1--What is the title of your latest release?
WHEN WE HAD FOREVER
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Mina Drake is a young widow who embarks on a heart-wrenching journey to uncover her late husband’s secrets, but in the process, she ignites an unexpected connection with the enigmatic twin brother he left behind.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
WHEN WE HAD FOREVER is set in the Pacific Northwest—a place that, for me, is inextricably tied to feelings of freedom and the headiness of new love. Before I got married, my husband and I spent 7 months living in our van up in Washington State, British Columbia, and Alaska, and it was a magical time in my life. I was in my first truly healthy relationship, and it felt like a new part of me was waking up every day. For me, that’s what WHEN WE HAD FOREVER is about—living well, and fully, and boldly—so it felt natural to me to set the book in the place in which I’d opened my eyes to that.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Funny enough, probably not, at least at the beginning of the book! Mina starts off timid, and stuck in her ways, and is convinced that her dreams have passed her by. Which is not a mindset I identify with, but then again, that’s why I wrote the book—because I believe it’s never too late to chase what you want, and I hoped to tell a story about one woman’s journey toward discovering that.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
She’s a dreamer, and a writer, and full of passion. So…maybe she is like me, after all!
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
The first thing that pops to mind is that the boost pump switch in an airplane can be in a couple different places. Which probably sounds incredibly random, but while I was writing this book, I realized I needed to make a plane crash in a very specific way, so I went to my dad (who’s a pilot) and asked him to help me come up with a scenario. He did, and that’s how the boost pump switch that would alter the course of Grayson’s life came to be.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Ooh, good question! I edit as I go. I can’t move on until I’ve massaged a chapter to just where I want it. Which ultimately makes the drafting process slower, and I still have work to do at the end, but probably not as much as if I just wrote it in one pass.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Ha! Cheesecake. Or Cape Cod potato chips (for which my husband mocks me relentlessly).
9--Describe your writing space/office!
Does my living room couch count?
10--Who is an author you admire?
Oh, so many. Most of whom are friends. But if we’re going with someone I’ve never met and probably never will meet, Natasha Pulley.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
So many of those, too! But to continue the above question, The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley absolutely blew my mind. BLEW. MY. MIND. I read it in 2022, and I still cannot figure out how she put that book together or what genre it even is. But everything about it is jaw-dropping, from the character work to the unraveling of the mystery to the setting to the interweaving of timelines. It left me a melted puddle on the floor and the only thing I dislike about that book is the fact that I can never read it for the first time again.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
This is actually so funny! I’ve been longtime friends with Sunyi Dean, of Book Eaters and Publishing Rodeo fame, and Essa Hansen, who wrote the incredible Nophek Gloss series. They’d patiently listened to me gripe about being on submission for a while. Sunyi lives in the UK, so we didn’t actually meet until 2022, when she and her partner traveled out to San Francisco, where Essa lives. They invited me to come meet up, so of course I did, and amazingly, I got the call while in the car with both, on our way to go meet with a cadre of other authors who I’m now lucky enough to call friends. I could barely get through that lunch; I was so excited.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
Romance. Be it fantasy, contemporary, dark, why choose, whatever. I don’t care. Just make someone fall in love.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
Lord of the Rings. Yes, I’m a nerd. I have tattoos in Elvish and everything.
15--What is your favorite season?
Fall! What better time of year than when the leaves change, and everyone wants to drink hot apple cider?
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
By pretending I’m getting younger instead of older.
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
Bridgerton. Because Rege Jean-Page. And also corsets. And everyone’s horny. What’s not to love?
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Whatever my in-laws are cooking. Which means Indian food.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
Will you think less of me if I admit that whenever I’m not writing, I’m just thinking about writing?
20--What can readers expect from you next?
My next book is called LOVE LETTERS FOR OTHER PEOPLE and comes out December 2025. It’s about a woman who gets swept off her feet by a man who writes her these incredible love letters…except he’s actually paying her high school boyfriend (the one she never got over, and who definitely never got over her) to write them. It’s a messy, emotional book (much like WHEN WE HAD FOREVER) and was very loosely inspired by Cyrano de Bergerac.
An Emotional Romance with a Twisty Mystery, Perfect for Fall 2024, Uncover the Secrets of Love and Loss
An emotionally powerful roller coaster of a novel about losing and finding love, perfect for fans of Colleen Hoover and Lucy Score.
Six months after her husband died in a car crash, Mina Drake is still mired in a haze of grief. Reminders of her years with Michael are everywhere, but beneath her heartache lies an even more painful emotion. It’s a guilty suspicion she can hardly admit to anyone, even herself—that her marriage was over long before Michael’s accident.
They were good together once, she’s sure of it, sharing a connection so deep that Mina can’t understand how it unraveled. That is, until a chance discovery in her husband’s office—and the reappearance of Michael’s estranged brother, Grayson, a notorious bad-boy photographer—awakens her to possible answers.
More shocking still is the pull Mina feels to tattooed, scarred Grayson, who’s nothing at all like the man she married. But as feelings stir to life again, so do secrets, changing everything she thought she knew about her marriage, and about the risks and rewards of loving with no limits…
Romance | Women's Fiction Contemporary [Canary Street Press, On Sale: December 10, 2024, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781335230874 / eISBN: 9780369749567]
Shaylin Gandhi first fell in love with love stories when she started stealing grown-up books off her mother’s bookshelf at the age of ten. By twelve, she’d perfected the art of reading under the covers by flashlight, and in high school, she attempted her first novel. She now writes from the mountains of Golden, Colorado, where she lives with her husband and identical twin daughters. When not finagling words onto paper, Shaylin can be found hiking, scheming up ways to earn another passport stamp, or ingesting enough coffee to power a small city.
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