Hitting the sophomore slump
Kiss Her Once For Me is Cochrun's second book, following her popular debut novel The Charm Offensive. Even though she went into writing her second novel with experience under her belt, Cochrun admits the process of writing a novel was much different the second time around.

"Oh my gosh, they were vastly different experiences for me. The Charm Offensive was one of those where I didn't have any previously published books. I was teaching high school English, I didn't have plans to be a writer, and I ended up just having an idea and running with it. It was very much a passion project, and it went fast. After it was done, I thought about publication," she said of her first novel.

"When you're writing a second novel, it's the opposite. You know that you have to have a novel first and that it's going to be sold and read by people. People are waiting for it, so it's not necessarily something that you're doing for yourself. You're doing it with an audience in mind, your agent and your editor in mind. For The Charm Offensive, I wrote the first draft so fast. The first draft just poured out of me in six days. Whereas for Kiss Her Once For Me, it took ten whole months to write the first draft. It's a pretty big contrast," she continued.

A lot had changed for Cochrun between novels as well. After struggling to balance writing with her career as a teacher, she decided to take a break from her job to focus on her latest book. "Last year I took a leave of absence from teaching. I love teaching and I did it for eleven years, so it's very meaningful for me, but it turned out that trying to write full time and trying to teach full time was not good for my mental health. I ended up taking a break from teaching to see how it went, and it went pretty okay, so now I'm in this phase where I'm writing full time."

While You Were Sleeping reimagined
Kiss Her Once For Me was a unique project for Cochrun. It was her first time writing a story featuring a sapphic romance, and it was also her first holiday book, something she had not originally planned on doing. "So, funny story, I didn't intend to write a holiday book at all," she said with a laugh. "In June of 2020, after I had sold The Charm Offensive to my agent, my agent was immediately like, 'Okay, what's book two? We've got to immediately come up with a proposal so that we can sell book two,' and I just had no ideas. I was struggling so profoundly to come up with what I wanted to write next at that moment."

She had some ideas for the book, but with everything going on in the world at the time, it was hard for her to find inspiration. "I knew I wanted it to be sapphic, but it was June of 2020, it was the middle of lockdown, and I had only been talking to my sister and my dog for far too long. Creativity was not at its peak."

Her inspiration for the book came from an unlikely place, but one that 90s rom-com fans might recognize. "The thing that inspired me to write this book was the movie While You Were Sleeping starring Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman, which was one of my absolute favorite rom-coms growing up. I was a really weird kid, so that was my favorite movie for a ten-year-old, and I would just make my dad watch it every single weekend because I was obsessed. I love that movie, so I was like, what if I rewrote it but made it Gay? So that was the initial concept for the book, and While You Were Sleeping is a holiday movie, it's set at the holidays, it's not a traditional Christmas movie, but because that was set at the holidays I was like, okay, I'm gonna write a holiday book, that's what's happening. That's how I ended up writing a holiday book, so it was more of an afterthought than a set intention."

The classic 90s movie ended up providing the perfect fodder for Cochrun's pandemic creativity gap. "While You Were Sleeping played a huge part. It's a story about a woman who rescues a man. She has this crush on a guy from a distance, but they've never spoken, and then he's attacked on the subway tracks and she rescues him and saves his life but he ends up in a coma. When she gets to the hospital with him, everyone assumes she's his fiancée and so she ends up being his fake fiancée while he's in this coma. His whole family adopts her and brings her in, but she ends up falling in love with his brother instead," she explained.

While the original movie centers on a heterosexual couple, Cochrun said she didn't need to stretch her imagination far to make the story Queer. "Bill Pullman, who plays the brother she falls in love with, his character is named Jack, and in the movie, he dresses exactly like a Portland butch Lesbian, like, it is to the T. He has this floppy hair thing going on, he wears a flannel shirt and a Carhartt jacket over the top, and workboots, and it's a whole look. He was a part of me being like, well, I could just gender bend that and make Jack a Lesbian instead, which is what I ended up doing."

Sapphic from the start
While she initially struggled to find the inspiration behind the story that would become Kiss Her Once For Me, Cochrun knew from the beginning that she wanted her novel to be Lesbian, especially after writing her first novel. "My first book was a big part of my coming out experience. Writing The Charm Offensive about male characters kind of gave me a sense of distance and protection and could kind of give me a disguise for myself so nobody would know that I was the blonde tech genius with eight-pack abs in the story.

"I knew that I wanted to, with this book, write a sapphic love story. I was out to all of my family and out publicly at that time, and I wanted to write a story about two women falling in love, that was the most important thing," she said. "That was an important thing to me, as a newly out Lesbian who had just created her Hinge profile when I started writing this, to write about two women falling in love and write about that journey."

Cochrun also knew that she wanted her book to be a rom-com. "I love the rom-com genre, 90s rom-coms, I was raised on them. They hold a very special place in my heart. Within the romance world and romance novels, I love the rom-com tropes that exist in there too, but I think one of the things that are fun for me, just kind of by the nature of being a Queer writer, is that I get to play around with those tropes in a few ways, so I get to take classic tropes and just twist them a little bit or subvert them all the way, just to make them Queer, so I can write myself into those movies and stories that I loved growing up."

