I’m a native Midwesterner, born in St. Louis and mostly raised there (we lived in Milwaukee for a few years when I was in grade school). A lot of my adult life was also lived in Missouri and the “Metro East�� area of Illinois. I got all my degrees in colleges in the St. Louis area. I married a man from the St. Louis area. Our two oldest sons graduated from a St. Louis high school, and they both have mainly stayed put, now married and establishing their own businesses in that area.

I located my first (and most popular) books, the Signal Bend series, in mid-Missouri, creating a fictional town strongly based on St. James, MO, the town nearest the small non-working “farm�� my beloved grandparents retired to, where I spent big chunks of my childhood and created a bushel of happy core memories.

My roots in the Midwest, specifically Missouri, are deep.

But I renounced Missouri years ago.

There are many things I love about the state of my birth, but, barring causes I can’t imagine at this time, I will never, ever live in Missouri again. Because our older sons and their spouses are well established there, and I am tired of living 2000 miles from them, our Plan A for our coming retirement years is to return to the area, but we are exclusively looking in Illinois. (Recently we’ve had to develop a few retirement plans, so we can respond to the changes around us, but our top plan remains getting the fam back together.)

Even so, even then, I will always consider myself a California girl.

My attraction to and fascination with California began long before I ever stepped foot on its soil. In TV shows and movies, books and magazines, it always seemed so magically beautiful and �� I ��Dz�’t know, just, like, perfect. My parents cast aspersions and made the usual snide (and I now realize wildly �� let’s say “inappropriate�� and move on) comments about it, but all I saw was beauty and fun and freedom. Probably a lot of my fascination, at first, stemmed from the simple fact that I am a person who from the moment I understood the concept, loved the ocean, and the Pacific is glorious. But I was landlocked and nearly 20 years old before I ever focused my actual eyes on the actual sea.

Thankfully, my uncle and aunt got stationed in the LA area, and California entered the family vacation options menu.

When I finally got there (that first trip was the typical SoCal family vacation—LA, San Diego, and all the theme parks between, with a day trip into Mexico) my first impression was that my fantasy couldn’t touch the reality. When I saw how much more than ocean and palm trees and sun California was, when I realized it was a gorgeous mélange of culture, and food, and architecture, and people, and �� I was gobsmacked. California is bigger, bolder, more vibrant, more beautiful, more dynamic than my imagination ever conjured.

That feeling has never really left me. Since that first trip, I’ve lived in both SoCal (San Bernardino) and NorCal (the Sacramento area, and a few months in the East Bay) for a total now of more than twenty years of my adult life. I understand now, of course, that California is far from perfect. I have had plenty of WTF moments living here. But I also understand how very close to perfect it is in ways that are important to me. In its natural beauty and its human vivacity, California is the first place I’ve lived that feels like I belong.

In my mind, to my eyes, California is the best state in the US and the most beautiful place I’ve ever been—and I’m including my international travel in that assessment. When we leave, if we leave, we will mourn, even as we rush toward the chance to have our family as reunited as it can be.

In the meantime, we are sucking the marrow out of this magnificent state, traveling throughout it, partaking of everything it has to offer—the big centerpieces, like Yosemite, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and smaller delights, like Mono Lake, the Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, the Valhalla Renaissance Faire.

Jim and I just got home from a lovely getaway to . Nature is my church. Ocean, forest, river, canyon, lake, rolling meadow, waterfall—that’s where I feel true peace and the presence of something great and mysterious around me. And one thing above all others inspires reverence in me: the Giant Sequoia. I am utterly awed and humbled by those extraordinary titans, towering up from the Sierras like ancient gods. To stand at their massive feet literally brings me to tears. To me, they are ancient gods.

The very largest trees on the planet, among the very oldest, and they exist only here.

I guess in that way I’m like a Giant Sequoia: I thrive only in California soil.

For various reasons, that’s what’s on my mind today. I hope you’re safe and exactly where you want to be this weekend. I’ll have some more author-oriented content for you in a couple weeks.

