What Is Wanderlust Romance? The Literary Territory I Didn’t Know I Was Creating

I thought I was naming a book series. Five books later, I realized I had been naming the literary territory I write in all along—one where place is character, Black love gets a larger map, and nobody has to become smaller to earn a happily-ever-after.

Here’s the funny part: I named the Wanderlust Romance Series before I fully understood what Wanderlust Romance was.

I wish I could tell you I sat down before writing Bali Blue with a beautifully articulated literary manifesto, a five-book plan and a crystal-clear explanation of the territory I intended to create. Absolutely not. I wrote the book. Then I wrote Mess on the Mara. Then Tempest in Tulum. Somewhere along the way, those books became the Wanderlust Romance Series because, well, there was romance. There was travel. There was wanderlust. It made sense.

But now I’m five books into my career. The first three belong to the Wanderlust Romance Series. Steel Horses, Leather Roads and The Sweetest Ride [Coming 2027] belong to a completely different series called Leather & Steel.

And every single one of them is Wanderlust Romance.

That distinction took me a few books to understand.

Wanderlust Romance is not simply the name of my first series. It is the literary territory I write in.

For me, Wanderlust Romance is romance fiction in which place functions as a character. The location is not decorative. It participates in the attraction, the conflict, the recognition, the breaking apart and the coming back together. It applies pressure to the people falling in love. And because these are my stories, that larger geography also gives Black love room to exist on a much bigger stage. Perfect examples of this are How Stella Got Her Groove Back, You, Me & Tuscany, and to a degree, From Scratch.

First Things First: It Has to Be a Romance

The wanderlust cannot cannibalize the romance.

These are love stories. Two people meet—or maybe they already know each other entirely too well—and something happens between them that neither can comfortably ignore. There has to be attraction, desire, conflict, chemistry, vulnerability and choice.

And, because apparently I enjoy making my own job harder, my characters usually come to the page with whole-ass lives already in progress. They have careers, baggage, families, exes, grief, ambition, bad coping mechanisms, good credit, questionable decisions and very strong opinions about what they do and do not need from another human being.

I’m interested in what love looks like when neither person is waiting for somebody else to give them an identity.

The traditional romantic narrative often tells us that a woman finds the man, gets the house, the children, the little dog and the white picket fence and BOOM her life is complete. But what if she doesn’t want children? What if her baby is the career she spent twenty years building? What if she has already been married? What if she tried one version of happily-ever-after and decided she would rather build another? What if she has money, passport stamps, property, responsibilities and a very full life before this man even opens his mouth?

Does she suddenly become harder to love?

Not in my books.

Can two fully formed, perfectly imperfect adults create a life together without either person having to become smaller to make the relationship work?

That is the romance I keep coming back to.

The Location Isn’t a Backdrop. It’s a Character.

A story does not become Wanderlust Romance because I dropped two attractive people into a villa and gave them a pretty sunset. The location has to earn its page time. Because if I can pick the story up, move it somewhere else and nothing important changes, then the place isn't working hard enough.

I want the location to create possibility and conflict. I want it to reveal things. Sometimes I want it to make the characters uncomfortable as hell. The destination might challenge how they see themselves, expose a lie they have been telling themselves for years, hold grief, or force them to confront family, culture, desire, home, identity or the terrifying possibility that the person standing beside them understands them better than they understand themselves.

And it cannot only happen to the woman.

I usually write in dual point of view because both people are in this relationship. Both are changing. Both are bringing history into that space. The location has a relationship with each of them, and those relationships do not have to be the same.

One Literary Rule. Five Very Different Jobs.

This is where I can finally look back across the books and see the pattern I did not have language for when I started my writing career.

Bali Blue: Bali as Remembrance

Rhiyan Carson does not go to Bali because she is living her best life. She is pushed there. Her marriage has ended, the future she thought she was building is gone, and people who love her can see that she is unraveling even while she is still trying to function like the woman who always has everything under control.

But the important thing about Rhiyan is this: she was amazing before she got married. She was amazing while she was married. Divorce did not make her less powerful. She just lost sight of herself for a minute.

Bali gives her enough distance from the wreckage to remember who the fuck she is.

She doesn’t become worthy there. She remembers herself there.

