Most of what my co-writer, Racheline Maltese, and I write can be pretty fairly classified as an HEA. We like finding new and creative ways (and subverting some old ones) to give our characters their well-earned Happily Ever After.

Which makes Room 1024 — which is a solidly HFN story — a bit of a departure for us.

The ending of this novella is, never fear, happy. But there’s a bittersweetness to it, too.

We like to write romance as realistically as possible, according to our own experiences and understandings of relationships and the world. Which means writing endings that, while (we hope) satisfying for the characters and the readers, are also complex, and come with their own little pains as well as happinesses. Life is, after all, complex and hard. Relationships that are 99% perfect can fall apart over the 1% that Just. Doesn’t. Work. People change, and grow in different directions — or change again, and move back together again. And the path to making a relationship — whether between two people, or four — is a long and rocky one.

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