Around seven years ago, I came up with an idea for a book. I wanted to write a surrogacy romance. I’d never read or even heard about one, and the idea captivated me. So I started plotting. The surrogate and biological mother would be the heroine, and the biological father would be the hero. She’d be doing it as a favor to a dear friend. Then the worst happens, and the child the heroine is carrying is motherless. That’s when everything changes.

That is the foundation of One In A Million, with has some pretty significant changes. But the fundamental conflict remains the same. What happens when two biological parents—practical or literal strangers—have to put aside their differences and do what’s in the best interest of their child? Especially when the biological mother never intended to be “the mother” raising the child, and the father doesn’t particularly want to co-parent with her. Actually, I’m being kind. It’s what happens when the father doesn’t want the biological mother in the child’s life at all.

Then, being the writer that I am, I had to throw in another twist and make the product of the fertility clinic mix-up a biracial baby girl, upping the angst and conflict of the story and romance. I literally rubbed my hands together in glee as I plotted this book.

When I needed to come up with a medical reason that a perfectly healthy twenty-something-year-old would need to freeze her eggs (that wasn’t cancer-related), I didn’t have to look far from my own diagnosis of endometriosis. I chose it because endometriosis doesn’t make it impossible for women to get pregnant without medical intervention, just more difficult. In One In A Million, Whitney freezes her eggs as an “in case of emergency, break glass” scenario.

In the end, I ended up killing two birds with one stone (no birds were actually harmed in the writing of this book). I wrote the surrogacy book I probably wouldn’t have had time to write for another 10 years. And I gave Sahara/Whitney the man and daughter, who both turned out to be better than she could ever have imagined.

With love,

Beverley x