I’ll do a lot to romanticize my life. But sometimes I get lucky, and all I have to do is walk a few blocks to immerse myself in a beautiful, relatable love story, such as First-Time Caller, the latest from bestselling author B.K. Borison. In it, Aiden, a jaded romance radio show host, and Lucie, a hopeless romantic eager to fall in love, are unexpectedly thrown together by Lucie’s pre-teen daughter. Maya and the love-starved Baltimore public. At its core, First-Time Caller is a story about making your own magic and accepting that heart-stopping romance can be found in the everyday mundane (both earnestly and reluctantly). It’s a love letter to the author’s home city in which she expertly weaves the fictional with reality, blending the picturesque world expected in the genre with a literary universe you feel like you can be a part of just by walking out your front door. To celebrate the novel’s release, my friends and I took to the setting’s streets to visit some of the highlighted locations, happy to indulge ourselves in Aiden and Lucie’s world. By the end of the day, the only thing we felt like we were missing was a Heartstrings, Baltimore’s Romance Hotline sweatshirt. (Hint. Hint. Book merchandisers)

It’s three weeks until Christmas, which means the annual Love Actually craze that consumes fans of all ages is well and truly raging. Even though the film just celebrated its 20th anniversary, the two-hour and fifteen-minute anthology directed by Richard Curtis remains evergreen and is now almost synonymous with the holiday season itself. All around London, cinematic showings and special events dedicated to the film have begun to fill the diaries of locals and tourists alike. With the lights sparkling over Oxford Street and the various Christmas markets in full swing, I couldn’t ignore the impulse to pay a visit to some of the filming locations. After all, since love actually is all around, the movie may as well be, too.

'Is Daisy Jones & The Six a real band?' if you read Taylor Jenkins Reid's acclaimed novel without adding that sentence to your search history, I will buy you a burger at Apple Pan. The world Reid created was so visceral and authentic that it was hard to believe the story was mere fact-laced fiction. Intertwined between the stories and retellings of lives made whole and torn apart by the oft-worshiped demon of "sex, drugs and rock and roll" are true historical events and many still accessible places. If you are a music history buff local to Los Angeles, it is likely that you are at least familiar with these sites, even if you have not been, such as I was. So, with the release of the hit Amazon Prime series bringing the real-world locations of Daisy Jones front and center again, my friend Shelby and I traded our cotton and polyester for denim and suede and set off hell-bent on following in the footsteps of a red-haired spitfire who took over the world–even if it was in a different way than she expected.