[This article first appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Writer's Digest.]
When I began writing Winging It with You, I knew I wanted to write a love story wrapped in adventure. Something sweeping and cinematic, with passport stamps, plane tickets, and the chaos that comes with reality television. But more than that, I wanted to explore the true adventure inherent in intimacy, forced vulnerability, and the way relationships evolve (and unravel) when people are pulled out of their routines and placed in unfamiliar surroundings. It didn’t take long to see that the turbulence of the journey here was what cracked open the emotional core of this story.
Setting can be a character in its own right. It shapes dialogue, pushes plot, and carves out space for vulnerability. In this book, it was the glue and gasoline. The thing that brought my characters together and ignited a relationship.
Asher and Theo begin as strangers with very different ideas of how their day at the airport terminal is going to go. They’re thrown together on a globe-trotting travel competition loosely inspired by “The Amazing Race” but with a twist. They must pose as a real couple. That meant from the beginning, I had to create settings that did more than just entertain; I needed environments that challenged them to ultimately soften the walls they’d individually built.
I leaned hard into the “forced proximity” trope, which … let’s be honest, is basically catnip for us romance readers. Shared hotel rooms. Cramped van rides. Airplane cabins where thigh touching is a prerequisite. Each setting wasn’t just a pretty postcard, it was a pressure cooker.
And in said pressure cooker, something beautiful began to simmer.
Because the truth is, it’s hard to keep your guard up when you’re sleep-deprived, jet-lagged, and brushing your teeth next to someone who is basically a stranger. It’s in the unguarded moments—the ones that happen in-between checkpoints and camera takes—that we start to see who someone is. I wanted readers to feel like they were third-wheeling on this adventure, watching Theo and Asher fall for each other, not in spite of the chaos, but because of it.
That’s why I gravitated toward settings that weren’t just visually exciting but emotionally revealing. Like the La Tomatina festival in Spain, amidst flying tomatoes and absolute mayhem, it’s how effortlessly Theo shines in the moment, laughing and entirely himself, that nudges Asher one step closer to accepting the truth of his feelings ... Or later, in Bali, when Theo pulls away once his feelings become too real during a high-stakes challenge set on a seaweed farm. The location is serene and still, but beneath the surface, everything is unraveling. Sometimes the biggest emotional eruptions happen in the quietest of places.
My fascination with this kind of closeness comes from my time as a photojournalist in the U.S. Air Force. I spent years stepping into the lives of service members, tasked with capturing moments that told a deeper story. It taught me how much setting can shape a person, how quickly your perspective shifts when you’re far from home, and how much more you see when you’re forced to slow down and observe. That lens—both literal and figurative—deeply shaped how I approached this love story. I wanted every location to matter. Every setting to nudge these characters closer to one another. Every city, hotel room, and airplane ride to hold a purpose beyond the page.
At its heart, Winging It with You is a story about two people discovering that maybe home isn’t a place. It’s a person. And to write that, I had to take them as far from home as possible.