Love,
����

It’s summertime! Yay!

If we’re speaking simply about what seasons mean and bring, autumn is unambiguously my favorite season. Though we live in California and ��Dz�’t actually get much in the way of changing seasons (we basically go from eight months of boiling heat from a sun hanging in an unremittingly blue sky to a few months of gloom and rain and light chill, and back to heat and sun), I love the relief from the heat. I love sweaters and wool skirts and tights and boots. I love jackets and scarves and cute hats. I love the holidays. I’m also a Scorpio, as is my husband, so our birthdays fall right in the thick of it all. As does our oldest son’s, who made me a mother. Autumn is awesome.

However, a career as a professor has brought the delights of summer home to me in a particular way. Though I have two jobs and I’m never not working (teaching and writing most of the year, prepping and writing in the summers), summer means freedom in a way not unlike it meant when I was a kid: my time is my own. For me, this is a peace above most others. Just knowing that I have the room to have a bad day, or a sick day, or just a plain old, contented “me day,�� without letting anything slip through a crack, without letting anyone down—that’s a full ton of stress off my shoulders for three whole months. I love it.

Stress is why I’m preparing to put in for retirement at my university; the coming school year will be my last full year teaching. I’m planning to teach a semester a year as emerita faculty for a while as a transition for my department and myself (we are both entities that need gentle transitions), but as of next summer, I will officially be retired.��

It has become all but impossible to teach at all, much less well, under the pressures and conditions in American higher education these days. From devastating budget cuts to the proliferation of AI plagiarism bots, from ICE campus raids to the suppression of faculty speech, too much of our mindshare is being devoured by external concerns. On top of that, our expertise, not to mention our very integrity, is under attack. It’s impossible to leave it all outside the classroom door. It’s taken a seat in the front row.

I’m not going to drag this post down the dark and brambly path of The State of US Higher Education in 2025; I’m saying only that the stress of my day job is why I love summer despite my deep disdain for the heat, and this year the stress has been so intense that not only do I love this summer times about a billion, but I’m also looking to extend my summer to eight months and eventually the whole year. I need my time to be my own.��

That’s basically why I’m an indie author—no demands on me but those I place on myself. And thank the gods for it! If I’d gone through the massive writer’s block I’ve been fighting for the past few years while on a contract with a publisher? Hooboy. Let’s just say I probably wouldn’t be writing this post today.

But today I can report the appearance of some hope. Since the semester ended, I’ve been writing at a pace not too far off the early days: a chapter a day, just about every day. And even better than that, the story I’m writing is living in my head all day long, trying to get written. That used to be the way it always was: when I wasn’t actively writing, I was passively writing, the characters refusing to be quiet. It made me a distracted companion who’d really rather be writing than almost anything else, but it also made me extremely prolific, and at a pretty high level.

Then it just dried up.��

I used to say that I didn’t get—like, understand—writer’s block. “Just sit down and type,�� I’d insist. “Put words on the page. Who cares if they’re good, you can fix that later. Just get the story down any way you can.��

Oh, what a sweet summer child I was. Turns out, when block sets in deep, words literally do not come out of your fingers. No words, not even awkward, stupid words. You just sit there, for hours at a time, staring at the empty page and hating yourself.��

It really, really sucks.

For a long time now, writing has been more pain than pleasure, and eventually it got to the point that my seriously waning mental health demanded that I just stop. I didn’t even bother opening the file of my primary WIP for months. I created the file for the story and began to write last September. In the early years, a 100K-word manuscript would have been done before Halloween. This time, I wrote in fits and starts until the story petered out in mid-October. I did not put another word down in that file until a few weeks ago, when I woke up with the next scene in my head. Since then I’ve written at a chapter-a-day pace again.

I’d tried plenty of fixes to get through the block. I started multiple different projects, “fresh ideas,�� that all died out in a few thousand words. I picked up my few unfinished projects from earlier days and tried to restart those, to similarly bleak results. I’d nearly come to terms with the idea that my writing career was over.

