Why I Wrote ‘Off The Record’
I don’t think I’ve ever shared the story behind my debut novel, Off The Record. I’ve talked about it on social media, shared bits and pieces of it here and there, but I’ve never shared the entire story. Let me do that now. If you prefer the video edition, head over to Instagram or TikTok.
My mom died on April 12, 2019, from complications of Type 2 Diabetes. Her death wasn’t unexpected, exactly, but it was also sudden. I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the time and had driven home the weekend before – my birthday weekend – to see her. I’d had a chance to speak one-on-one with her doctor, and he was blunt about her condition. She was a difficult patient and didn’t necessarily want to follow their recommendations or do the physical and occupational therapy (she had lost her left leg and had a stroke by then). She flat out refused to see a psychologist. In sum, a lot was up to her. She ultimately coded during an endoscopy, and her heart – congestive heart failure was one of her comorbidities of diabetes – wasn’t strong enough to bring back.
I remember the day she passed vividly. Everything felt different that morning. Unsettled. I owned a barre studio in Chapel Hill at the time and had a few people registered for my 6 AM class. I drove to the studio, turned everything on, and waited. Weirdly, the entire class no-showed. I headed home, disappointed about the empty class but also looking forward to having some unexpected quiet time before I needed to go to my full-time job. It had been raining for several days at that point, and we were in a brief lull between storm systems. I stopped at an intersection. While I waited for the light to signal I could turn left, I felt it in my very gut: something was going to happen today. I didn’t know what. I just knew that day was going to be different.
“The Daughters” by Little Big Town was playing on the stereo. A few tears rolled down my cheeks as I accepted the unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach was going to be a part of my day. I headed home.
A few hours later, my mom was gone.
It was pouring rain by then. Torrential flooding rain. It fit my mood perfectly. I had frozen yogurt for dinner. I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to finish the last two episodes of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix. It was the first show in a while that I had been fully engrossed in, and Sabrina and Nick’s relationship was a personal favorite. The last two episodes had everything. Betrayal. Heartbreak. Redemption. A cliffhanger. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I drove home the next day and was pulled into the chaos of planning a funeral. My mom had no plans, no life insurance policy, nothing like that. We had to figure it out. My family is large and well-meaning, but the 7 AM phone calls asking if I’d ordered flowers for the funeral (I hadn’t – I hadn’t even thought about flowers), the pastor, a man I’d never met, asking me to write an obituary, the condolences, the demands for me to be here, do this, say hello to that person… It was all too much and other than two of my dearest friends, one of whom showed up with a bag full of my favorite things asked “what do you need?” and the other who had been through the loss of a parent who bought me a breakfast sandwich and said “so this sucks,” no one stopped to ask me how I was doing. I tried to distract myself by reading, but I couldn’t concentrate. TV and movies didn’t hold my attention. The closest city was forty-five minutes away, so I couldn’t just hop in the car and go somewhere easily.
I decided to write.
It had been a while since I last wrote something. For no reason other than life got busy, I had tabled the manuscript I’d been playing with and hadn’t opened a Word document in a long time. It had been even longer since I wrote a fanfiction. I couldn’t stop thinking about Sabrina and Nick, however, so I wrote a one-shot that took place after the finale, posted it, and went to bed. I woke up the next morning to an inbox full of requests to write more.
I had an idea. “What if Nick was a jaded former NYPD homicide detective turned small town detective?” I started to type with no idea where the story was going or what was going to happen. The next thing I knew, I had a whole murder mystery with a side of romance and an unexpected online following.
As I started to contemplate attempting my hand at self-publishing a novel in 2023, I thought about that fanfiction again. I read it with fresh eyes and realized it was the book I wanted to share with the world as my first published novel. It felt right to make my debut the book I wrote as I navigated the loss of my mom.
Something a lot of people didn’t know about my mom is that she talked about starting a magazine for single moms. She didn’t do it. She always had a reason. There wasn’t time. She didn’t have the money. She didn’t know how to do it. She died without following that dream. It encouraged me to follow mine.
Off The Record isn’t the most polished book that has ever been released. It doesn’t have the fanciest cover and the first printed paperbacks had a typo on the back cover. The release was bumpy, and I had to figure it out as I went. I did figure it out, though, at least well enough to release a book I’m proud of. Off The Record has exceeded my expectations, and I will forever be grateful for this first book.
And so, Off The Record is a book born from grief and a love of fictional characters. I’m really proud of it. It’s available on Amazon as an ebook and in paperback, and on Kindle Unlimited.
