Rachel Stockbridge

Random facts about the writing process of Next Stop Love:

• I wrote a good chunk of the first draft scrunched up in the passenger seat of my car while on a week-long road trip across the country.
• There’s a lot of talk about and eating of food in the book. There’s even a whole Thanksgiving sequence. But it somehow took a critique partner saying “bad food is kind of a theme in this novel, huh?” for me to realize it came up so often. 😂
• The first draft of the book actually had a third POV character. Julian’s sister had a whole thing she was doing herself. I had to cut that particular subplot early on, but the sister is still there, and I’m, uh, *cough* kinda planning on giving her her own book down the line. *cough* Don’t tell anyone.
• Next Stop Love was the first novel I wrote where I actually set out to write a Romance. Before that I’d been writing mostly soft SFF with enough of a focus on the romance aspect that, in retrospect, they were probably also Romances and I just didn’t realize it. (I arrived at the Romance party real late, guys. You’d think I would’ve guessed when one of my all-time favorite books as a teen was Lola and the Boy Next Door, but nope. Took me another ten years to put that together.)
• One of my absolute favorite things to write is characters joking around, and man did I have fun putting in as many jokes as possible everyone I could think of.
• My other favorite part to write was the Thanksgiving sequence. It’s four or five chapters in a row and every aspect of it was just so fun to write. And that’s all I’m going to say about it for fear of spoiling anything.

Just a couple of days left to preorder before the ebook drops on September 22nd! I’m so excited (and only slightly neurotic about it)!

The ebook is available from Amazon, Nook, Apple Books, and Kobo. If you’re a paperback person, you can grab that from Amazon as well (I’m still working on making the paperback available elsewhere). You can also still preview the first 6 chapters for free by signing up for my mailing list here.

Take care, friends! See you tomorrow!