Plot Girl Walk #6

updates + musings in these trying times

Hi bookish friends,

I’m alive and (un)well, so I thought I’d pop into your inbox to share a couple updates + some musings.

Updates:

First up, Wedding Dashers is part of the Kindle Daily Deal which means for today and today only you can travel with Jack and Ada to England, Scotland and Northern Ireland for just $1.99! In this economy (iykyk), that’s a pretty great deal!

I’m also very excited to announce that Ros and Liam aren’t just sailing to Hawaii (or into your heart) they’re also sailing across the pond! Sunk in Love has found a home with a UK publisher and you can preorder the UK version of Sunk in Love here!

Sunk in Love will be available in paperback in the UK February 24, 2026. Here’s a look at the gorgeous cover which is mostly the same but with a few small differences! Like the front cover blurb (Thank you HBY!!!) and the tagline which I learned is called a “shout line” in the UK.

Musings:

I recently finished Overdue by Stephanie Perkins and not to be dramatic, but it pierced my soul.

This was such an emotional read for me. Not just because Stephanie’s writing is deeply wise and hauntingly perceptive in its exploration of love, friendship, and adulthood. But because Stephanie Perkins is the reason I write romance.

I first discovered Stephanie through her YA. I picked up Anna and the French Kiss at my local library (libraries are SO important! Which is one of the messages of Overdue! So fitting!) in the year of our Lord 2011 back before Booktube and Bookstagram, before all our TBR’s were curated by trends and influencers and “most anticipated” lists, back when we just picked up books based on the cover and copy and went in RAW! One might say we were rawdogging reading.

In those days, reading was very “life is like a box of chocolates” and some times you struck gold and other times you didn’t. But one day I was at the library with my mom getting our weekly haul when I stumbled across a cute looking YA book with the Eiffel Tower on the cover. I was immediately intrigued and checked it out.

From page one I was LOCKED in. I remember staying up into the wee hours on a school night, simply unable to put this book down.

It was my first introduction to “only one bed” and I was positively TITILATED. I wanted to kidnap the friend group and make them be MY friends, the Parisian setting was to die for, and St. Claire was my sexual awakening of book boyfriends. But what really made this a formative read for me was how well Stephanie Perkins captured the feeling of a crush. The butterflies of falling for someone and not being sure if they feel the same way. It was exquisite and when I turned the final page, I knew two things: one, my appetite for more books like this was voracious and two, I wanted to write something that made me feel this way. Something I’ve now spent the last fourteen-ish years trying to do.

A couple weeks ago the very lovely Clare Gilmore published a very wise substack (which you should definitely read) about how art is basically fuel for more art and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

While it would be cool to have an idea that’s totally unique and never-been-done-before, I kind of love that we’re standing on the backs of everyone who came before us. That nothing is ever really purely unique, we’re all just repurposing and reimagining and reinventing and reclaiming each other’s work in an endless cycle of inspiration and conversation. And I can’t help but think how beautiful and crucial it was that I picked up Anna and the French Kiss. That it captured my heart the way it did. That I spent years trying to recapture that high in other books. That one day I decided to try writing my own romance novel. That it was bad, so I tried again. And again. That I kept trying. That along the way I discovered Sophie Kinsella and Emily Henry and Abby Jimenez whose work shaped and molded my own storytelling. That I kept reading. That I kept collecting inspiration. That fifteen years later I get to return to the words of Stephanie Perkins as a published author myself.

How cool to think that our journeys as writers don’t begin with the debut or even the first draft, they begin somewhere long before then with a song, or a movie, or a TV show, or a book. They begin with a single spark, a flame of inspiration, a little voice in our heads whispering “yes, this feeling, I want more of it.” Maybe we don’t act on it right away, but it’s there, waiting for us when we’re ready to finally create something of our own.

I think about about that iconic scene in the Devil Wears Prada where Andy can’t tell the different between the two belts and Miranda scolds here with one of the most scorching monologues of all time about how Andy thinks she’s exempt from fashion when really everything she is wearing was curated and chosen by the fashion industry. And while I think that’s a much stronger metaphor for what gets hyped in publishing (*eyeballs emoji) I also think it applies to creativity as a whole. That every idea, every work is part of a larger ecosystem of ideas. An endless cycle of invention and reinvention that none of us are ever exempt from. That our work is always in conversation with someone else’s.

I can so clearly look back at all the formative pieces of art that shaped mye along the way, all the little landmarks that stick out as big, bright, lightbulbs of inspiration. Art that molded my taste and reshaped my interests, and all the ways those landmarks became part of my own art. That I in turn became part of the ecosystem of ideas and if I’m lucky, my work might someday become part of someone else’s.

How beautiful to think that art is always being reincarnated. That it never truly dies, it always gets to live on in some other vessel, in some other shape with some other life.

Okay that’s it from me friends! I’ll hopefully be back soon to announce the Sunk in Love preorder campaign (it might involve Jack and returning to London!!!) as well as the upcoming SIL tour (she’s hitting the road!)

Heather xx