Carla de Guzman is a contemporary romance author based in Quezon City. She is the author of 13 titles, including Manila Takes Manhattan and The Last Guy You Kiss published by Harlequin’s Afterglow and Mills and Boon UK, Sweet on You and Match Made in Lipa with Carina Press (same publisher as Heated Rivalry) internationally, and Blooming Love with Vibal Publishing locally. Anvil Publishing is the former publisher of Midnights in Bali, now Some Bali to Love independently. Audiobook editions of If The Dress Fits, The Queen’s Game, and How She Likes It were published by Everand.
She continues to self publish her books, enjoys being a part of Romanceclass and was a delegate for the Frankfurt Buchmesse in 2024. Her book, Sweet on You, was recently released as a movie retitled to Recipe for Romance and aired on the CW and Crave Canada.
She also designs book covers, has appeared on talks and panels as a romance writer and reader, creates hand lettering titles, and has written articles for Esquire, Spot.ph, When in Manila, and Philstar Life. She also recently worked on the English translation for the online webcomic Duty Ka Ba? by Tepai Pascual, published by Avenida Press.
She is a Capricorn Sun and a Virgo moon, and runs Magdamag Market Cafe with her siblings. Her usual coffee order is an iced latte, and she’s currently using a Hobonichi A6 as ring planner to keep it all together.
1. You chose “friends to lovers” as the trope of this story. What are your feelings about the trope? Do you love writing it?
I enjoy friends to lovers (especially in a Filipino romance) because there’s a lot more to safely play with. You start with a couple that is already comfortable around each other, and that are already on the same page about a lot of things—that the other person is great, probably that they voted for not the wrong people in the last elections, that they have similar values and interests already—so the tension is in taking that leap of faith with someone you already trust, and you know they’re genuinely a nice person!
It’s not my favorite trope to read (enemies to lovers, hello!) but ironically the trope I gravitate to when writing, mostly because it lets me get to know the characters right away, where in other tropes there are a lot more layers to peel back.
2. Jaime and Roxanne have a dynamic that is reminiscent of rom-com pairings, and an homage (with a twist) to When Harry Met Sally. Are there rom-com pairings in movies or other media that you love and want to recommend?
Off the top of my head, I want to say Heated Rivalry is great and Off Campus did their particular pairings really well, but as uncarley the YouTube recapper once said, “I have nothing funny to say about Heated Rivalry. Am I going to riff on the Iliad? I don’t think so.”
Something slightly more recent that I still adore and love is Bridgerton Season Two’s Kate and Anthony. They mirrored the book characters well, but there was just a particular way that Johnny and Simone looked at each other that made me feel like I was intruding on something and I was dying inside (in a good way, of course). In books, I recently read Hannah Bonham Young’s Out on A Limb, which was a refreshingly level headed take on accidental pregnancy. Kiss Away the Goodbye by H. Bentham’s Martin and Judd I really liked because the romance developed so carefully. The fact that they were strangers with benefits meant they needed to communicate, which naturally led to the romance.
One of the longer things I’ve read this year and I will recommend because it’s so good is a fanfic. Rubicon by merionettes is an alternate universe figure skating romance fanfiction featuring characters from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It’s a Sylvain and Felix story (of course), so it’s a childhood friends to lovers fic that spans an entire figure skating season (and beyond). My toes were curled the whole time I read it.
3. Even though this was a short story, a reader can pick up previews of their relationship as it evolved over the years. But what about after? How do you see Jaime and Roxanne several years into the future?
Jaime and Roxanne I see really clearly. They live together (in sin!) and share most things but aren’t quite ready to make it official just yet. But they do adopt a dog, a rescue that loves it when he gets attention. They spend most of their days dining out, trying the newest restaurants and the latest holes-in-the-wall that Jaime always hears from other people. They have purchased wayyyy too many 3D printed mood lamps from local lifestyle brands. They see Fino at Art in the Park once, and it’s unclear who was more mortified—Fino because he already kinda knew Jaime liked Roxanne, or Roxanne because she’d forgotten about his holy staff until then.
4. What’s a trope that’s a challenge for you to write?
Strangers to lovers! It’s not the instinct of an eldest asian daughter (which most of my characters are) to trust a stranger, which I work around by creating a loose history between them. Olivia Angeles (from Manila Takes Manhattan) doesn’t have that stranger danger instinct, which is why she and Mon end up together on the night they met. But even that took me a long time to write and rewrite because Mon is the more guarded one, and a lot of readers noticed, I think. It’s hard to draw those lines sometimes of where stranger ends and connection begins. In movies, those are told in montages and slow builds, but I feel when writing it’s a skill to pull off, one that requires a more intimate knowledge of your characters. As someone who gets to know them as she writes, it’s a more difficult process.