Can’t Help Falling is officially here!
Today is the release day for Can’t Help Falling. And, oh, how I want to celebrate this book. This was the first book I’d ever written under contract. I loved working with HQN and I wanted so badly to hand them an absolutely sparkling manuscript. I wanted to prove my worth. Of course, anytime you command yourself to be perfect, well, things… just kinda go sideways.
Wanna know the main challenge? Fin, my main character, didn’t really care about falling in love. And I love that about her. At the beginning of the book, she wants so many different things for her life and none of them are a romantic partner. She is strong-willed and smart and unwieldy and so much fun to write. But Tyler had such a whopping big crush on her that I had to throw the poor guy a bone. The title of this book is apropos (if I do say so myself) because both of them fight the idea of love as hard as they can… unsuccessfully. When they do fall, when Fin softens and realizes Tyler has been in her heart for a long time, when they get sweet and open and flirtatious, the two of them are in an absolute tumbling waterfall of feelings for each other. These two don’t hold back in the manner they try to fight their feelings and they certainly don’t hold back in the manner that they ultimately love the hell out of each other.
These were the first characters I’d ever written whose love story is a hot, prickly step-step-step up the high dive ladder and then an absolute free fall into love.
Another challenge in writing this book was the otherworldly nature of Fin’s work. This book is not fantasy or paranormal in the least… and Fin is clairvoyant. Just as there are people in real life who move through the world with a more layered and nuanced understanding of reality, such is Fin. She is not preachy, she does not attempt to convince Tyler (or the reader) that she is the real deal, she simply believes what she believes and goes about her life. My journey in writing her, and understanding her, was a reflective one. In the same way that I was asking myself What’s under the hood of these characters? What more is in their hearts for one another? What more is in their histories that makes them who they are? I was also asking myself What’s under the hood of Fin’s reality? What are the layers of how she sees and interacts with the world? Is it possible for her to calmly live in a world with slightly different rules than everyone else? “Yes!” Fin told me, over and over. “Sure!” Tyler told me. “Why not?”
Ultimately, it was Tyler’s lead I followed. He starts out a skeptic and finds himself why-not-ing himself into a bigger world filled with mysteries and unexplainable truths and ultimately, the ability to truly know the love of his life. One of my favorite things about Tyler is how hard this dude tries. Much like Fin, I originally thought of Tyler as a silver spoon, a natural at everything because what doesn’t come easy to him? But no, Tyler’s greatest weapon is not his place in the world, but his huge heart that beat-beat-beats with one word: try. He is somehow polished and goofy and genuine and a huge mess all at once. And there’s nothing he doesn’t try his best at.
So, that brings me to the ultimate challenge with writing this book. I was in love with Fin. I was in love with Tyler. I was in love with their love for one another. I wanted to write them forever. Thus… the manuscript was roughly 1.5 million pages long. At some point I had to stop writing. I had to trim and polish and edit. (Thank you into infinity to Tara Gelsomino and Allison Carroll). And then, the hardest part, I had to be done.
This was especially hard for me because the phase of life I was in while writing this book was so very tender. I felt my baby kick for the very first time while I was writing Can’t Help Falling. I was sitting in our new apartment, looking out a new window at new trees, my laptop on my knees, thinking of Tyler and Fin and what happens next for them when —bop— my shirt moved over my belly. My eyes must have been the size of clementines. “I didn’t know you could do that!” I said to my pregnant belly.
And that, really, is the essence of this book. This book is about the didn’t-know-that-was-possible-but-wow-thank-goodness-it-is moments that we are so lucky to get to experience. I wanted to expand the limits of what can happen between two people who are learning to love one another. I wanted to ignore the probable and write unabashedly into the rare, otherworldly, almost magical feeling of just letting yourself… fall.