About Ariel
Ariel is a native Texan who lives in Hawaii with her dreamy husband Justin and two kiddos.
She can't resist pairing a damaged heroine with a southern gentleman who manages to tear down her walls one brick at a time. The men in her books will open every door and carry every bag, just like Justin does.
She's eternally indebted to her writing, which rescued her from the darkest place she has ever been.
Her lifelong dream is to one day write all her books in a house by the sea, with a wine cellar that's never empty and her imaginary characters somehow becoming her real-life friends.
Previously published under the pen name Mj Hendrix.
From Mj to Ariel...the longer story
When I started writing romance and publishing through Amazon KDP in 2021, I was still married to a royal pain in the booty cheeks. My ex husband did not approve of me writing these silly love stories and sharing them with the world. This was before I had a social media presence.
Because of him (and various other pressures from my childhood and community at the time) I decided that I would publish anonymously under a pen name, Mj Hendrix.
Well, that plan flew out the window when I posted my first viral booktok video, which hit 5 million views and sold my first 450 books. People from my hometown started asking me if I was writing cringey books and what was I thinking, pretending I could actually be an author? (cue eye rolls and sneering)
Only one month after secretly publishing my first book, I quite literally ran for my life from that man after he told me in vivid detail how he planned to unalive me.
In chapter one of my first book, Falling for Temptation, the heroine Harley also runs for her life and manages to escape her fate of abuse and meets a green flag of a man named Adam. Little did I know, I was virtually manifesting my very own southern gentleman who I had no idea had only just turned twenty-one, the same age as Adam in that book.
From there, I spent many nights typing away on my laptop while juggling single motherhood, pursuing a ‘real’ career, and entering the dating world as a twenty-seven year old with two kids. I did all this while fighting a miserable divorce battle.
To make matters worse, the books were the one thing I felt like was mine, yet my ex-in laws decided to mock me and belittle me for my books to the point that I deleted them all, erasing any evidence of their existence off the face of the internet and completely giving up on the dream.
It just wasn’t worth it anymore. Emotionally, I couldn’t take the constant hate and bullying on top of everything else, healing from abuse and trauma, and trying to be a good mom.
Fast forward to after the divorce was finally settled, and I decided to create a new secret pen name, Liv Darling. I was on the brink of planning the release for the next book under the new name when I went to the bank to make the name change on the accounts.
I vividly remember the banker looking at the account that I had ignored for the past six months and asking me what it was for. I told him I was an author and I’d written a few books.
He then told me that I should write another one because the account had accumulated $10,000 that I didn’t even know was there. As a struggling, exhausted single mom it felt like winning the fucking lottery.
And I thought...fuck it.
Fuck them. Fuck hiding this. Fuck all these assholes for trying to ruin every single thing about my life and me pursuing a dream, something I KNOW I’m good at, something that will actually help me support my babies, who I love more than anything, alone in this economy.
So I brought it back. I revamped Mj Hendrix and started publishing again. I started typing up When Summer Ends right there in that banker's office.
At the same time that I gained my new ‘fuck it’ attitude, I was starting to share my divorce and single motherhood journey online and gaining a following of women going through the same thing I was, under my real name Ariel. It wasn’t connected. Mj constantly had to take a backseat when life became life, especially because I was working two other jobs and shouldering 85% of the parenting alone. Still, I managed to write six more books. SIX.
Not long after, I met Justin and things started to finally feel like they were looking up again… until I was unexpectedly granted temporary full custody of my kids, and for the next two years I went through a custody battle that cost me over three times what I paid for the divorce.
I felt like I had just crawled out of the pit of hell and been thrown right back into it.
Once it finally came to an end a grueling two years later, my husband, Justin, got a job that took us all the way to Hawaii. I felt like I could finally break free once and for all from these people who did everything they possibly could to ruin my life and trample on my dreams and hard work.
And for this reason, I’ve decided that I’m going to change the author name on all my existing books to Ariel Hendrix. I’m proud of my work and I’m proud of how far I’ve come on this journey, despite all the obstacles and everyone who tried to destroy and hinder my progress.
I have exciting things in the works for this year with my publishing journey, and I’m hitting milestones and crushing goals I never even dared to imagine I would get this close to.
All the books previously published under the name Mj Hendrix have the same internal content. Only the name on the cover has been changed to Ariel Hendrix.