Vika Bani

Spread over arid and steep hillsides, the colorful city of Guanajuato is glistening under the hot February sun the day I arrive in this charming capital of the eponymous state in Mexico. This is the city where the first battle of The Mexican War of Independence took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It’s the city where the famous El Cervantino festival happens every fall and it’s the city where tourists come each year to see the El Museo de las Momias and the mummified bodies of long gone locals. It’s also the city where my friend Vika unexpectedly found a home during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she left the United States and the American corporate dream to become a self-published romance author. 

She lives in Guanajuato with her husband Ahmad in a two-story house that they had, for all intents and purposes, built from the ground up. It’s a beautifully designed home, featuring a small courtyard, a colorful patio with the view of the city, two floors of spacious rooms and cozy nooks, all bundled up into what could be best described as a Spanish-colonial-revival, mid-century oasis with the serenity of the modern summer houses on the Adriatic coast. It’s a remarkable feat of human creativity, not only because the house looks extraordinary but also because the interior design was conceived entirely by Vika.

“I knew nothing about design,” she tells me as we walk through the second floor of the house, where I am staying. “Initially, we hired an interior designer who was working with the architect, but it’s not a type of collaboration that is typically done around here. It was challenging to figure out that process, so I thought it might be easier if I work with the architect directly and learn about interior design.”

It was all a happenstance. Ahmad and Vika did not plan to live in Mexico when they decided to quit their jobs in the US. The plan was to travel and visit a few places before they found a city they liked, which they assumed would be somewhere in Europe. But then the COVID-19 pandemic enveloped the world and they happened to be in Guanajuato at the time. Unexpectedly, they fell in love with the city. 

I quickly learn why. Vika suggests that the three of us spend the afternoon in the city, and go to a place called Navo Churrería to grab churros and hot chocolate. As we walk through the narrow, winding streets of Guanajuato, I can’t help but stop every few seconds and revel in the energy of the city. Kids running around, street vendors yelling and selling, abuelitos and abuelitas sitting on benches in the plazas and people-watching. I am a stranger to this place, but this place feels like a close friend to me.    

“We were actually staying in an Airbnb in the city,” Vika says after we sit down at Navo Churrería and get our afternoon delicacies. “We just loved existing in that place. I think that’s where the inspiration for my vision of our house started.” 

Vika started learning about color theory. She was spending a lot of time on Pinterest. She was googling how to think about lighting when creating a space. She says that the amount of decision-making was paralyzing, but that she found the process exciting because she never realized how much problem-solving there was in interior design. Her vision came through, and most importantly, she created a dedicated space for her new career: a small but charming blend of a library and an office, from where she has been writing and publishing romance fiction under a pen name.

A self-published author and a self-taught interior designer sounds like someone who had spent years perfecting her craft in a creative field. Vika’s background is nothing of the sort. Her favorite game as a kid was pretending to be a teacher and creating gradebooks for her toys, which were subjected to Vika’s rigorous and organized grading system. She went to university planning to major in accounting and then ended up with a degree in mathematics. 

“I distinctly remember,” she tells me and Ahmad, “spending Friday nights in my room during university, doing math problems, and feeling so happy. Just me and the math problems.” 

She started her career in management consulting, and then transitioned to tech, where she worked in operations and internal process optimization. This is where my story with Vika began. I met her on a gloomy Monday, January 7, 2019, which happened to be my first day in a new job. The team I was joining went out to grab Thai food for lunch and I was seated next to Vika, a Canadian-Ukrainian coworker who spoke quickly and succinctly about Marie Kondoing her apartment over the weekend. 

That same afternoon, when we were back at the office, I got my first task: to clean up a Google Spreadsheet and set up a new import of data so that other people on the team could have visibility into their client portfolios. When I sent the spreadsheet to the team, I got a message from a faceless Slack profile, with Vika’s name next to it. The message consisted of a link to a specific cell in the spreadsheet and four words, “hey, this is wrong.”          

I didn’t know what to make of her initially. She wore a pin of Dobby, the elf from Harry Potter, on her denim jacket. She crunched numbers at the speed of light. In one meeting, she said her favorite celebrity was The Rock, and when asked why, her response was a deviously crisp, “What’s not to like about two hundred and fifty pounds of meat?” One day, she sent me a Slack message while she was at a dentist appointment, and to keep the Slack small talk going, I sent her an overly emphatic “ooooh! good luck at the dentist!!” message. To which she, several minutes later, replied: “why? it’s teeth cleaning.”

I found her intriguing; she was unlike any other coworker I had met. Always laser-focused on the task at hand, she made decisions quickly and she wasted no time on small talk. Most impressively, she consistently came up with valuable ideas and found ways to partner with people in the business to make those ideas happen. I had received feedback many times before at work to take more initiative, but I didn’t really understand what that looked like until I started working with Vika. 

