Spotlight: Writing Mr. Right by Alina Khawaja
/
The Dead Romantics meets Book Lovers in this charming rom-com about struggling writer Ziya, who’s about to give up on her dream of publishing until she wakes up one morning to find a physical manifestation of her writing muse in her apartment.
Ziya Khan is a legal secretary by day, but she spends her nights working hard to be a published author. She’s spent the last few years trying to get her novel published about a young brown woman falling in love with a small-town brown man—but with no luck.
After one particularly painful rejection on the night before her thirtieth birthday, Ziya decides to give up her pen for good and instead just wishes to be happy. Then, the next morning, Ziya wakes up to find Aashiq, a physical manifestation of her writing muse, sitting on her couch.
Aashiq has materialized to help Ziya find her love for writing again, despite Ziya’s determination to keep her dreams in the past. But bit by bit, Aashiq starts to remind Ziya of why she loved writing and that her words matter more than she thinks. And impossibly, something more starts to blossom between them.
But as Ziya falls for Aashiq, he begins to disappear, which prompts her to choose: her art or her heart?
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Dear Ziya,
Thank you for your patience as I took my time with THE LONGEST GOODBYE. There’s so much to love about this manuscript—Haniya and Arsal are such wonderful characters who have great chemistry, but unfortunately, I didn’t connect with them and the story quite enough, so I regretfully have to pass on this one. Don’t forget this is just one agent’s opinion…
My eyes glaze over the rest of the email. A sigh rips through my chest as I already know what it says—a whole lot of nothing. I swear, I might as well tattoo the literary agent’s words to my eyeballs with the number of times I’ve read them.
But at least this rejection on my book is better than the last one I had; that agent literally pulled an “it’s not you, it’s me” and that somehow was way worse than if he’d just ghosted me.
I slide my phone back into my pocket as I walk down the street on my way to work. I take a sip of my coffee, and the bitterness of the bean juice goes well with the bitterness strung through my body. I knew I shouldn’t have checked my email so early in the morning. I made it a rule not to check my query email—the account I use to send out pitches of my book and sample chapters—before 5 p.m. But I saw the notification on my phone as I exited the subway and climbed the stairs to the street, and I thought maybe, finally, after a year of sending my book out to agents, this would be the one who would offer me representation. I matched so perfectly with their wish list for a romance novel—fresh characters, distinct voice, and feel-good ending. I hoped this would be the agent who would gush about my characters and my writing. They’d tell me how excited they were to work with me, and I’d finally get my writing career started.
But no; it’s another cookie-cutter response: I couldn’t connect to the characters or the story. What didn’t they connect with? The small-town setting? The young woman returning home for the first time in years since she’d left to attend college? The guy she’d left behind and promised to come back for—who might have been her true love, had she decided he was worth staying for?
My plan in this latest round of queries was that each time I got a pass from an agent, I’d send out five more, but that sounds mentally exhausting, especially after the near year and a half I spent outlining, writing, and revising this novel.
Maybe I should hold off on sending it and see if there are some edits I can make to the book. Or maybe it’s actually fine and it really was just subject to the agent’s taste. Or maybe—
A giant truck zips past me, its tires way too close to the curb. The driver goes right through a huge muddy puddle, which shoots upward and splashes all over me.
My spine curls as the dirty rainwater splatters my clothes. The cold water mixed with the dropping temperature in the air immediately causes the warmth in my body to evaporate. Goose bumps erupt all over my skin as the now-wet fabric of my shirt clings to my waist. I glance down at the outfit I took so long to settle on this morning—a brown pencil skirt with black pantyhose, and an orange sweater, which is now soaked and stained with watery mud that looks too close to something else I don’t want to think too much about. An earthy smell sticks to me, but not in a good way. If I were a male love interest in a book, I’d smell like the swirl of smoke from good firewood, or like I brushed my skin with a bristle of pine needles every morning. Instead, I smell like a bear who spent the afternoon rolling around in a patch of grass.
The short strands of my hair, previously carefully styled with a flat iron so they gently framed my cheekbones, now cling to my face in wet clumps. At least my mouth was spared; I don’t want to know what the combination of dirt and coffee tastes like.
“Damn it,” I hiss under my breath. I’m about a block away from my office building, and it’s way too far to go home and change. I pick up my pace, my heels clacking against the concrete. I swear each person I pass gives me the same grimace that says, Wow, sucks to be her.
Oh well. At least I’ll be behind a desk all day. I think getting splashed by a truck is actually better than running into street performers. Brooklyn, thankfully, doesn’t have its own version of the Naked Cowboy to terrorize tourists and commuters alike like in Times Square, so I can get to my office in relative peace.
I finally reach the building at the end of the street. Shivers rack my body as I pull the door open. I ignore the strange glances from the receptionist and head straight for the elevator. While inside it, I try my best to squeeze the water out of my hair, which isn’t easy because I have a bob cut and the ends fall to just below my chin. It’s already drying, the frizz adding a crunch to the consistency of the strands.
The elevator goes all the way up to the tenth floor, to the New Scope Law Office, where I’ve worked for the past six years. When the doors open, I carefully step out onto the sleek floors so I don’t slip in my wet heels. I tread cautiously, water still dripping from my body onto the floor. The last thing I need on top of everything else that’s happened this morning is to—
A shoulder bumps into mine as I round the corner, and it jostles the coffee in my hand. The hot liquid splashes onto my shirt, further staining my sweater and scalding the skin underneath. My arm rears back, a yelp caught in my windpipe at the stinging pain. I catch a glimpse of the person who ruined my outfit, but it’s one of the women who works in the doctor’s office next to ours. She doesn’t even bother to glance back as she makes it to the elevator and presses the button.
I huff, then examine the damage to my outfit. Blotches of brown leak through the material, and the scent of caffeine clinging to my skin is so strong it’s like I took a bath in a coffee maker, which I guess is better than smelling like a feral coyote, but there’s definitely no time to go home and get changed now.
Perfect. The one day I really need to look good, and I look like a drowned rat.
Excerpted from Writing Mr. Right by Alina Khawaja, Copyright © 2025 by Alina Khawaja Published by MIRA.
Buy on Amazon | Bookshop.org
About the Author
Alina Khawaja is a Canadian Pakistani author. Seeing that she's a graduate from the University of Toronto with a BA in English, history and creative writing, and from Toronto Metropolitan University with an MA in Literatures of Modernity, it's been clear from day one that the only thing Alina could be is a storyteller. Alina lives in Ontario, Canada, where she spends the summer at theme parks and the winter cozying up inside with a ridiculously expensive coffee. When she's not writing, she's either reading or trying to keep up with her endless list of K-dramas. Her debut novel was Maya's Laws of Love.
Connect
Author website: https://www.thealinakhawaja.com/
Twitter: @thealinakhawaja
Instagram: @thealinakhawaja