And then it was just �� back.

I can’t tell you what happened, or how, or why, but I’m feeling it again. I am wary, I am absolutely terrified of letting it slip through my fingers, so I’m coming at it sidelong, creeping along the edges so I ��Dz�’t spook it. But still, it feels fucking amazing just to have the story bouncing around in my head like a puppy who heard the treat jar open.

I am NOT ready to announce a new release yet. I still have thousands of words to write in this story. But I have enough real hope that it will be finished, and will be good, that I’ve “penciled�� a target release date in my personal calendar. AND I’ve got notes for a new project to take up when (IF! I need to remember that IF is okay!) this one is done.��

I guess my own little crisis here is one big way all (gestures wildly around) this is affecting me—and that’s extra ironic, since writing used to be the thing that let me escape from the stresses of life and the world.��

Thanks a lot, there, Cosmos. Real dry sense of humor you got there.

It’s not a suffering sweepstakes, we all have our battles and for us they are bloody, but I also try to keep some perspective. A whole lot of folks have things way harder than I do. Writer’s block is existentially excruciating, but even among other authors, this is a fairly minor battle, because writing is not what pays my bills. My needs and reasonable wants are comfortably met, and I have options should that ever be at risk. Many ��Dz�’t have that degree of privilege.��

Most everybody’s life is extra stressful these days. Chaos seems to reign in every direction, and it feels like it’s moved in to stay. I hope you and yours are as comfortable and secure as possible, and surrounded by a community that will take part of your load when you can’t. I hope you find joy where you can, and have chances to send it into the world for others to find.

And I’ll let you know when (if!) I get this story finished.��

Love to you,
����

Hey there!

As advertised in my 1 May post, now that this is the only place where I am an Author Online, I’m planning to post twice a month. My semester ended literally yesterday, and grades are due early next week, so I’m seriously swamped with day-job work. So today instead of coming up with thinky thoughts for you, I’m going to share some recommendations your reading/viewing/listening pleasure

Books:

Biggest Impact: , by Celeste Ng

This book has been out for several years, but it’s fairly new to me. I taught this book this semester in my senior seminar. I did a theme of “Complicated Women,�� and this book fits that bill really well. More than that, it’s beautifully written and heartbreaking poignant. This is literary fiction and definitely not a romance. It’s a story about family love and pain.

BTW: Ng wrote the novel Little Fires Everywhere, on which the TV series was based.

Just Finished: by Chuck Wendig

I listened to this one on my commute to campus. Also very much not a romance, this is a horror novel. I guess I can’t call Wendig the 21st-century Stephen King, because King is still very much writing and publishing, but I can say if you love King you’ll very likely also love Wendig.

I ��Dz�’t know how to describe this story beyond saying that a group of friends finds a staircase in the woods that seems to lead nowhere but in fact leads somewhere, much to their chagrin.

Staircase has shivers and shudders galore, and plenty of ewwwwws as well, but, like King’s best work, the real story is in the friendship. If you love King and have not yet read Wendig, this is a good one to start with.

Reading Now: , by Emily Henry.

I ADORE Henry’s work. She’s a one-click for me for sure. Her story worlds are rich and lively, full of interesting, realistically quirky characters, lighthearted humor, and sneakily powerful emotion. The chemistry between her leads is intense.

All but one of her romances are 5+ stars for me. People We Meet on Vacation is my all-time number-one friends-to-lovers romance, and Book Lovers is WAY up on my all-time faves list (several students who know my romance tendencies suggested I should have put BL on my Complicated Women syllabus, and they are SO RIGHT. MISSED CHANCE UGH).

I tried to make myself hold off on this one until grades were in and my semester was truly over, but I was weak and started it this week. It’s still early going, but already I love sunshiney Alice and grumpy Hayden. As soon as grades are in, I am face-planting into this story.

