks and stacks of books. I always thought they would last us days, but I usually insisted on my mother reading title after title resulting in the stack lasting hours instead.

My love affair with writing started in the fifth grade. That year I won an award for an essay that I entered in contest hosted by a psychology group. The theme was “Why a Child Should Like Himself.” I don’t remember the whole essay—and sadly, I didn’t keep it—but my argument was that if a someone didn’t like, or love, himself or herself, it would be impossible to love others.

I don’t remember writing much during middle school, but my passion for it re-ignited in high school. During the summer between ninth and tenth grades, I began writing my first novel. My best friend, mom, aunts and uncles thought it was a good, but I always wondered if they were saying that because it was true or because they felt they had to. That novel, written in long-hand on pink spiral notebook paper, sits on my bookshelf today, unfinished. Next to it is my second novel, which I started in college. It also sits on my shelves unfinished. Between college and present, I started at least three other novels, all of them abandoned because life took precedence over fiction.

My love affair with K-pop started in 2008 or 2009. I had become a mom to a son who was born in Korea, and started learning about the culture and language. He had loved Korean music as a baby and fell in love with it anew when he was four years old. I had already been listening for more than a year, by that time, but now Korean pop music filled our house daily. The more learned about Korean culture, the more in love I fell with it.

In early 2019, I had another idea for a book. I played with it for a few weeks, but the idea didn’t take off until I changed the main character to a K-pop star. Then words and ideas flowed, and throughout the remainder of that year, I wrote the story that has become Unexpected: Love.

I never intended for anyone to read to it. But after one friend did, and liked it, it was easier to share. The second draft was finished just as a pandemic swept across the world, and changed all of our lives forever. With more free time, I became more involved in the Twitter community and mentioned once that I had written a book. From that one tweet, I gained beta readers, possible editors, and, most importantly, friends.

The more people who read it, and liked the story, the more encouraged I was to publish it. And that is how I came to publish what I hope is the first in a series of novels about InFINITY, a fictional K-pop as they come back together as a group after military service. I have other ideas too—different characters and lives, but a common theme of Korean music.

You can read the first chapter of Unexpected: Love here. I hope you enjoy it!