Fay & Karelia Stetz-Waters
Ambassadors of real-life happily-ever-after, Fay and Karelia Stetz-Waters have been together for twenty-three years. They live in Albany, Oregon with their pug-mix Willa Cather and a garden full of dragonflies and hummingbirds. Their writing process involves many afternoons spent at local coffee shops and brewpubs outlining scenes, going over drafts, and high fiving each other. The process works beautifully.
Q: How did the idea for TASTE THE LOVE come about? Especially as a companion novel to ONE NIGHT STAND?
A: Fay loves to cook, so we thought it'd be fun to write a foodie romance. Since writing a book involves a lot of research, we chose topics we're interested in. We decided to write TASTE THE LOVE shortly before finishing SECOND NIGHT STAND. At that point, Kia was a marketing consultant. When we realized we wanted her to be the main character in our next book, we quickly went back and edited SECOND NIGHT STAND so that she owned a food truck.
Thanks to the find feature in Word and Google Docs, it was easy to search for all mentions of her work as a marketing consultant and change it. I teach creative writing. Sometimes new writers are daunted by making those kinds of global changes, but they are actually much easier to make than many writers think.
These Sapphic Stories Book Club author profiles are compiled by Founder Aliya Bree Hall. Aliya is a freelance journalist and author who founded the book club in 2021 to uplift sapphic stories and celebrate LGBTQ+ authors. This excerpt has been lifted from an interview Aliya conducted with our May 2026 authors. You can read the full Q&A by joining the book club.
