There’s nothing like good drama, real or imaginary. It’s the reason many have been following the titillating It Ends With Us behind-the-scenes escapades and why Hallmark holiday movies are playing at my house throughout December. It’s also why romance is such a tried-and-true genre in fiction.
Imagine this scenario: A young woman is about to undergo a stem-cell transplant. The night before her procedure, she meets a handsome man, and they have a whirlwind date. Months later, after the treatment, she decides to meet her donor only to learn the woman who saved her life is now dating that man she fell for months before!
It’s a juicy narrative nugget, the perfect starting point for romantic intrigue, and it happens to be the plot of author Allison Ashley’s new novel If Tomorrow Never Comes.
Ashley is an Oklahoma writer who has found success writing romance, usually with some kind of medical twist — appropriate because her day job as a clinical oncology pharmacist provides her the ideas and research needed to tell these stories.
Ashley (writing under a pen name so her research papers don’t get mixed into search results) said she started as a reader and turned to romance when she was in medical school. It provided a break from the heavier, more science-focused texts she had to study.
She went on to prosper in the medical field and start a family, but the pull to the world of books was always there.
“It was after I’d had both my kids and when I was working as an oncology pharmacist at the Stephenson Cancer Center at OU,” she said. “I just started thinking, ‘I always loved English and literature and things in school. And I’m very much using the science part of my brain right now, but I wanted to go back and explore a little bit some of the artistic side of me.’”
Not to mention, days in oncology can be tough on the mind.
“I thought to myself, ‘What is an escape or almost a self-care modality I could use that will help me get back to my creative self and give me a happy, joyful thing to focus on after some hard days at work?’” she said. “And so I started slowly exploring writing romance, and that’s where it started. I was trying to take care of myself in that way.”
Writing community
She dove in, writing a few books she said “will never see the light of day” because she was still perfecting her craft.
“I had a local mentor who used to write Harlequin romances, and she really helped hone my skill and my craft,” she said. “We would meet at coffee shops, and she would mark up my manuscripts in red pen and just very bluntly say, ‘This needs work. You need to do this differently.’”
That mentor is Darlene Graham, a prolific romance author. It took a bit of trial and error for Ashley to sell her first book, Perfect Distraction.
“It wasn’t until I wrote my fourth full-length book that I was able to sign with an agent for that one, and that was my first book published,” Ashley said. “That took about three years from the time I started writing to signing with an agent and then finding a home for that first book.”
Any creative person knows that sometimes, it’s just a grind. Thankfully, the fact Ashley was using writing as a therapy of sorts helped her keep going. She also credits her support network.
“Having other authors that are in the same part of the journey as you — so maybe they don’t have an agent and they don’t have a published book, but they’re working on getting better and writing these stories and really still doing it for the love and joy of it — they can really help bolster you and keep you going,” she said.
In addition to Graham, Ashley found a community on X (formerly Twitter), where she met fellow author Denise Williams, who paralleled her journey in many ways, signing with an agent and selling a manuscript around the same time.
“We really were able to bounce off some of the frustrations and the joys together,” she said. “We critiqued each other’s work, which is critical. Having another person who writes in your genre who can give you both the constructive criticism, but also those moments of, ‘You do this so well’ — you need a little bit of both.”
Ashley has also gotten to know Oklahoma writers, naming Ally Carter, Scarlett St. Clair and Ava Wilder as connections.
Close to home
Being an Okie works itself into her writing, just as her health care background does. Many of her stories take place in the Midwest or Southern states. “Write what you know” is an adage she keeps in mind, within reason.
“I do think there’s an aspect to that, that you don’t have to completely pigeonhole yourself, because nobody can write exactly only everything that they know,” she said. “But I do think there is a benefit to that in that you can give a certain perspective, but also you don’t totally misrepresent something.”
She joked that she would probably write a New Yorker as constantly driving themselves everywhere if she tried that setting — wrong for the Five Boroughs, “but in Oklahoma, that’s how we roll.”
“My next book that comes out takes place in Omaha, where I lived for a year,” she said. “And then actually the one after that, that will come out later this year, is in Oklahoma City.”
Sharp-eyed readers will sometimes be able to catch names of local restaurants and neighborhoods in her works as little call-outs to her home.
