The crazy started when I excitedly urged my husband to read one of my favorite mafia romance series, and repeatedly expressed my love for the villain.
This was in September of 2019, and at that point, I had been in the book world for about 4 years and had a handful of author friends. There were times they encouraged me to start a blog, and although the thought had crossed my mind, I wanted to do something different than other blogs.
Little did I know that the idea was about to come to me when my husband started to question everything he thought he knew about me in the 20 years he’d known me to that point. He was absolutely horrified that I loved Mateo Morelli. He’s a mob boss, and the author wrote his character to fit the life he led. He wasn’t a hero, and he wasn’t going to become one when he met someone. He was the villain, and he never pretended to be anything else.
He’s manipulative, and when he sees something he wants, he will stop at nothing until he has it… or her.
This series comes with warnings from the author, but when I downloaded it for my husband, I had it past the point where it said it was a dark romance. He was basically going in blind.
I’m going to continue to be vague on the story details because if you haven’t read it yet and you love those dangerously dark villains who aren’t looking for redemption, then you need to RUN, not walk, to this series, and plan on not getting anything done. The characters introduced in the first book are a part of an ongoing story. In order to truly enjoy the storyline, you need to read the series in the order it was intended to be read, or you will be completely lost.
Now that all that is out of the way, I will explain the crazy. While he read, I posted his reactions in the author’s reader group, and because his reactions were so dramatic, people seemed to get a lot more enjoyment out of it than the previous series he read. Likely because like me, they were head over heels for this book boyfriend who was the “bad guy.” To this day, my husband doesn’t understand why I love these villainous characters so much, or why I continuously defend the fact that some things that I would find absolutely heinous in real life, I have no problem with when reading.
He would start ranting and raving about events that happened in the books, while I would sit there and defend the actions of the characters and my love for them. Either during these conversations or afterwards, I would take a photo of him and post in the author’s reader group parts of our conversations (debates). It’s been 3 years since he read the Morelli Family series, and he still brings up parts of the book, and we have the whole. “It’s OK in a book” (me), “IT’S NEVER OK”
People had so much fun sharing how it made them laugh or just commenting, and we would continue the conversation in the comments. It made people laugh. It made people smile. That was my main goal. I wanted to make people smile, especially the ones who felt as though they would never again. I wanted to be someone who had a positive impact on the people I interacted with, no matter how small that might be. You never know when the person on the other side of the screen is in desperate need of something good to keep them from falling apart.
It was those conversations and the reactions from her readers that are the reason I finally found what I had been waiting for; an idea for a blog that would be different from others out there. I’m so thankful that the author allowed me to post our ridiculousness in her group. It’s crazy to think that such a random series of events would irrecoverably change my life.
It’s not even really about all the opportunities I’ve had to review books by authors I never imagined I would ever be able to read before they were released. It’s more because of the people who are in my life now that likely wouldn’t be if my husband hadn’t randomly started reading one of my favorite series. I take screenshots of messages I get from different authors or even comments they leave on my social media review post of their book. It’s been 2 years and there are so many times that I feel like I need to pinch myself. How can this be my life? video calls and messaging with my all-time favorite authors. I started doing it because I literally feel like I’m daydreaming, and at any moment all of these amazing aspects of my life will be gone, and when they are, I will have all these little conversations to look at so I can remember when I was living a real-life daydream.
My bookish life story will be a series of sorts. The story of how and why I became a blogger, and why it happened at the perfect time I have a rare special cord disease, Adhesive Arachnoiditis, that was caused by an epidural injection that was supposed to help my previous pain. Now I’m not even 40, and I live in agonizing pain. There’s no cure and it will only continue to get worse. My health makes it impossible to be the person I used to be. Being able to find a new version of myself through the book world has been my saving grace. It’s something positive that came from a very dark time in my life.
