I will tell you all straight off the bat: I never expected this to happen.
Once Upon a One Night Mistake (previously titled Once Upon a One Night Stand) was just a silly little story I started writing for fun—and escape—at 14 in 2007 on a website called FictionPress. It was my first foray into writing original fiction on the internet, an exercise in creativity for a teenager who really never thought she’d go anywhere with writing.
But more than 60 million reads later, that silly little story has changed the trajectory of my entire life. It would be funny to go back in time and tell 14 year old Simone, “Hey, you know that story you’re writing right now just for kicks? Yeah, it’s going to be the start of your entire writing career. Surprise!”
When I sold The Fairytale Series (Once Upon a One Night Mistake, Arabian Nights, Dryland, and Roses & Thorns) to Radish Fiction in 2019, I never thought this would be a step along that journey. I always thought this series would only exist in its little, sheltered corners of the internet, but Radish decided its reach was going to go further than that. It’s both exciting and terrifying, simply for the fact that I never intended this story to have any sort of reach, and now it’s going to be available for a much wider audience. Cool? Very. But also a little scary!
Again, this is a book I wrote as a young teenager. It has been lightly edited a few times since then, yes, but its plot, its characters, and its essence have never changed. It is a marker for who I was as a writer at that age. And I will say, it no longer represents me as a writer and storyteller today, but it’s where I started. I think that’s important to acknowledge.
As many of you know, OUAONM has been continued on Radish and is currently in its 13th season there. This published book is Season 1, aka the original Once Upon a One Night Mistake that I wrote years ago. Currently, only the ebook is available, but hopefully we’ll have physical copies in the future!
Here are all the links where you can buy a copy:
Or you can use this link to see all the places it’s available! And of course, OUAONM will always be available on Radish.
If you’d like to leave a review on any of those sites, please feel free! The book is also listed on Goodreads if you’d like to add it there as well.
Thanks for joining me on this journey, and you’ll be seeing Arabian Nights, Dryland, and Roses & Thorns published too in the near future.
Here’s to more books!
simone shirazi 