Category: Author’s Alley
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The Practice of Choosing
Every year on the day they’d first met — not their anniversary, the meeting itself, a distinction important to them both — they asked each other the same question: would you choose this again? It had started half as a joke in the early, giddy years, when the answer was obviously, exuberantly yes. It had…
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Chapter 1. Say My Name Like You Mean It
The House of Wind was in one of its moods again. Nesta could always tell. She had lived there long enough to recognise the signs: the stairwell creaking a fraction too loudly, the windows sharpening her reflection, the doors requiring just a little more force than usual. But this morning, pre-dawn, during the cold, quiet…
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The Apology That Wasn’t
He never said sorry the way other people did. Years into the relationship, Greta had finally understood why: his family had used the word as currency, tossed around so casually growing up that it had lost all weight by the time he reached adulthood. He didn’t trust the word. He trusted actions instead. So when…
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Did you hear? Nesta and Cassian Are About to Lose Control of Their Own Story
I write the chapters. You vote on what happens next. They suffer the consequences. Hey bestie, I’ve started something new. Possibly brilliant. Possibly unhinged. Almost certainly dangerous for Nesta and Cassian. It’s called The Oath Archive, and it’s a completely free, interactive Nessian fanfiction where I write the story… and you help decide where it…
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The Good Pen
He had one pen he actually liked — a specific, slightly absurd preference for a particular brand of fountain pen that wrote, according to him, “the way thinking is supposed to feel.” She’d thought it was a minor eccentricity until she watched him lose it, properly lose it, at a coffee shop, and witnessed something…
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The Anatomy of a Billionaire Romance: Why Wealthy Heroes Still Rule the Charts
Let’s be completely real for a second, bestie. In the real world, if a tech billionaire worth eighty billion dollars locked eyes with you in an elevator, cornered you, and demanded you pretend to be his fiancée for a corporate gala, you would immediately call the police. But inside the pages of a contemporary romance?…
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BEFORE YOU ENTER: How The Oath Archive Works
What if you could read a new Nesta and Cassian story… and when you screamed, “NO. DO THIS INSTEAD,” the author actually had to listen? That’s what we’re doing. I’m writing a brand-new, completely free Nessian fanfiction with a real mystery, romance, tension, terrible decisions and, naturally, spice. Except I’m not deciding everything that happens.…
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The Empty Chair
For the first six months after her mother died, Odette set the table for three without thinking, then quietly removed the extra plate before anyone noticed. Anyone except Hassan, who always noticed. He never said anything about it directly — never made it a topic, never asked if she was okay in the way that…
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5 Signs You’re Suffering from a Summer Book Hangover (And How to Cure It)
Alright, bestie, look at me. Put the Kindle down for a second and take a deep breath. We are at the end of August, Read-a-Romance Month is officially wrapping up, and you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Or worse—you just finished a 5-star book and now you feel completely hollow inside. Diagnosis? You are…
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The Spelling Bee
He still couldn’t spell “necessary.” Eleven years together, a graduate degree, a job that required regular written reports, and the man simply could not, under any circumstances, spell the word “necessary” correctly on the first attempt. It had become, over the years, one of Wren’s favorite things about him. “It’s two C’s and one S,”…
Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 