I met Blake Quinn at my desk in the newsroom on a random Wednesday in 2014.
He arrived just minutes after I’d filed a story about a prominent politician arrested on corruption charges.
Blake Quinn was unlike anyone I’d ever met.
He was a media mogul, cocky and impossibly confident, with a chiselled jaw. He was also fictional.
Blake Quinn was the hero of a romance manuscript I had written on my BlackBerry phone between filing stories as a hard news journalist.
He had captured my imagination, along with Jessica Connor, the story’s heroine, who was searching for love after a broken engagement.
As much as my colleagues loved hearing me talk about the couple, the manuscript sat in a folder labelled “Manuscripts” for years.
I couldn’t find the courage to take the next step and pursue the dream I’d always had of becoming a romance author.
Before long, that folder held three completed manuscripts.
Whenever colleagues asked why I wasn’t submitting the manuscript to publishers or self-publishing, I always had an excuse.
When a local publisher, who was also a friend, encouraged me to publish it, I told him there wasn’t much of a market for romance writers in South Africa.
I knew that wasn’t true. Some of my favourite authors are South African romance writers.
I just couldn’t reveal the truth: I was afraid of what people would think of me.
I assumed people wouldn’t take me seriously. I was a senior hard news journalist for a prominent national Sunday newspaper.
I was writing front-page stories, interviewing celebrities and decision-makers, and winning awards for my reporting.
What would people think if they discovered I spent my spare time writing stories about people falling in love?
I convinced myself that the two worlds couldn’t exist side by side and that if people knew about one, they would no longer take the other seriously.
The manuscripts were always at the back of my mind for years. The characters in the fictional worlds I’d created refused to stay locked away in a folder on my computer.
They wanted to be out in the world. They wanted their stories to be read.
Although I’ve always been an avid, loud and proud romance reader, I still couldn’t bring myself to admit that I was writing romance.
I just wasn’t ready to tell people that I was writing steamy scenes, emotional love stories and happily-ever-afters.
Then the pandemic hit and suddenly life was nothing like we had known.
As a journalist, I spent every day reporting on death, grief and lives turned upside down by lockdowns.
One day, after filing yet another story of loss, my cursor hovered over a folder on my computer.
After witnessing so many people lose the chance to live the life they had planned, I realised I didn’t want fear to be the reason I never lived mine.
I knew it was time to change my mindset. I was ready to be a published romance author.
I called my friend, the publisher who had been waiting seven years for me to make that call.
I was excited, but I was also terrified. I had finally stopped worrying so much about what people thought of me but those doubts hadn’t disappeared completely. It was a strange contradiction.
A part of me thought, who cares? But another part couldn’t stop asking questions. Would people like the book? Would they take me seriously? Would they compare my fiction to my journalism?
Then my book hit the shelves. Readers were always ready for me. I had been the one holding myself back.
I had spent years worrying about what everyone else would think instead of believing in myself.
The moment I realised that my career didn’t have to define all of me, everything changed.
I could be an award-winning journalist chasing front-page stories and I could be a romance author writing happily-ever-afters. One dream didn’t cancel out the other. They could exist side by side.
Today, I’m the author of six romance novels, two of which were published after one of South Africa’s largest traditional publishers approached me with a two-book deal.
And now every page I write is a reminder, not only to myself but to my son, that you never have to limit yourself to one version of who you are. You can pursue more than one dream.