Music:

New find:

Shortly before I deleted my Insta, the algorithm offered up a post from this artist I’d never heard of, and I really liked the song in that post, so I looked her up. Everywhere I’ve found her, ILUKA is fully capitalized, and I ��Dz�’t know yet if that’s her name, or the band name, or an acronym for something, but anyway. “Angry Women�� is one of my favorite “genres�� of music, and I’ve liked everything I’ve heard of this particular angry woman.

If you’re a fan of the viral song by Paris Paloma, you’ll probably like ILUKA as well.

Movies:

OMG HAVE YOU SEEN SINNERS? This movie is �� everything! It’s terrifying. It’s funny. It’s powerful and poignant. It’s absolutely beautiful, breathtakingly shot and performed. And it is absolutely packed to the rafters with layers and layers of meaning and metaphor. It feels like a revolutionary moment in cinema. See it. More than once. Revel in it.

Television:

I’m grouping these two series together because, though they are quite different on the surface, you only have to peel back a single layer to see how similar they are in the kinds of Big Questions they tackle—like “How far is too far?�� Watching them concurrently these past few weeks has me thinking a lot about why I write the kinds of stories I write. My musings on that point might turn into a blog post, actually.

Both series are masterful works of art. Andor, IMO, is just about perfect. I have some minor quibbles with S2 of TLOU, but even so, it is close to perfect as well.

Podcasts:

I often listen to a podcast as I “power down�� at the end of a day. I ��Dz�’t do the kind of pods where randos spew their uninformed opinions about politics and culture (blerg), but I kinda love them for short fiction and narrative history. Titanic: Ship of Dreams is a new-ish pod that does weekly deep dives (ugh, I’m sorry for that terrible pun—but not sorry enough to delete it!) into the history of the sinking, from the building of the ship to (I expect) the aftermath of its loss. It’s really well-produced, with lots of perspectives, ranging from academics to descendants of the passengers and crew at every level. Really fascinating.

I was never particularly captivated by the story of the Titanic (and didn’t like the movie) until I wrote about it in Nothing on Earth and Nothing in Heaven, but doing research for that book ignited a spark for me.

So those are the stories I’m turning to when I need to turn away from the world. Have you read/seen/heard any of these as well? Or what are your fave��–do you have recommendations, too?

Have a great weekend and rest of May, and I’ll see you in a couple weeks!

xoxo
����

I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with many aspects of my online life, and in the past six months or so, that disillusionment has hit a critical point. I am very much over the megalomaniacal oligarchs running most social media platforms, not to mention the biggest point of sale for authors (indie or otherwise), and all the dirty tricks they’ve pulled to overflow their pockets and empty ours while they tear the world apart. On top of that, AI is infiltrating creative spaces and ��

Anyway. You live in this world, too. You know what I’m talking about. Rather than swan dive down a rabbit hole of ranting, I’ll simply say that social media is a place I ��Dz�’t really want to be anymore. And writing through the world’s existential crisis and my own is quite the challenge.

I’ve been struggling with all this for months (longer, really), but through that constant agonizing, I’ve come to some decisions that will (hopefully) brighten my path enough that I can find the things that bring me joy again.

Writing is one of those joyful things, and I want it back, dammit.

I haven’t stopped writing, but WOW has it been going slowly the past while. I’ve been trying to keep it going, putting words down anytime I can drag a few out of my distracted, despairing head, but it’s been existentially frustrating, to put it mildly.

What it comes to, I think: social media is killing my mental health. Besides the daily firehose of doom and panic, I have learned too, too much about the billionaires and their minions who run the platforms, and my personal ethics take a hard hit every time I log onto any Meta site. (I deleted Twitter on , so Meta is the locus of my billionaire blight.) Like most everybody, social media is how I connect with virtually all my friends and family, where I get most of my news, where I find the cute and heartwarming content that serves as an antidote to my otherwise relentless angst. So it took me a LONG time to realize that the bad of social media far outweighed the good.

