The Hardest Part of Writing a Love Story

(Day 23 of 30 – story crumbs from the world of Loveandpizza.it 🍕)

You’d think the hardest part of writing a love story would be the love.

The kissing, the yearning, the will-they-won’t-they. Getting two people across a room and into each other’s orbit without it reading like an instruction manual. And yes, that’s hard. Romance is technically tricky – one wrong line and the whole thing curdles into cheese. 🫠

But writing the romance in Loveandpizza.it wasn’t the hardest part. Not for me.

The part I’ve never really written about

Loveandpizza.it was meant to complete its journey as my MA dissertation, and I was finishing it in early 2013.

That February, a few weeks before it was due, my mother died. Suddenly, with no warning, an ocean away. She lived in Brazil, and she’d been getting ready to fly to Wales for the very first time, to see me graduate that July. She never made the trip.

I still don’t have the words for what that did to me, even now.

The dissertation was due in March. I couldn’t do it. I asked for more time, and they gave it to me, and I finished the thing in a fog I can’t fully describe – trying to write about a young woman falling in love in a sun-drenched city while the floor had gone out from under my own life. Writing something hopeful while flattened is a strange, hollowing task. I did it, but I did it as someone else. Someone moving through water.

So when people ask what the hardest part of writing this love story was, that’s the honest answer. It wasn’t the romance on the page. It was staying upright long enough to finish it.

And then, a grade

Here’s the smaller wound, though it tangled itself up with the big one for years.

When the dissertation was assessed, it got a Pass. Not a distinction. Not a “we’ll be watching your career.” A Pass – the polite, unremarkable, thank-you-and-goodnight of grades.

Given the frame of mind I was already in, that little word did more damage than it should have. I filed the book away and quietly accepted the verdict: nice try. Not special. Easier to believe that than to fight for anything that year. (I’m totally ok with it now. I mean, completing a master’s degree in a language that isn’t my own? Well done, me! 😌)

Here’s what I know now that I couldn’t see then. The grade was an academic assessment of the work in front of them, measured against the requirements of the degree. It was never meant to decide whether the story had value, whether I had talent, or whether the book deserved a life beyond the dissertation.

But at the time, grief had blurred all those things together. I took a perfectly ordinary academic result and turned it into a verdict on the story – and, if I’m honest, on myself. The examiners hadn’t done that. I had.

It took me years to understand that a Pass was not the end of Loveandpizza.it. It was simply the end of one version of its journey.

Why it’s coming back

Because the story and the characters wouldn’t leave me alone! 😅 That’s the thing about the stories that are truly yours: you can file them away and get on with being sensible, and they wait. They water themselves. They tap on the glass at odd hours.

Eventually, I stopped arguing. I took the manuscript out of the drawer, looked at it again, and decided to give it a life beyond the dissertation. In 2016, I finally published Loveandpizza.it for the first time.

But publishing a story doesn’t always mean you’ve finished with it.

Now, a decade later, I can see the book more clearly. I can see what was already good and true and mine – and I can also see the places where it deserves a little more care: the grammar mistakes and typos I didn’t catch the first time, the sentences I can now make stronger, and the story I’m finally ready to carry into two more languages.

So, in 2026, Loveandpizza.it is coming back. With a new cover, a carefully revised English edition, and brand-new Italian and Portuguese versions.

The Pass is still a Pass, but it simply doesn’t get a vote anymore. 😉

The dedication

There are two lines at the front of the book. They were there in 2016 and they will be there in every new edition, in every language.

~ For my mother ~
I love you forever.

She was getting ready to cross the world to watch me walk across a stage. She never got to. But the book she was so proud of, the one I nearly let a single word talk me out of, is about to travel further than that plane ticket ever would have. It’s going out into the world with her name at the front of it.

That’s the hardest part, and somehow also the reason for all of it.

Your turn: I’ve shared more than usual today, so no clever prompt. Just this: if you’re carrying someone with you into the things you make, tell me who. I’d be honoured to hear their name. 👇

Dani. x

New to the Loveandpizza.it world? Start here: https://danielapescuma.com/category/loveandpizza-it/

P.S. Loveandpizza.it is coming back in English, Italian and Portuguese. Save your slice and you’ll be first to know the moment your edition’s ready. 🍕