Kendrick’s relationship with Bali is completely different. Bali already holds his mother, grief, complicated family history, love and forgiveness. His connection to the place existed long before Rhiyan stepped into it. So when they meet there, they are not simply two Americans having an exotic experience together. They have arrived in the same place through two very different emotional doors.

That matters.

Mess on the Mara: Kenya as Recognition

Andra’s journey to Kenya is tied to identity almost from the beginning. Her father was Kenyan, but he walked out of her life when she was four. Meanwhile, her best friend Kobe is Ghanaian. He came to the United States when he was thirteen, and he grew up knowing where he came from, knowing his family, knowing his cultural connection.

Andra has always been close enough to witness that kind of belonging without having it for herself. So Kenya becomes ancestry, family, culture, reckoning and homecoming. She goes looking for pieces of herself, and she finds some. But Kenya also forces her to confront something she has carried for most of her life: the belief that men leave.

Meanwhile, Kobe has been there since they were thirteen. Through her foolishness. Through the fuckboys. Through the mess. Through every reason he could have decided loving her was too complicated.

Yet, he stayed.

Kenya does not give Andra Kobe. Kenya changes what she is finally able to recognize about the man who has already been there.

That story changed me creatively, too. When I was writing Mess on the Mara, I realized I could not sit at home and Google my way through the food, culture and sensory life of Kenya and pretend that was enough. So I jumped on a plane and went to Kenya and other parts of East Africa to research what was needed to grow this story from thought to full realization.

The details of the 5-D experience of a space are not travel decoration to me.

They are a massive part of the story.

Tempest in Tulum: Tulum as a Mirror

Delia has a very personal connection to Tulum through her father, and in some ways she has built a beautiful story around that connection. But Delia is also carrying guilt and shame. She is punishing herself and puts herself in danger, repeatedly.

Then she meets Okiyo, a man whose entire existence is wrapped in duty, loyalty and protection.

Tulum becomes a mirror. The beauty is real. The history is real. Her emotional connection to her father is real. And equally so, is the danger underneath what she is doing to herself.

Okiyo is not simply there to hold up the mirror. He is going to make her step through the damn thing. And thhe location forces Delia to look at the difference between the story she has built around herself and what she is actually doing to herself.

Steel Horses, Leather Roads: Paris and South Georgia as Competing Truths

Cara does not arrive in Paris wondering if she belongs. Oh, honey. Cara knows she is that girl. Paris is not her dream vacation. Paris is her manifesto. It is proof: I made it.

She came from two drug-addicted parents in a place where they did not have much and she and her baby brother were left with even less. I had ambitions bigger than the one-stoplight town she grew up in, and built the life she once dreamed of building with another... brick by brick... by herself.

Paris is not pretending to be her home. Paris became home because Cara built a self capable of belonging there.

But South Georgia holds another truth. It holds where she came from. Family. Old shame. Old pain. And Corian—the only man she has ever loved and the man who broke her heart.

So the story is not South Georgia bad, Paris good. And it is not Paris was fake, South Georgia was home all along. That would be too easy.

The real question is harder:

Does loving where you came from require you to surrender what you became?

If Cara and Corian find their way back to each other, Cara still has a life. She has a business. She has Paris. She has a self she worked very hard to build.

Love has to make room for all of that.

The Sweetest Ride: Sometimes I Have to Take Away Your Home-Court Advantage

Kima and Darren Demetrie are both extremely capable people. They know how to make things happen. They know how to carry a lot.

What they do not know how to do particularly well is let somebody else help carry it.

So what am I supposed to do with two hyper-capable people who are very comfortable operating inside systems they understand?

Easy.

Take them out of those systems.

Paris starts the job. Turkey is where I intend to commit the real crimes.

Cappadocia. Fairy chimneys. A cave hotel. A cave suite. One bed.

Listen. I am still a romance author. We know what we are doing here.

But underneath the fun of the trope is something much more important. Kima and Darren have to rely on each other differently once they leave home. Darren, in particular, is walking into a cultural environment where he is going to encounter men whose romantic intentionality is not subtle.

There is no “maybe I like you, maybe I don’t, let me disappear for three days and come back with a wyd.”

Honey, no.

Darren Demetrie is about to get a lesson.

And the destination is part of the lesson.

I Wanted Black Love on a Bigger World Stage

Some of what I write comes directly from what I have seen with my own eyes.

