In early 2020, I moved from the South West of England to the North East of England.
I'd met a man (that's a story for the another day lol), and we'd done the long-distance thing for a year, but that was never going to be ideal long-term, so I decided to re-locate.
As you know, in March 2020, the entire world went into lockdown due to the pandemic, and as such, I was unable to go back and visit my hometown.
I'm from a beautiful seaside town called Dawlish, on the South Devon coastline, and I lived there my entire life until 2020. I'm sure you can imagine how challenging it was to be away from the place I grew up and my whole family at such a scary time, and while I loved where I moved to, I found myself feeling a little bit trapped and pretty damn homesick!
In around 2021, I was invited to join a Christmas anthology, and I decided to write what I intended to be a short, enemies-to-lovers story set in Dawlish. However, when I started writing, I realised that what I was writing was more Hallmark cute than enemies-to-lovers, so I had a massive change of direction, to childhood friends to lovers.
While I was writing, it also occurred to me that I made Nova, the female MC, a teacher, and I was already planning my next release to be a book with a teacher as the lead too, so when I eventually extended the anthology piece, I made it a kind of intro to what went on to become the Oakwood Lane Series, which is a small-town romance series set predominantly in Dawlish and a fictional suburb of Exeter, with many, many local references.
Re-Writing Christmas was eventually released as a full-length novel, and it went down brilliantly with readers, especially those who live in and around Devon.
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Re-Writing Christmas is a small-town friends to lovers holiday romance set in England (UK). It has elements of hurt/comfort and grumpy/sunshine, along with a feisty grandmother, and large amounts of Hallmark-esque festive cuteness.