Dear Librarians,
I’m so excited to share Dream On, Ramona Riley with you. Thank you so much for all you do for books and authors and readers, sharing your excitement and passion, and ensuring that every person who needs a certain book, finds that book. Books heal, book teach us empathy, book help us tell our stories, and librarians are at the forefront of that mission. So thank you. Always.
Dream On, Ramona Riley is a very special book to me. I love the small town I’ve created here, and I greatly enjoyed diving into my first celebrity romance, hopefully, infusing the experience with a bit of nuance and my own point of view. But what I love most about this book is how messy it is. I always tend toward complicated backstories and imperfect characters in my writing, as these are the kinds of characters I love reading about the most. These are the kinds of characters in whom I see myself. With Dream On, Ramona Riley, however, I think I really outdid myself when I created Ramona’s love interest, the famous and Hollywood bad girl, Dylan Monroe.
Dylan is the only child of two nineties rock icons and has quite the storied childhood as a result. And while it was fun and entertaining to create Dylan and all her disastrous decisions, I didn’t create her to be specifically messy. I created her to be a mess and then learn to love herself in that mess. I created her to look inside herself, to face her past, to hold other accountable, to hold herself accountable. I created her for a journey.
What I love most about writing romance is this very journey. I love writing two imperfect people who, yes, fall in love and live happily ever after, but right alongside of that arc, is their own individual adventure. The one where they fall in love with themself. The one where they choose themself. The one where they realize and truly believe that they are worthy of love. Every character I’ve ever written goes on this journey, as does Ramona in this book. But no one embodies the disaster learning to love herself in all her mess quite like Dylan Monroe, and I love her for it. I thank her for it. Because the reason why I love these messes that I create so much is because I myself am a mess. We all are, in our ways, to our own scale, and we all learn to embrace these parts of ourselves in our own stories. Fictional stories like this one help us—help me—process my own adventures. They help me feel less alone, feel a part of a community of humans just trying to do their best in this wild, wide world. I created Dylan to reflect this, a window or a mirror, for every human learning to love themselves exactly as they are.
Thank you for reading, for your excitement, and for your passion.
Best,
Ashley Herring Blake
