The Real Story Behind Paper Fame

I wrote Paper Fame because I was suffocating.

Somewhere along the way, the thing I loved—writing—started to feel like a box. Every time I sat down to create, there were voices in my head telling me what was “marketable,” what was “trendy,” what wouldn’t “sell.” And those voices weren’t mine. They belonged to workshops, editors, agents, and sometimes even well-meaning friends who thought they were helping.

“You should write a fantasy.”
“Romance is hot right now.”
“Make the character more likable.”
“You can’t sell a book like that.”

I didn’t get into writing to follow a checklist. I write because I want to be free. Because it’s the only place where I can say exactly what I mean, in the way I want to say it. But somewhere between query letters and comp titles, I lost that.

That’s where Paper Fame came from.

Paige, Ink, Teresia—they’re all me. Not copies of me, but reflections of different stages of my writing journey.

Ink is the part of me that writes purely for the love of it—for the connection, the joy, the raw need to create.

Paige is the part that longs for recognition, that wants so badly to be seen and validated.

And Teresia is the part of me that once thought I had to claw and crawl to maintain a place in the market, no matter what it cost.

Writing this book forced me to look at all of those versions of myself and come back to center. To remember why I started writing in the first place. I don’t write to be in a cage. I don’t write to cater to an audience. I write for me. If people love it, great. If they don’t, that’s fine too. But my stories are mine, first and foremost.

That hunger—the need to be seen, to be read, to matter—is something every writer understands.

Writing Paper Fame was my way of saying: No more.

No more contorting myself to fit into boxes that were never made for me. No more watering down my voice to be “palatable.” I didn’t write this book to be trendy. I didn’t write it to make people comfortable. I wrote it because I was tired of being told how to write.

I wrote it to be free.