How My Destination Wedding Led to My Debut Romance Novel
The first thing one of my friends asked me when I announced my engagement to my now-husband was, “Will I need a passport?”
While these days I try to avoid leaving the house at all costs (hello 30s) there was once a time when a last-minute flight bargain to Europe hated to see me coming. I had a seemingly unquenchable thirst for adventure, for going new places and trying new things. For padding my resume with as many experiences and landmarks as I could.
(The 7 Rules of Travel Writing.)
So when it came time to pick a location for our wedding, I did what any wanderlust enthusiast would do: I went on Airbnb, searched worldwide properties that could accommodate events, and landed on an off-the-beaten-path villa in Mexico, just north of Puerto Vallarta. It was perfect. An intimate hacienda with enough room to host us and our 50 closest friends and family for the big day.
At the same time I was planning my own wedding, I was also writing a comedy of errors about two stranded wedding guests on their way to a destination wedding in Northern Ireland. It was a story about shenanigans and travel mishaps and everything that could possibly go wrong on a road trip from London to Belfast that would later become my debut romance novel, Wedding Dashers.
I’m honestly not sure which came first, the idea for the book, the idea for the destination wedding, or if they both came to me in one tidy package of inspiration, but because life often imitates art, and vice versa, elements of my real-life wedding found their way into the pages of the book.
Like how my best friend and maid of honor handmade my veil and transported it to Mexico, which later influenced my main character Ada being the one to transport her sister’s veil (also made by Demi Karina Custom Bridal). When I found out someone wouldn’t be able to come because they couldn’t get their passport renewed in time, that became both the reason Ada couldn’t travel with her family to the wedding, and the reason I had to spend three days at the regional passport office getting an expedited passport two weeks before my wedding.
I also couldn’t resist a self-own when Ada says, “Anyone who would make all their friends and family fly halfway around the world to take part in ritualized self-aggrandizement is seriously disturbed,” because yeah, it probably was.
But my favorite example of life and art influencing one another was when I learned that one of my bridesmaids had just broken up with her boyfriend and would no longer be bringing a plus one around the same time that I found out that her very single high school crush whom she hadn’t seen in years would also be at the wedding.
Of course, I was bummed for my friend, but as any budding romance novelist would do, my brain started cooking! What if it was serendipity? What if her and Mr. High-School-Crush reconnected? What if they hit it off? What if this was their second chance for love? What if all these years later, it was finally the right time and place for these two?
I fired off a silly little Tweet about the whole thing (this is back when it was a Tweet, and no I won’t be calling it anything else), and woke up the next morning to find out that my post had garnered over 320,000 likes, 16,0000 reshares, and that a popular TikTok personality had made a video about it with hundreds of comments ranging from “this would make for a great book!” to “I hope there’s only one bed!”
I was floored.
Not just by the fact that a Tweet from an account with less than 500 followers had gone so viral, or the fact that there seemed to be an audience for the novel that only existed in my head, but by how many people instantly became invested in the possibility of love for two people they didn’t know.
Of course, I was thrilled to see so many people interested in the would-be love lives of my friends, but I was also curious. Why did people care? Why had this silly little Tweet captured so many people’s attentions?
I suppose I don’t really know why, but I’d like to think, at least in some way, that people cared for the same reason we love boy bands and musical theater and looking out the window when a sad song comes on in the car. It’s the same reason the romance genre is so beloved. Because there’s a part of us that yearns to romanticize. That wants to latch onto bright spots of joy and hope in a world so sorely lacking both. Maybe we’re all looking for something that makes us laugh or swoon or kick our feet with glee.
In the end, the high school crush couldn’t make it, and there was no second chance meeting, no rom-com-esque “only one bed,” no great love story. But what I took away from the experience, and the same thing I took away from the mishap with the passport, and every other inconvenience, was that as a writer, I’m always looking for the story. The special, magical element that transforms a mundane, pedestrian, even inconvenient encounter into a narrative, a plot point, a spark. An idea.
But maybe it’s not just me. Maybe writer or not, we’re all doing this. Maybe we’re all looking for the story, to romanticize the inconvenient. To find the special, the extraordinary. To see opportunity and possibility and a potential happily-ever-after wherever we can.
Maybe that’s why my Tweet popped off, and why a story of travel mishaps and inconveniences and plans gone awry spoke to me, because that’s where the story is—it’s in the possibility. In the chance for something ordinary, or difficult or even embarrassing to become extraordinary. In the chance that a missed train or a breakup or an expired passport can lead to something special, something romantic, something worthy of a story.
While real life doesn’t always guarantee us the safety net of happily ever after, of a meet cute that works out, or transportation mishaps that end in true love, perhaps that’s why we return to the page, why we continue to look for the story. Because we’re hoping to find it wherever we can.
Check out Heather McBreen’s Wedding Dashers here:
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