Rocklin nurse publishes first adult romance using inspiration from BookTok

Rocklin nurse Brandi LaRoux has published her first adult romance, titled "Only The Moon," using inspiration from BookTok. The story follows Sia, a long-term substitute teacher visiting town to cover for a maternity leave. She quickly meets with a gentleman who instantly lights a spark with her. "It's a love story, then life happens. ... Things from the past kind of threaten the delicate balance of a new relationship," she shared. The book immediately hooks readers in chapter one with a witty point of view. LaRoux writes, "She tilted her head to side, studying the stranger as if she were Charles Darwin landing on the Galapagos Islands and finding brand new species of life. Was this a - functional male adult? It required further investigation." LaRoux shared the story comes from stories she heard and things she has experienced. But her number one inspiration? BookTok. BookTok is a niche subcommunity on the video streaming app TikTok that focuses on reviewing, discussing and joking about books they read. Imagine the world's biggest and easily accessible book club but trendy - that's BookTok. LaRoux said she got hooked into BookTok during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. She said while everyone was baking bread, people in this corner of the internet were getting back into reading for fun again. "I started reading again because of Court of Thorns and Roses (by Sarah J. Maas)," LaRoux said. "I saw it on TikTok. I read it, and I was just like, 'Oh, my god, I forgot how much I love to read, right?' " As she dived into reading, she remembered she used to have a creative spark in writing. Before she was a nurse, she was a newspaper reporter in Indiana and Illinois. "That creative outlet was used in writing news stories, and I haven't used that muscle in so many years that I just, when COVID was happening, I think, as a way of kind of shutting off all the trauma of COVID, I went into myself and pulled these stories out of my chest," LaRoux shared. She said when she writes, she feels like the story pulls her in a way she never would have expected. "There's something that happens when I'm writing in particular where I start pulling a thread, and I don't really know," she said. "I'm just curious about something, and then I feel like I'm almost taken away, kind of with the story. And it's almost like I'm just a passenger in it." She knows as a reader it's easy to get carried away by a good story but never expected it as a writer to share that experience. "You know how you feel as a reader and it happens, but I never expected it as a writer to feel like the story was in charge and I'm just kind of this participant," LaRoux says. "... And then I'll go back and read it, and I'm like, I mean, I logically know that I wrote that, but I don't remember forming that sentence. So it's kind of like I get into a haze." She also compared it to sports, saying, "That's the only way to describe it is that, you know, when the athletes go in the zone and they're not constantly making choices about what dribble, what shooting the ball or anything. It's just kind of like muscle memory. It feels like that." You can find the book on Amazon.