Georgette Anna S. Gonzales, who once called Sibulan home before migrating to the United States, never set out to become a romance writer. In 2003, while working in Manila, she was simply looking for extra income when her best friend suggested they try their hand at romance novels in Tagalog. Five thousand pesos per manuscript, she recalls with a laugh: “Less taxes, that was still a big boost for our wallets.”

But what began as a pragmatic hustle quickly turned into a calling. The romance formula—boy meets girl, they fall in love, conflict ensues, and they live happily ever after—became her gateway into storytelling as a deeper, more resonant act.

Gonzales, who grew up in Quezon City surrounded by books, credits her imagination to childhood days spent devouring Nancy Drew mysteries and, later, the double rows of Mills & Boon novels owned by her godmother. “I just loved how two people found ways to love each other,” she says. Those well-thumbed paperbacks shaped her early sense of narrative rhythm and emotional honesty. She was drawn not to the artifice of love stories, but to their insistence on possibility—the idea that affection could flourish even amid life’s cruelties.

Her debut novella, Tulungan Mo Akong Lumimot, was written by hand in a notebook, and fragments of dialogue and scenes then stitched together on an old desktop. When her manuscript was accepted for publication that same year, her alter ego “Edith Joaquin” was born—named not after literary greats Edith Tiempo and Nick Joaquin, as some would assume, but after a nickname and a street in Frisco, Quezon City. That small beginning would lead to an enduring career in romance, where she would craft stories filled with kilig and complexity, and with women who are never mere recipients of affection but architects of their own desires.

For Gonzales, romance is both easy and difficult. The formula may be predictable, she admits, but its success lies in the execution: “How do you draw the same intense emotions in your readers as your characters are experiencing?” She writes her scenes like cliffhangers, each one pulsing with anticipation. Her measure of success is not awards or money, but when readers fight over her characters “as if they were all in The Bachelor.”

She has since built a body of work defined by her unwavering faith in the romance genre—not as escapism, but as a map of emotional truth. One book in particular—her 2016 collection of short stories, Of Love and Special Things—was inspired by the songs of Barry Manilow, and amply demonstrates how love stories can be lushly sentimental yet anchored in the grit of human vulnerability. Across four tales—“When Broken Hearts Find Love,” “No More Goodbyes,” “Memories and Our Song,” and “Undercover”—she turns familiar tropes into windows through which we glimpse the complexities of longing, resilience, and tenderness.

“When Broken Hearts Find Love” begins, as many romances do, with heartbreak and alcohol. A betrayed woman and a jilted man meet at a bar, their conversation a duel of cynicism and wit that slowly transforms into an unexpected intimacy. Gonzales deploys the classic rebound-meets-redeemer setup, but what saves it from cliché is her meticulous pacing and ear for emotional rhythm. The dialogue crackles with wounded humor—“That bad, huh?” he asks, to which she retorts, “Ass is an understatement”—and in those exchanges, Gonzales reveals her deft control of tone, moving effortlessly from bitterness to warmth. When their one-night solace becomes something more lasting, the story reads like a quiet argument for second chances, one that eschews irony for sincerity.

“Memories and Our Song” is perhaps the emotional centerpiece of the collection, a melodrama steeped in music and memory. Here, Gonzales takes the Manilow lyric “Weekend in New England” and spins it into a full-bodied narrative of lost love and miraculous remembrance. Elise, a singer, must rekindle her husband’s memory after an accident robs him of their shared past. The motif of song becomes both narrative engine and emotional metaphor—music as the vessel of memory, melody as the shape of love enduring against amnesia. It’s an unabashedly romantic conceit, but Gonzales writes it with conviction, balancing sentiment with restraint. When the final reunion comes—when the husband remembers her as she sings their song—the catharsis feels earned, not contrived.

In “No More Goodbyes,” the emotional temperature shifts darker. A police officer and his fiancée are caught in a tragic dance between duty and devotion, sacrifice and loss. Gonzales uses the language of action and urgency—a gunshot, a moment of fatal decision—to contrast the quiet ache of love unfulfilled. It’s her most cinematic piece, one that stretches the romance form into something approaching tragedy, reminding readers that love’s purity often survives only in its ruin.

Finally, “Undercover” provides a change of tempo—a smoky, sensual story of two lovers working together in the nightlife scene, navigating desire under the guise of pretense. Here, Gonzales flexes her command of atmosphere, mixing humor, danger, and erotic charge with the playfulness of a writer utterly at home in her genre.

Across these stories, Gonzales’s prose is polished, brisk, and unpretentious. She embraces the conventions of romance—the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the grand gesture—but reshapes them with emotional intelligence and feminine agency. Her women are not damsels but survivors; her men are not saviors but equals. In Of Love and Special Things, Gonzales proves that the romance genre, in the right hands, remains the most sincere chronicle of what it means to be human: to hope, to hurt, and to love again.

She has not written in a while, she tells me. Today, however, even as she juggles office work and editing stints, Gonzales dreams of returning fully to writing. Her stories endure because they speak to something elemental in us: the human need to love, to hope, and to begin again.