Keeping a Secret

I’m terrible at keeping secrets. Ask any member of my family, and they’ll warn you not to tell me anything. However, I managed to keep one secret this year, and it was a big one.

Dylan and Gabe are getting a sequel. Vow Maker is a novella following their road to matrimony. It features family chaos, meddling friends, sexy bathroom encounters, and love. Always love.

I’d always intended to write Dylan and Gabe’s wedding. They were the couple who set me on the road to writing full-time, and I’ve always adored them. However, this was partly what made writing a sequel so difficult. How did I take two much-loved characters and give them the wedding they deserved? It was a puzzle I happily set aside for years while I wrote other books. Not to mention that writing weddings is really hard. There’s a huge cast of characters and a real pressure to make it right. 

Then this year, it was Rule Breaker’s fifth anniversary, and I started to think a lot about Dylan and Gabe again. And for some reason, a strand of dialogue popped into my head that was so quintessentially Gabe that it made me laugh out loud. 

“I merely pointed out that she wanted too many flowers at the ceremony. I informed her that if I wanted to get married in a forest, I’d head to Nottingham and become Robin Hood.”

It was like he was telling me to get on with it, and I always do as Gabe tells me! And just like that, I knew how they’d get married, and it was so them. I realised it wasn’t going to be a tiny short for the newsletter. Dylan and Gabe deserved a novella and so did my readers who’ve been so wonderful to me. 

That’s not to say I wasn’t nervous. It’s always nerve-racking going back to old characters. So I reread Rule Breaker,and not without a lot of trepidation because what if I didn’t like it? It was a surprise how much I did and how proud I was of these two characters. I also knew their novella had to show relationship development. These two men have been together for seven years, so we need to see who they are now. However, they also needed to be true to themselves. You see the problem? It’s a wonder I ever wrote it. 

Then I started to write, and their voices returned to me in a flash. And I loved every single minute of writing their story. It’s full of love and massive amounts of snark, and that’s always the way I saw them – happily biting at each other, loving, and laughing through the years.

So on that note, I cordially invite you to the wedding of Dylan Mitchell and Gabe Foster. It isn’t an easy route but did you really expect anything else where Gabe was involved?