In addition to my Silver Birch stories, I'm starting a new collection of cozy workplace romances, all with the "enemies to lovers" trope. The series title is: Corporate women. The series kicks off with
Lydia from Legal, the tale of a corporate merger and two feuding lawyers who knew each other in high school (#second chance romance) and can't deny their attraction to each other, even though they hate each other.
The series continues with Sara from Systems, Anna from Admin, Rita from R&D, Sofia from Sales, and Faye from Finance. Book Covers Online did Lydia from Legal's cover, Dawn Taylor created the follow up books.
I love vector-based covers for this type of story. I feel like they convey the tone of the story and that they're on the sweeter side of romance. (Although not always. I just read a hilarious spicy romance featuring a southern woman who is in love with a hometown boy who is definitely a bad boy. (It's called Enemies with Benefits by Roxie Noir. Check it out. Noir brings both the snark and the spice and as someone who was brought up in Virginia, the southern stuff really rings true as well. It's one of a series about a family with a bunch of interesting sounding sons.)
It's been fun plotting this series and trying to get in what it's like to work in different departments at a big corporation. Before I went freelance, I had a lot of jobs. (Back in the day, I worked as a temp. Remember Kelly Girls?) I worked at banks. I worked at utility companies. I worked at an insurance cmpany. I worked for government agencies. At one of my temp jobs, all I did, all day long, was type type up purchase orders for various different screws and bits and pieces of hardware needed to make Magnasync movieola machines (which are now virtually obsolete.) I would amuse myself by mentioning that the names of the suppliers sounded like Nordic porn magazines (Benthic Screw is the only one I can remember) and oddly, no one thought that was funny.
We got a half hour break for lunch and we started at eight in the morning. I was a long-term temp there and valued because I typed fast. But I burnt out. And when one of my coworkers was killed by a car blowing through the crosswalk on the street in front of the office, I took that as a sign to request another assignment. On the plus side, I met a woman who became one of my closest friends, so there was that.
Corporate life has changed in the details since I worked in an office, but some things have stayed the same, even in this post-pandemic age of hybrid workdays and Zoom calls. There are still managers that inside on having staff meetings when the agenda could be covered in an email message.
There are still managers who schedule those staff meetings at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon and are very surprised that no one is really paying attention.
There are still horrible "trust building" events and corporate retreats and Christmas parties (command performances, often without significant others). There's office politics. There's ... you get the idea. I think the experience is universal, and hope to make the situations fresh and funny and yes, romantic.
