It started, as most great creative endeavours do, with a story so disappointing we couldn’t stop talking about it.
We’d found a story in the male-maid subgenre — yes, that’s a real thing — and the premise had potential. A man in a maid uniform. Power dynamics. Tension. On paper, it should have worked. In practice, the execution was so fumbled that we spent more time giggling about it than reading it.
“Haha, how would one even write a good story with this premise?”
Trying to answer that question, we joked around, thinking how a normal man would ask another to wear a french-maid uniform and do chores… and why another would accept, especially given the constraint that it isn’t just a kink, but a lifestyle.
What began as a joke turned into a brainstorming session, which turned into a shared document, which turned into 65,000 words in nine days. We split the story down the middle — one protagonist each, alternating chapters — and something clicked. The dual POV wasn’t just a structural choice; it became the engine of the entire book.
The premise
A government agent goes undercover to infiltrate a trafficking operation and winds up as a domestic worker. In a maid uniform. Inside the household of the man he’s investigating. The man running a covert rescue operation out of a Welsh manor who separates women and children from their abusers — while making the men wear French maid outfits for six months as part of what can only be described as the world’s most unhinged rehabilitation programme.
We know how it sounds. That’s the point.
Underneath the absurdist premise is a story about trauma, consent, found family, and two deeply damaged men falling for each other while the ground crumbles beneath them. It’s dark romance with the comedy turned up and the safety rails removed.
How we write together
You can read more about this in this other blog post:
But in short, we start by splitting the POV. Savanna writes one protagonist, Nina writes the other. We brainstorm in unstructured, chaotic sessions that look more like improv comedy than outlining. We tend to have a rough shape, then improvise into it — often both writing at the same time in the same document, catching each other’s hints and weaving them into our own chapters.
It probably shouldn’t work. It works beautifully.
What came out of it
Blurred Borders — an M/M dark romance with romantic suspense elements, a slow-burn that earns every moment of its HEA, and a premise so ridiculous it wraps all the way back around to being devastatingly sincere.
We looked at a terrible book and said “we can do better.” Turns out we could. And now we can’t stop.