I look down at the menu and read the ingredients: blanco tequila, agave, lime and lemon juice, and cucumber water.

“It’s like cucumber water but so much more,” I add. “It’s so refreshing.”

“Mine’s really good, too.”

She gives it to me to try and I take a few sips.

Suddenly, we are no longer strangers. We are almost like long lost friends or, dare I say, family.

Over lunch, she tells me all about how she always loved to read and has wanted to be a writer ever since she was a little girl.

After majoring in English at USC, she went on to get a graduate degree there along with a PhD but after graduation she knew for sure that she didn’t want to work in education.

She started out like many others, writing short stories and submitting them to literary magazines.

“The ability to handle rejection is one of those things you really need to develop as a writer if you want to pursue traditional publishing,” she says when our fried avocado bites arrive. “When I wrote my first novel, a young adult paranormal romance about a werewolf, I sent it out to about forty different agents. Most didn’t write back but the few that did sent back form rejection letters.”

“Wow, I had no idea that it was so brutal,” I say.

“It’s kind of like acting. You just have to brace yourself for rejection and not take it personally. Otherwise, it’s never going to work out.”

“So, what happened then?” I ask.

“I wrote more. I wrote a sci-fi dystopian novel with my husband. We alternated writing different chapters. While he worked, I traveled to Texas to a writers’ conference to pitch the book to agents.”

“And that worked?” I ask her eagerly.

“I was scared shitless to present the pitch. I’m not much of a public speaker. But I did it and they both asked me to send it to them. Well, I was really excited and that’s what I planned on doing. The conference itself had a lot of different seminars so I attended as many as I could. One of the ones that I went to at the very end was this one that Deanna Roy ran.

“It was all about romance writing and how she quit her job as a teacher because she was able to make about thirty grand a year as an independent author. Well, I had no knowledge about this whole field up until that point. I mean, I knew that romance existed but I’d never read any modern indie romance books.”

She stops talking to dunk the last avocado bite into their magnificent spicy sauce.

“What happened then?” I ask.