SwishyMermaid
Some people collect souvenirs. Twenty-six-year-old Pinkie collects first dates.
By day, she hides behind the counter of a multimedia shop, helping strangers find their next favorite book, record, or comic while quietly avoiding her own increasingly uncertain future. By night, she channels her sharp wit into a late-night radio show and anonymously writes a relationship blog, transforming awkward text threads, missed connections, and spectacular dating disasters into the internet's favorite stories about modern heartbreak.
The catch? Pinkie isn't trying to become a dating expert-she's desperately trying to find "the one." She's just using a spreadsheet of dates, case files, and a heavy dose of sarcasm to do it.
When a sweet regular customer accidentally leaves something behind, Pinkie sees it as another chance to get her story back on track. But while she's busy chasing what looks like the perfect beginning, real life keeps quietly pulling her in another direction. Between late-night broadcasts, increasingly chaotic blog comments, friends who refuse to let her overthink everything, and a quiet neighborhood barista who somehow remembers both her coffee order and her bad days before she mentions either, Pinkie's carefully curated life begins to drift delightfully off-script.
As her twenties continue to race ahead, her career feels increasingly uncertain, and her carefully curated approach to dating begins to unravel, Pinkie has to face a difficult question: has she become so obsessed with documenting life that she's forgotten how to actually live it?
Told through a vibrant mix of blog posts, radio transcripts, playlists, text messages, and "case files" on the men she's dated, Not Quite There is a heartfelt contemporary romantic comedy about growing into adulthood, navigating the exhausting reality of modern dating, and discovering that sometimes the best stories are the ones you never planned to write.