I have traveled and seen Black women moving through the world alone. I have seen groups of Black women traveling together. I have seen Black couples. I have seen friendship and romance and Black people simply being out in the world.

We are already there.

And yet, when I look at the images constantly presented back to us, I do not always see that same reality reflected. Even within Black romance, many of our stories understandably happen in places like Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Miami and New York—places with vibrant Black communities and endless stories worth telling.

But we are in more places than that. Our love is in more places than that. And I wanted my books to reflect a larger map.

Especially when I published my first book during COVID, when so much of the conversation seemed obsessed with what was supposedly wrong with Black women, what was supposedly wrong with Black men, what one side demanded from the other, who deserved what and whether we even liked each other very much.

I did not want to build my fiction around the assumption that Black love was missing.

I am not inventing Black love in Bali, Kenya, Tulum, Paris or Turkey. I am writing it from the assumption that it already exists and am giving it more room, more landscape, more possibility and more places to breathe.

My Characters Don’t All Arrive in the World the Same Way

There is no one Black experience of a destination. That would be boring. And dishonest.

When Rhiyan arrives in Bali, she notices that she does not see many Black women. When she finally sees one, there is that little knowing head nod.

If you know, you know.

Cara, on the other hand, is not walking around Paris waiting for somebody to validate her presence. Paris belongs to her because Cara has cultivated herself into a woman who believes she belongs in every room she enters.

Delia approaches Tulum through curiosity, family history and the memory of her father.

And Andra steps into Kenya and experiences something entirely different. People look familiar. Hair looks familiar. There is this sense of recognition.

A Black American woman stepping onto the African continent for the first time can experience something difficult to explain until you feel it.

Homecoming. Reckoning. Belonging. Being covered.

That does not mean every Black person experiences Africa the same way.

It means Andra does.

The place may be a character, but it does not have the same relationship with everybody who enters it.

That is what keeps the books from becoming formula.

My Women Are Already Somebody

I write perfectly imperfect women.

Not perfect. Not inspirational mascots. Women.

They can be successful and emotionally foolish. Powerful and wounded. Horny. Angry. Soft. Ambitious. Self-protective. Generous. A whole mess sometimes.

And still worthy of being loved all the way down.

Rhiyan does not become worthy because Kendrick sees her. Andra does not have to get her shit together before Kobe is allowed to love her. Cara’s success is not an obstacle Corian needs to knock down so he can finally be “the man.” Kima does not have to become less capable for Darren to become useful.

My heroines do not need to shrink so a hero can look taller beside them.

And the men do not get to be cardboard either.

The Men Have to Be Bold Enough to Meet Them There

When I say I write perfectly imperfect women and the men bold enough to chase them around the world, “bold” does not simply mean dominant. It does not mean louder. It does not automatically mean richer. And it definitely does not mean he gets to show up with confidence and no emotional range and call himself an alpha.

A man can be intimidated by a successful woman. That is real life.

I know.

But the men I am interested in writing may struggle, may learn, may fuck up—and they absolutely do—but they cannot require the woman they love to become less so they can feel like more.

They have to see her at her actual scale and move toward her anyway.

They have to desire her and be willing to make that desire known. They need lives of their own, ambition of their own, wounds of their own, and they need the capacity to be changed too.

Because Wanderlust Romance is not about sending a woman around the world so she can transform while a perfectly formed man waits at the finish line.

Everybody has work to do around here.

So What Is Wanderlust Romance?

Five books in, I finally know how I answer that question.

Wanderlust Romance is romance fiction in which place functions as an active character in the love story. The location has to evoke desire for the world while also creating conflict, possibility, recognition, pressure or transformation for the people falling in love.

In my work, that means Black love gets a larger geography. It means the characters come to the page with full lives rather than waiting for romance to create them. It means the destination cannot be swapped out without changing the story.

Place might make someone remember herself, confront her ancestry, question home, face danger, surrender control or finally recognize the person who has been standing beside her the entire time.

I just needed enough books behind me to recognize my own fingerprints.

Bali. Kenya. Tulum. South Georgia. Paris. Turkey.

Different people. Different relationships with place. Different versions of home. Different problems to solve.

And the same question keeps pulling me back to the page:

What happens when two perfectly imperfect people fall in love somewhere in a world that refuses to leave them exactly as it found them?

Apparently, this is what I write.

And now I finally know what to call it.