One of her favorite rom-com tropes to write is forced proximity. "Just take two people and shove them together and force them to be close? I love it! I also love opposites attract, just two characters that are different and bring out different parts of each other."

Cochrun has always been a writer but never thought she'd be writing Queer romance novels. "Growing up, I always was a writer, and in my teen years I mostly tried to write YA fantasy novels, but of course back then I had no idea I was Queer. That didn't even seem like a possibility in my life. All of those stories were straight and involved heterosexual romance subplots," she said of her early work.

"I know for me, writing a Queer romance for the first time felt vastly different, from a personal standpoint, about how I was able to develop those relationships, the way that I felt about exploring the identity of the characters. It felt right to me after years of something that was not true to myself and authentic," she said. Now that Cochrun is a Queer romance writer, she's noticed that there are a lot of expectations placed on her shoulders. "One key difference that I do know of between Queer romance and not Queer romance, in Queer romance, because we have fewer stories, there are always more expectations placed on them."

"There are eighty bajillion straight romance novels out in the world, and some of them are freaking fantastic, some of them are horrible, some of them are just middle-ground fluff. They can be all these different things, but I think with Queer romance, readers can be a lot harder on Queer romance just because they don't have as many stories that represent themselves so they tend to expect a lot from it," she continued.

As a consumer, Cochrun is aware that she also places high expectations on Queer work. "I know for me that was how I felt watching Happiest Season a few years ago. I was like, this is it, this is the only one we have, this is our one sapphic holiday romance, it has to be perfect, it has to be all these things. Of course, it wasn't, because Queer people are not a monolith and Queer culture is not monolithic, and I think that can be a little different. I think other marginalized authors experience the same thing. I have the experience of being a white writer and so I am not expected to represent all white people in my writing, but I know for a lot of Latinx writers and Black writers that there can be that expectation to make sure that your story reflects everyone in your community, which is just an impossibly high standard."

A fluffy hug of a book
With impossibly high expectations in mind, Cochrun knows that her book won't be for everyone, and that's okay. "It's a holiday romance about two women falling in love. I hope for some readers picking up this book it's like a fluffy hug, that they can drink their hot cocoa by the fire and they can kind of, for a brief period, allow themselves to escape from whatever hardships are happening in their life and just escape into this zany story," she said.

"I also think on a deeper level, for myself, a huge part of writing Queer romance is an act of self-love and self-affirmation, and I of course always hope that people walk away from my books believing truly that they are deserving of love in whatever form they want it and need it," she continued.

While Kiss Her Once For Me is a love story, Cochrun also hopes it can be interpreted as a self-love story. "This book specifically deals with the concept of failure. The main character is crippled by her fear of failure because she is twenty-five and she has been fired from her dream job, so her whole life plan has fallen apart and she's so afraid to put herself back out there after this perceived failure. So I hope this book provides some comfort in regard to that fear of failure and allows readers to question what failure is and how we define it and also to consider that some things are worth that risk. In life, some things are worth the risk of falling on your face. Some things are worth the risk of having something not work out, and so that is kind of a key takeaway within the book."

Celebrating the holidays with Alison Cochrun
The holiday season is a time for love of all kinds, and Kiss Her Once For Me is a reminder to show love to all those close to you, even yourself. One of the ways Cochrun expresses love this time of year is through cherished holiday traditions. "I love all holiday traditions because I think for me what I love most about Christmas is the anticipation. It's all the little things that you do in the lead-up to Christmas that I find special," she said. "One of my favorite traditions growing up was just driving around looking at Christmas lights. We used to do that as a family and have our little hot cocoa, so I just love doing that, driving around looking at lights."

Of course, Kiss Her Once For Me wouldn't be a holiday book without including some traditions as well. "One of the traditions in the book, the family, when they put ornaments on the tree, they bring out all the ornaments, and every time they bring it out they have to reminisce about where they got the ornament, where they traveled and got it from, or was it an ugly elementary school ornament that you made, whatever the story behind the ornament is. That's something that my family does. When we would decorate the tree together, it's a very slow process but every ornament has a lot of sentimental value, and we would always talk about it. It means we don't have a nice tree aesthetic, it's just a lot of random shit, but it's such a special experience," she said with a smile.

Cochrun also has a special Christmas gift for all her fans. "My third book has been announced. My third book is called Here We Go Again. It's a sapphic road trip rom-com. I pitched it to my agent as my sapphic road-trip rom-com about death, which I know sounds grim and sad but it's a book that is super-near and dear to my heart and I love it very much and I am excited to share it with people," she said. She plans to continue writing Queer romances in the future and said she can't imagine writing anything else.

While her next book will be coming out next year, Cochrun has another, more personal romance project she'll be working on in the meantime: in just a few weeks, she will be getting married. "Is being U-Haul-ing Lesbians a trope? We're that, we're getting married in three weeks, that's coming up real soon, so I've got a wedding to plan," she said with a laugh. "In romance novels, there's often a trope in like male/female pairings where the man is really big and strong and the woman is tiny and dainty, and my partner and I are like that, but we're both women. I'm 5'11" and very much a broad, full-sized person, and then my partner is like five feet tall. And she is like teeny-tiny, and so we look very mismatched."

Fans will no doubt be awaiting Cochrun's latest novel in 2023, but she will also be taking some much-needed time off to enjoy married life with her new partner and their parrot.