I finished The Wedding Crasher this week.
I have been writing it since the summer of 2024, which means it lived in my head, in my drafts, in the middle of other things, through all the seasons of whatever this past year was. And now it is done. Published. On Kindle. Out in the world with its own cover and its own ISBN and no longer just a file on my laptop with a working title and good intentions.
"There is a specific feeling that comes when you finish something you started a long time ago. It is not quite celebration. It is closer to exhale."
Like a conversation you have been meaning to finish finally reaches its last sentence. The Wedding Crasher began as a question — what happens when a woman decides that a door that was not meant for her is still a door worth walking through? Fourteen chapters later, I have the answer. Lara Kay has the answer.
This week I also made a decision about my writing. I have unfinished work — series that are mid-sentence, stories that are two chapters deep and waiting, characters who have been patient with me longer than they should have had to be. I am stacking my priorities higher. The writing comes first. You will see more of it here, and you will see it sooner than you expect.
The Veranda exists because I needed somewhere to put all of it. The stories, the essays, the weekly exhale of a life being built in real time. This is that place.
And there is a lot more coming.
— Lola