Today I fully deleted every Meta account I had: Facebook (my OG social media account, started in 2008, AND my primary author page, started in 2015), Instagram, Threads, even Messenger. The only social media I now have is this blog and . (If you’re interested in the non-author me, that’s where you’ll find her.)

Simply having made that decision unlocked something for me, and I’ve been able to write with much more flow, and much more joy, in the past few weeks. I’ve finished a short story (the first thing I’ve finished in more than a year), and I’m about halfway into the first draft of Book Three of the Signal Bend Heritage serie��—and starting to feel some confidence that I can finish it. (Hoping to do so over the summer and publish it in the early fall.) The path ahead has brightened enough that I’m even feeling fresh inspiration, starting to make plans and jot notes for wholly new story ideas again.

Backing away from most social media is the right choice for me, for both ethical and personal reasons. But I ��Dz�’t want to lose touch with my readers. So I’m restructuring and streamlining how I do that.

This is where all my book and writing-related content will be, starting now. The best way to keep up with book news, preorder and release dates, etc. is to subscribe to this blog (subscribing is free). If all you’re interested in is info about my preorders and new releases, you can also follow my author page on whatever platform you use for ebooks, and you’ll get an email whenever I publish a new book.

To mark this big change to my social media presence, I’ve done a little refresh of the blog look and layout. I’m planning to post here regularly: twice a month, with content ranging from personal musings, thoughts about the craft of writing and the business of publishing, and original fiction content like deleted scenes, character sketches, short stories, and more. I expect a lot of this fiction content will be situated in one of the story worlds I’ve already created—The Horde and the Bulls, the Paganos, the Vikings, the folks living at the base of the Sawtooth Range, and so on—but I hope there will be stories set in brand-new story worlds as well as well.

In fact, I’ve posted some original fiction today—exclusive for blog subscribers. It’s “interview notes�� from Gia Lunden. If you’ve read Virago, Book One of the Signal Bend Heritage series, you know Gia is working on her doctorate in cultural anthropology, and she’s chosen to study outlaw motorcycle clubs for her dissertation. In this new story, she’s visiting the Bulls in Tulsa and sitting down to talk with Eight Ball.

You can find it under the link.

And please note: in order be able to restrict some content to subscribers, I had to add a plug-in that’s intended for monetization. I have no plans to monetize anything in this blog, at least not now or for the foreseeable. The plug-in added the “register�� link at the top of my page—you can ignore that and simply subscribe to get subscriber access.

To all my readers reading this: thank you for sticking with me. I appreciate you so very much, and I’m glad you’ve stuck around.

xo

����

PS: If you’re interested in an insider’s look at Facebook/Meta, I highly recommend , by Sarah Wynn Williams. It’s a page-turner—but I warn you: the look into the inner workings of that company ain’t pretty.

Just a quick post to let you know that my completed Kindle Vella story, The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn, is now available as a regular book on all the usual platform��–and as a paperback as well. It’s still up on Vella, too, if that’s where you’ve read it.

The description:

Leo Braddock is a recent widow and single mom returning to her hometown twenty years after she ran away. She plans to refurbish and reopen her family’s motel, which has sat derelict since her mother’s death. But a real-estate developer is trying to claim the property, and he means to oust Leo any way he can. While she’s trying to build a new life for herself and her son from the detritus of her past, Leo must find a way to save the home she’d fled.

She won’t be able to do it alone.

Buy links:
Amazon:

Amazon UK:

Amazon Canada:

Amazon Australia:

Other platforms: ��

Today I’m announcing my next release��Snake. It’s the second book in the Signal Bend Heritage Series. This book features Cox, a member of the Horde who might not yet have made your radar (but oh, he will) and Autumn, who was very briefly introduced at the end of , Book One.

Snake is available for preorder right now, on and . It goes live on Saturday, 6 July (3 weeks from today).

You might remember that I plan to feature complicated women in this series (women get to be complicated, too!), and title their books with words commonly used as insults for women, specifically insults aimed at the female leads. I intend either to reclaim the word as a positive (as in Virago) or correct the insult as applied to the character (which is the case with Snake).