When she came to me one day with a detailed proposal for a data project she wanted to work on together, my stomach churned. I had no idea how I was going to do what she needed from me, at the speed she wanted from me. One month later, however, we somehow did it, at the level of execution that was beyond anything I had known before. I never had so much fun working with someone on something that seemed so unachievable. From there, the two of us quickly became friends. 

What I learned over time was that I was drawn to Vika exactly because it’s hard to know what to make of her. Just when I thought I had figured her out, a new dimension of her personality presented itself. She took singing lessons. She loved going to karaoke. She knew Amy Winehouse’s “Tears Dry On Their Own” by heart. She adored tiki bars. She was creative and thoughtful just as much as she was analytical and executional. Being that way—being a bit of everything but never being entirely something—meant that Vika shared the plight of those who didn’t cleanly map to an archetype. She didn’t belong.  

“I think the feeling of not belonging started in Toronto,” she says. “I lived in Kyiv until I was ten, and when my family moved to Toronto, that’s when it all began. Over time, I started feeling more Canadian and less Ukrainian. At the same time, I didn’t feel truly Canadian either.”

The feeling continued throughout her life, which prompted her to seek the sense of belonging in other places. She thought she had found it when she moved to San Francisco and became part of social circles that attracted driven, goal-oriented people with plans to achieve great things. The setup worked until it didn’t, and it stopped working the moment Vika realized her sense of identity was never tied to sociopolitical or corporate values, which are the implicit foundations of San Francisco’s modern culture. 

“So, fair to say, you still experience it? The feeling of not belonging?” 

“I do,” she answers. “But I now see it as a strength. That I am okay with not belonging. I didn’t see it that way until we moved to Mexico.”

What happened then? Well, one could say that Vika became an author. But this change of vocation was merely a symptom of a more profound shift. The shift was that she found her sense of belonging in an identity that was subatomic enough to persist within her wherever she went and whoever she was. For Vika, that identity was storytelling.      

The idea to become a storyteller did not come out of left field. Vika was always an avid reader and always sought out escapism in fictional stories. As a kid, she found it in the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Sherlock Holmes series. In teenage years, which also happened to be her Linkin Park emo fangirl era, she was obsessed with fanfiction, spending nights on online forums and researching the infinite continuations of the Harry Potter series. Some of this fanfiction, according to her, is top-notch, and ranges from a remarkably dark post-Horcrux future to a remarkably steamy future in which Hermione and Draco end up together.

Love for storytelling was always there, but it took some time for Vika to start thinking that storytelling could be her career. The idea, to my surprise, started germinating in 2019, when the two of us were coworkers and when she discovered the juicy universe of contemporary romance fiction. She tells me this the next day, when the two of us grab BLT sandwiches and iced cappuccinos at La Victoriana, a gorgeous eatery with a charming veranda, close to her house.  

“I never told you this, but I actually used to sneak away into one of the phone booths at work to read.” 

“What?” I laugh. “What were you reading?”

“It started with this romance book called The Wall of Winnipeg and Me by Mariana Zapata. I could not put it down. It was all I thought about when I woke up. I would come to work and just think about the moment when I would have some free time to hide and read.”

The genre had intoxicated her and it all snowballed from there. In the span of only two years, Vika left the corporate world, published her first book, and began her thirties with a bang: as a romance author who would go on to sell many more books and officially turn her passion for storytelling into a living.

“Why romance though?” I ask. 

“It’s playful,” she answers and pauses. “And, I like that the subject matter is unpretentious. Romance knows what it is and it doesn’t try to be more than that.”

Just like she did during her years in the corporate world, Vika moved decisively and diligently through the freelance world inhabited by self-published authors. Market research, Facebook groups, writing conferences, social media strategy: Vika did all. She quickly deduced the patterns of success in this world, which allowed her to cut through the noise. And, there was a lot of noise. 

“The thing is,” she adds, “compared to the tech world, for example, where you are surrounded by people of really similar backgrounds and life stories, the world of self-published authors is much more diverse. But that also means you have to be better at discerning who you let into your life and who you work with.”   

Vika’s resourcefulness and self-reliance made her good at this, but it also helps that she has a life partner in Ahmad, whom she considers to be her most trusted advisor. They started dating shortly after meeting each other at work, when they were living in Toronto. Vika was a summer intern and Ahmad was a full-time management consultant. When Vika joined the company as a full-time consultant one year later, Ahmad was itching to leave Canada and was hoping to try out Silicon Valley. But Vika was not allowed to transfer to the San Francisco office yet. 

Logical and objective, as always, she did not see a long-distance relationship as a viable option so she presented Ahmad with the two most realistic paths forward. Either the relationship continues, which means they live in Toronto for another year, or they don’t live in the same place, and the relationship ends. Ahmad chose to stay in Toronto. One year later, the two moved to San Francisco together, and four years later, they got married.

