Author invented romance hero while she was sleeping

Lockdown events created a soup in Nuhaa Bardien’s brain, which boiled together into a character called Titan while she slept. 

Bardien, 32, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son, spent some of the pandemic learning how to sew and reading romance novels. This, combined with the background of her husband’s working-from-home conversations, mushed together in her head and created the character Titan.

“I had a dream about Titan and that's how all the stories came about,” she said.

The stories she is referring to are her two romance novels, Better Once Than Never, which was released in December last year, and Till This Night, which was published in April last year. The spicy Shakespeare-inspired novels feature the characters Ted, Savi, Kalina and Titan but it was Titan’s character that got the series going.

“During lockdown, when I started rereading romance books, which I hadn't read in years, I had a dream about Titan. This story is maybe my 10th version,” Bardien says of the one that made it to print. “I rewrote and edited until it got to where it was now. Till This Night is their best friends' stories, and because it happens before their story, I went backwards and had to start writing that story first.”

During the many rewrites, Titan’s character morphed from the original dream concept into the reformed rake trope he is in the book, but Bardien liked the name and was determined to keep it.

“So everything about that first story and him has basically changed. It's only the name that stuck,” she said. “I only found out, I think maybe this month, where the name came from,” Bardien said during an interview with Tabletalk last week.

“My husband works in film and production and one of the European brands of grips for cameras is called Titan and I think it's because of his phone calls around the house, with him saying it all the time, and my subconscious just grabbed onto that. I saw a post for the grip on my husband's Instagram and I was like ‘wait a minute?’ The name and all the conversations in the background that I'd heard, it sort of just clicked,” Bardien said, laughing that Titan’s character is a photographer and that a photo made things “click” for her.

Bardien has more books planned for the series but her third novel was pushed back after readers became outraged at her treatment of a “beloved” character from the second book. 

So, to placate her fans, Bardien started writing a series-adjacent novella.

“The Christmas novella is about a beloved character from the second book,” Bardien said. “People were like, ‘how dare you make him sad?’” 

The third book will give Titan’s sister Scarlett a happily ever after and will also have a Shakespearean quote for its title, Bardien said, adding that she has stories for many of the periphery characters, even some of the very minor ones. 

All of the books have been self-edited and published by Bardien.

“I wanted all the control,” Bardien said, chuckling. “I don't want someone to tell me when I need to write or when I need to get edits back to them, and I don't want someone to tell me, ‘no, you can't have that new cover’ or ‘no, you can't have that in your book.’ I thought, ‘no, I'll do it myself’.”

She also markets the books herself and has put them up for sale online, where they have already started to find a tribe, which includes readers abroad.

“I've connected with really lovely readers. Some people have told me that no matter what I write, they'll be there to read it and that's everything. That's all I wanted.”