Writing about medical issues is also obviously close to home. It’s practical, in a sense, because the world is familiar and doesn’t require the time for a lot of research. Additionally, the unique perspective helps her stand out in a sea of romance authors. But weaving in those threads is almost a call-out to the profession and its employees, too.
“I think in some ways it’s me writing love letters to folks who work in health care and saying, ‘I see you and I know what it takes to dedicate your life to healing and caring for [others] and how personally hard it can be,’” she said.
Her next book, If Tomorrow Never Comes, will be released April 1. Ashley called it one of the most difficult books she’s worked on. Elliott, the protagonist, faces a bombshell revelation when she meets her stem cell donor.
“I remember thinking to myself many years ago, ‘What would happen if somebody who needed a stem cell transplant fell for the partner of the person who saved their life?’” she said. “That was just this random thought of, ‘What an ethical conundrum.’ If you truly thought that person was your soulmate and your person, but you can’t be with them, and not only can you not be with them, but they’re with the person who saved you, what would you do?”
As a health care professional, Ashley was challenged by the ethical questions posed by the book. It’s not a tidy story because of the nuance and messiness of the choices her characters face. She initially put off the idea because she thought it was too complicated.
“But it just kept sticking there, and I just had to get it out,” she said. “And it just explores the complexities of life, sometimes, that aren’t always easy-to-make choices. How do you do the right thing while also being true to yourself?”
It’s a great setup for a story.
“I’m really happy with the way it turned out,” she said. “I had to work on it and rewrite it and tweak it more than any other book I’ve ever written just because it was very complex. But I love it, and I hope readers do too.”
Happily ever afters
I brought up the fact that Ashley promises on her website to always give the reader a happy ending. The challenge, as a writer wanting to keep the audience on tenterhooks, is in finding all that dramatic tension in the middle.
We turned to a discussion of the genre itself. Love stories can obviously be a subgenre of anything — you can have a sci-fi love story or a general literature work with romantic elements. But if you are writing straightforward genre romance, there are certain rules you need to follow as an author.
“If it is a true romance novel that is in the romance section, it has to end with a happily ever after,” Ashley said. “And a lot of folks will say, ‘Well, if you know how it’s going to end, why do you want to keep reading those books? What makes you go back to them?’”
The messiness between the meet-cute and the happy ending is where the story can get interesting and is the place where readers can find all that drama.
A writer like Ashley has to find an obstacle so challenging that the happy ending might be in question. She actually wants the reader to wonder, “How on earth are they going to overcome these [challenges] and end up together?”
“That is what makes romance worth reading and picking up a new book every time,” she said, “wanting to read new stories of people overcoming challenges and getting to that happy ever after.”
Ashley said it’s one of the more challenging aspects of writing novels.
“That is something that I really lean on editors and my critique partners [for],” she said. “Denise is actually really great at conflict, and so she and I will have brainstorming sessions where I say, ‘I’m not sure that this is tough enough for them. What other obstacle could they realistically face that would maybe up the tension and up that challenge?’”
As someone who has found success with multiple books while working a full-time job, Ashley is living many people’s creative dream. What advice does she have for other aspiring authors?
“I think one is just take the time that you have,” she said. “Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. There have been phases, and there are going to be peaks and valleys in your writing.”
Sometimes, she said, life gets busy and you don’t have time to sit down and write.
“There have been other times where I feel like I am failing at everything and I don’t have time for anything,” she said.
While some would advise that you should be writing every day, it’s not something that holds true for her. If the creative juices aren’t flowing, she suggested “reading in your genre or watching a movie in your genre or listening to music.” Sometimes scribbling down thoughts in your Notes app is all you can do.
She also emphasized the importance of finding a writing group or community, online or in person, because the field can be so frustrating.
“You want to have your safe place and your safe group of people that you can just say, ‘Man, this is hard. This sucks.’ And they can say, ‘Yeah, it does, but you know what? We’re going to keep trying and we’re going to keep doing it, and one day that’s going to be us on the bookshelf or on the Amazon chart.’”
Ashley is preparing for upcoming book signings for If Tomorrow Never Comes. One is 6 p.m. April 1 at Best of Books, 1313 E. Danforth Road, in Edmond. The second is 6 p.m. April 3 at Love Stories, 3812 N. MacArthur Blvd., in Warr Acres, a romance-only bookstore.
Learn more at authorallisonashley.com.
This article appears in The OG Food Issue 2025.