Gabriella Gamez said she wasn’t a big romance reader until the pandemic hit in 2020.
“I was like, okay, I just wanna read something comforting, something happy,” she said. “Something that you know is gonna have a good ending … with the couple at the end ending up together after they go through all of the things that kind of lead them ultimately to each other. And there was just something really comforting in that.”
Gamez also started writing romance, and her second book, “Kiss Me, Maybe,” came out this fall. The 2025 Texas Book Festival pick follows a library assistant named Angela who goes viral by accident when she posts a video online that the masses interpret as a thirst trap.
“She’s never really dated. She hasn’t been kissed,” Gamez said. “She’s kind of like, okay, what if I kind of use this viral moment as a way to get into the dating field and finally experience all of these firsts that she never has before. And so she decides that she’s going to plan a scavenger hunt and have people compete to be her first kiss.”
Angela plans the hunt with the help of her local neighborhood hot bartender, but all the while they’re kind of growing feelings for each other, said Gamez, who based Angela’s job as a library assistant on her own time in that job. And she set the book in San Antonio because she missed the city after college.
“I went to college there and maybe it was just another thing, the consequences of the pandemic, right? Like I have to move back home after college,” she said. “And I think just adding the scavenger hunt element to it just, I think, further made me highlight the city even more.”
Gamez said she wanted to write a romance book about an asexual main character because that kind of representation would have been helpful to her when she was younger.
“I basically came out later in life when I was maybe like 25. And that was very weird for me. I had kind of already thought that I knew what it meant to be asexual. I had some misconceived ideas about it,” she said. “There’s a whole scope, like a whole umbrella of just, you know, like terms like asexuality. And there could be two people who both identify as asexual and have completely different experiences within that.”
But ultimately, Gamez said she hopes her book makes it into the hands of the people who will enjoy it the most.
“I just hope that this finds the readers who need it the most,” she said. “Or who will just enjoy romance.”