How one horrible phone call led Carley Fortune to quit her job and become a romance novelist
The New York Times bestselling author reflects on her path from journalism to fiction writing
Many of us have had days when we've had to deal with unpleasant meetings or phone calls and the stress of work becomes too much. For Carley Fortune, one particularly unpleasant phone call was enough to make her quit her job as the executive editor of Refinery29 Canada — a brand that she helped launch — and pursue her bucket list item of writing a book.
"I'm so proud of the work that we did, but as I rose up in my career as a journalist and as an editor … I got further away from the work that I really, really loved, which was coming up with ideas and collaborating," Fortune tells Q's Tom Power. "I was just so sick of working my butt off. I was a journalist for 16 years and feeling like no matter what I did, it couldn't make a difference."
After that horrible phone call, Fortune started re-examining her life. "[I] said to myself, 'I need to do something for myself,'" she recalls. "'I have done all my creative work as an adult for my employer. I want to take that back.'"
While Fortune had dreamed of becoming a professional author since childhood, she never thought it was possible. "I didn't know anyone who worked in publishing," she says. "And I was very concerned about money. I think what I absorbed growing up was that writers didn't make any money. And so smart kid that I was, I went into journalism."
To tackle her financial concerns, Fortune devised a plan to ensure that her first manuscript, a romance novel, would be done by the end of that year.
"I calculated how many words would be in a romance novel manuscript, and it was 80,000 words," she says. "Then I figured out how many days were left in the year and divided 80,000 by the number of days. If I wrote 388 words a day, I could finish by the end of the year."
Following her plan, Fortune would get up at 5 a.m. each day to write before her husband and young son woke up. With this routine, she managed to finish the manuscript for Every Summer After in just four months.
While she says Every Summer After had a mix of positive and negative reviews, especially on TikTok, her second novel, Meet Me At The Lake, garnered the approval of Archewell — the production company founded by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Meet Me At The Lake, which touches on Fortune's personal experience with postpartum OCD, is now being adapted into a movie for Netflix.
Fortune's latest book, This Summer Will Be Different, is based on a real girls trip she and her best friend took to Prince Edward Island in their 20s. The book touches on some steamy oyster shucking at the National Oyster Shucking Championship in Tyne Valley. While Fortune says This Summer Will Be Different is steamier than her previous two novels, all three books touch on female relationships in different ways.
"Each of my books looks at different relationships between women," she says. "I'd never written really, really closely and intimately about best friends. That's integral to the book for sure."
The full interview with Carley Fortune is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Carley Fortune produced by Vanessa Nigro.
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