While it was not unusual for Kathleen and Reyna Lawless to be watching a rom-com together, how the mother and daughter responded after the movie was. “That was so clever!” Reyna recalls about the film’s premise. “I wish we had come up with that.” So, they started talking, and Reyna casually came up with an even better plot. That’s when Kathleen made a formal invitation “We could create a really great romance [novel] together,” Kathleen said. Although Kathleen was a professional author who had more than 60 romance novels published, and Reyna’s job was completely unrelated to writing, the daughter accepted her mom’s challenge. “I felt like I really had to step up and bring my A-game to this,” Reyna recalls. The plan was for Kathleen to write a rough draft, Reyna to make it more contemporary, and then for them both to email the chapters back and forth until they were satisfied. “It was very frustrating,” Kathleen laughs. “It was not what we signed up for.” The mother and daughter worked differently. Kathleen wrote quick, and Reyna was more contemplative. After taking more than nine months to finish writing it, the test readers felt it was flawed. “It’s like someone says your baby is ugly,” Kathleen laughs. “I took it hard,” Reyna sighs. Finding the courage to take the next steps were far from easy. “It’s like ripping up knitting and starting all over again,” Kathleen says. But through re-building their book together, Kathleen and Reyna learned to not just appreciate each other’s differences but capitalize on them. And now the duo is grateful for the challenges they overcame together. “The result is this product that is the best parts of both of us,” Reyna smiles. So, instead of listing both their names on the book’s cover, they came up with one pen name — Carissa Harper. The early feedback for “Cupid Grants a Second Chance” is first rate. “Multiple people are saying ‘I couldn’t put it down’,” Reyna smiles. “Or, ‘I’m tired at work today because I stayed up late reading last night’.” While the novel’s plot follows a TV producer who creates a reality show that reconnects people with love interests from their past, this mother and daughter are looking forward to working together again on the second book in the series in the near future. “I feel like the luckiest mother in the world,” Kathleen smiles. “We’ve created something neither of us could have done without the other,” Reyna says.
