My First Blog: Why I Wrote Want is Weather
Every author begins somewhere. For me, writing as Dahlia Quinn, was never easy. My books aren’t about heroes or villains — they’re about people, flawed and tender, trying to survive the story they’ve stumbled into.
My third novel as Dahlia, Want is Weather, is perhaps the most personal story I’ve ever told. It follows Daniel, a married architect, whose carefully ordered life is overturned when a friendship with Ethan becomes something he can no longer deny. His wife, Laura, refuses easy tropes — she sets boundaries instead: the guest room, therapy, daylight only. And so begins the hardest renovation of all: a family trying to tell the truth without burning their house down.
Set along a river that won’t stop threatening to flood, this book is about desire and discipline, marriage and mercy. It’s about the slow, blistering work of being human when love refuses to fit the rules. No heroes. No easy villains. Just three good people facing the consequences of being alive.
Readers have called it “a tender, knife-bright portrait” and “the most humane depiction of boundaries in fiction.” For fans of Sally Rooney, Brandon Taylor, Ocean Vuong, and Tayari Jones, Want is Weather offers aching tenderness, sharp dialogue, and a story that might just feel too close to home.
This is my first blog post — and if you’ve found your way here, I hope you’ll stay. I’ll be sharing more about my writing, the themes I can’t stop returning to, and the ways stories help us survive ourselves. If you pick up Want is Weather, know this: it isn’t just a novel. It’s a reminder that honesty hurts, but silence destroys.
👉 Want is Weather is available now. Get the Book—Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FNLF39M9 and step into a story of love, boundaries, and brutal honesty. A queer literary drama about desire, discipline, marriage, and mercy—no heroes, no easy villains.Join my epicinkbybailey@gmail.com
About The Book
A couple of years ago, friends of mine confided the messiest seasons of their marriages, I heard the same two heartbeats over and over: Tell the truth. Please don’t let the truth burn everything down. Want is Weather grew from those conversations—not as a transcript, but as a meditation on the courage it takes to be honest without cruelty, and faithful without pretending.
My book follows three people—Daniel, Ethan, Laura—who refuse easy roles. There is no savior, no cartoon villain, no tidy affair plot that blames one and absolves another. Instead, there’s a family trying to re-draw the map: guest room, therapy, daylight only. Those rules are not punishments; they’re the scaffolding that keeps the house from collapsing while everyone decides whether it can still be a home. I wanted to put that work on the page—the awkward silences, the exhausted laughter after therapy, the breakfasts made in a kitchen where no one is sure where to stand.
Why a river? Because the body keeps weather. Desire rises and recedes, grief lingers like fog, and sometimes the water comes for both doors at once. The river in this book is not just scenery; it’s a pressure system. It keeps asking the characters the same question: Are you going to sandbag your life, or are you going to reroute the floodplain? I’ve known people who did both—sometimes in the same week. I wanted to honor that ordinary heroism.
Why an architect? Because love is also architecture. We draft rules. We test the load-bearing beams. We try to make a space that can hold our flawed lives without collapsing as soon as feeling leans too hard on it. Laura’s boundaries are not the end of love; they’re love putting on a hard hat and saying, “If we’re staying, we’re rebuilding with better materials.”
And why write it at all? Because I believe in the radical tenderness of telling the truth. I believe couples therapy can be literature. I believe a marriage can change shape without losing its soul. I believe queer love deserves narratives that aren’t just first-kiss fireworks or clean-break tragedies, but the complicated middle—the paperwork of kindness, the daily choosing, the ordinary holiness of trying again.
A note about real people
Want is Weather is loosely inspired by the lives of people I care about, but it is not the story of any one couple. The characters are composites; timelines are altered; details are invented; identities are protected. What is faithful here is the feeling—the ache of being good people who did not expect to land in this story and are trying to be better than it.
If the book gives you anything, I hope it’s permission: to set kinder rules, to hold your own hand in hard rooms, to love without lying, and to see boundaries not as walls but as the beams that keep a life upright.