NOVELIST CARLEY FORTUNE resides in a mid-century modern home in Toronto, but it’s in a little cottage three-and-a-half hours away where she does her best writing. The place, a rental she secures from a family friend every summer, is perched on concrete blocks at the bottom of a long, bumpy driveway at the end of an unpaved road. Inside, the knotty pine walls are rustic. On brisk nights, even in summer, you need a heavy sweater and a fire in the cast-iron woodstove. There’s no Wi-Fi, and the cell signal cuts out. At first glance, the place doesn’t scream “romance,” but to Carley, it’s what the cottage represents that’s deeply romantic. It’s here where she’s written two bestselling romance novels that have become something of a cultural phenomenon.
Sometimes, she writes on the sofa in the bedroom beside the dormer window. She might also tap out prose on her laptop, jot ideas in a spiral-bound notebook, or read other writers’ work to study their craft. She likes to stretch her legs out on the flower-patterned cushions. “I come to the cottage to relax,” she says. “But it’s also where I feel most inspired.”
Carley’s favourite time to gaze out of the dormer window at the green hills and the wide lake is at sunset, when the sun dips low enough to hit the far shore. She spent her adolescence 30 minutes away, in Barry’s Bay, Ont., a one-stoplight town whose tiny population swells in the summer. “Our house was on a
