If you've turned 40 and had that "what do I want to be when I grow up?" panic attack, then you'll relate to why I wrote the book. If you haven't turned 40 yet, this is what you have to look forward to if you don't pursue your dreams.

I guess I've been a writer all of my life, I just never really conceived that I could ever write a novel or make a living at it. An overdose of Oprah's Live Your Best Life series made think to myself, "Maybe I don't have what it takes to be an author. But I'd sure like to try before I give up." And so I tried.

The story came to me in an epiphany as I was reading a self-help article about dieting. And I laughed to myself because I thought, "How many of these dang articles have I read?" They give you 12 steps, and the first I do in my mind is negotiate. "Well, I don't have to walk two miles a day, maybe just two blocks" or "I can eat vegetables three times a day, but I'm going to eat them with fried chicken." Yet, I still expect to lose 112 pounds.

So, I thought I'd write a story about a woman who attracts more players and goes through more break-ups than the law should allow. She knows it's a pattern in her life that she needs to stop so when she happens upon this self-help article about emotional baggage and toxic men, it hits her like a lightning bolt. And she goes through these same "negotiating" motions with the article, except it's not a food diet, it's a man diet. And just like a dieter that drives past the McDonald's and stops for "one little Big Mac" and knows full well she should've gone home and eaten a carrot stick, so Charisse, the main character, stops for a big "something else." And that is how the Bum Magnet came to be.