After La Victoriana, Vika and I make our way over to Museo Iconográfico del Quijote, an extraordinary museum in the heart of Guanajuato dedicated solely to the evergreen story of Don Quixote. There, Vika tells me more about the significance of their relationship. 

“It’s interesting that you asked me earlier whether being a management consultant helped with the business intuition around self-publishing,” she says. “It definitely did, but I also think Ahmad was a big reason why I developed this intuition.”

“How come?”

“He’s really smart when it comes to business,” she answers. “He was the one who taught me that, no matter which business you’re in, you will be successful only if you create value to the business and the end consumer. That’s it.”

Her sentiment does not sink in for me until the next day, the only day during my stay in Guanajuato that Vika has to dedicate fully to work. In the morning, she doesn’t provide much detail on what she needs to work on, but I can tell that there is a problem she needs to solve, because she looks like the Vika I had met in the office a few years ago: quick, laser-focused, on a mission to find a solution.

Unlike her, I spend that day meandering aimlessly outside, soaking up the piercing sun, exploring shops, and drinking Coke. I return to the house in the afternoon and lie down on the patio sofa, where I spend the next few hours reading, until I hear Vika and Ahmad coming up the stairs.

When they come out to the patio, Vika is looking vividly victorious and is ready to celebrate. It turns out that she and Ahmad had stayed up late the night before, talking for hours about the protagonist of Vika’s new book, which led to an unexpected epiphany. In talking to Ahmad, it became clear to her that her fictional mafioso was too meek and too despondent. She wasn’t excited about the character she was developing. That’s why she had been feeling on edge, like she needed to solve something.

“There was not enough friction between him and the girl who was supposed to fall in love with him, later in the book,” she says while opening her can of beer. “There was nothing for her to grab onto. He was just this sad, quiet character.”

“Yeah,” Ahmad nods, “just a really boring character. It didn’t work.”

“So, Ahmad and I were problem-solving last night,” Vika continues, “and it helped me identify what went wrong with the characters. And then, Ahmad found me staring at the ceiling this morning. I was rethinking the entire storyline.”

By the time they came out to the patio, Vika figured it all out. She knew what the protagonist’s new character arc was and she had identified which parts of the book she needed to rewrite to make it all work. The changes will push the deadline for the full draft by a few weeks, but Vika is not worried about it. She now has a roadmap to tee up the book’s narrative.

“Do you believe in the infamous writer’s block?” I ask her later, when the three of us grab tacos in the city, after the impromptu patio celebration.

“Not in the sense that I believe it’s some sort of unsolvable mental state. I think a writer’s block is a side effect of running into a problem in your writing and not having the right tools to solve it.”

Vika’s primary tool is talking with other people about her ideas. Most often, she discusses her characters with Ahmad, but she also shares much of her thought process with other writers. I keep thinking to myself that this is a risky move; after all, she is exposing her unfinished stories to other authors.

“Do you ever think that someone might steal your ideas?”

“No,” she answers, unfazed. “I am not protective of my ideas. Because I know that, in the end, it all comes down to execution.”

For many authors who want to sell commercially successful genre fiction, having to think of the writing process as something that is operational and tactical can feel unappetizing. Vika, however, thinks it’s paramount to accept this notion. To write a commercially successful genre fiction book is to create a successful product, and that means the author is not just a writer but an executor as well.

Authors generally know how to get better at writing. But how does an author become better at executing? They have to learn how to keep things moving. Vika unsurprisingly excels at this.

“So, what’s your secret?” I ask her. “What’s your advice to those who want to do what you do?”

“I would say most of the generic writing advice is not helpful when it comes to this. From my experience, executing well boils down to two things. Number one, you have to get the story done, period. Start and finish the story, and accept that your first version of the story will probably be bad. Number two, have dedicated time to think about your story. Not to write, but to think about your story. This way, it becomes easier to see the act of writing as a tactical step, and you start to see the moments spent not writing as important aspects of the writing process.”

Perhaps, knowing all this, to describe Vika concisely is to say that she is a textbook definition of an individual with a high sense of self-efficacy. No matter the situation, she believes that she has both the agency and the ownership to figure things out. It’s what makes her so good at taking risks and charting paths for herself that most other people would be afraid to take. Because, ultimately, she sees the situation as a puzzle to solve. Not as a threat to avoid.

While we’re eating, it occurs to me that I had been consistently firing questions at Vika over the past few days, but I not once asked Ahmad—the person who knows her the best—what his first perception of Vika was.

“Ahmad, when did you first notice her?”

“Definitely in the first few days of her internship,” he answers. “A few of us from the office were going to go for drinks with the interns after work, so we all walked over to a nearby bar. And I just remember seeing Vika power walking through the streets. Determined. Going around the slow walkers. Wasting no time.”

Vika laughs, and I do too. I know exactly what Ahmad is talking about.

“And I just thought,” he says and smiles at Vika, “everyone should be walking the way she is.”