Snake is an adversaries to lovers kind of story.

Here’s the description:

Autumn Rooney has a great idea.

Newly promoted to VP of Commercial Development at MidWest Growth & Progress, she’s convinced her twentieth-century relic of a boss to fund her new “Heartland Homesteads�� project, bringing vibrant new businesses to small rural communities. So many such towns are dying, and she sees a way to bring them new life without compromising the local culture.

She’s identified Signal Bend, MO as the perfect site for her pilot development. It’s a quaint town that already draws regional tourists and just needs a bit more commercial infrastructure to support its full potential. And there’s a perfect lot for it—a building that has sat vacant for more than a decade. Her project will bring that dead space back to life.

But first she has to deal with the infuriating Night Horde MC.

Like all his Horde brothers, Daniel Cox hates the redheaded, big-city snake so hellbent on forcing a strip mall onto a town that doesn’t want one. Then again, he hates pretty much everybody and everything. He shut all his other emotions down twenty years ago.

When Autumn shows up in town and Cox is assigned to keep tabs on her, all he wants is to get the night over as quickly as he can, with as little pain in his ass as possible. And all Autumn wants is to shake the scowling biker off her heels.

By the end of that night, however, their feelings are a lot more complicated. And ‘hate�� is certainly no longer part of the mix.

She’s a fashionista, corporate go-getter from a big city hundreds of miles away. He’s a taciturn, misanthropic biker who’s never lived anywhere but Signal Bend. Their powerful attraction might not be enough to close the distance between them.

It’ll take something monumental.

And a preview scene (from Chapter 3):

Cox had expected people to take note when he walked into Marie’s with the woman who was trying to ruin Signal Bend, but he was surprised when the diner had one of those straight-from-Hollywood moments and the whole place went quiet as everybody stopped and stared. It was almost six o’clock, so Marie’s was near capacity. That was a lot of people suddenly forgetting their manners.

So subtly it was unlikely anyone but him noticed, Autumn faltered a little when the silence crashed down. Cox put a hand on her back to keep her moving in the direction of the only open booth. As they headed toward it, he sent a look around, making eye contact with as many people as possible until they all remembered they had their own business to mind.

Autumn slipped into the booth. Cox slid onto the other bench and grabbed two menus from behind the condiment caddy. “You ever eat here?�� he asked as he handed her one.

The look she hit him with screamed, Are you stupid? “T�󾱲� is my fifth visit to Signal Bend. Of course I’ve eaten here. There aren’t many options to choose from.��

He’d asked a question; she’d answered it. There wasn’t anything else to say unless he wanted to throw snark back at her, and he did not. So he focused on his menu and left her to her own.

After a minute or so of silence while they stared at the laminated pages, Cox sensed someone come up on them. It was Kalina, a waitress here, and also a club girl whom he tended to favor, primarily because she didn’t try to make conversation with him. She was happy to quietly sit on his lap in a corner of the Hall while he drank, and then sit on his lap in his dorm room while he fucked her, and then go on about her life without expecting even a ‘see ya later�� from him.

“Hey, Cox,�� she said as she put her pen on her order pad. “You know what you want?��

Cox nodded at Autumn, whom Kalina had thus far ignored. “You ready?��

“Sure,�� Autumn answered. ���’ll have the fried chicken sandwich with frie��—can I get some cheese on that?��

“We got American or Swiss,�� Kalina answered with a hostile sigh.

“Swiss, please,�� Autumn said, either unaware of the chill in Kalina’s tone or ignoring it. “And a Coke.��

“Diet Coke?��

“No, regular. Thank you.��

“Uh huh.�� Kalina turned to Cox, and her tone shifted to friendliness. “What’re you having tonight?��

Cox found that he’d been so absorbed by Autumn’s order he needed a second to remember what his was. ���’ll do the grilled ham and cheese with fries.��

“You got it. Sweet tea, right?��

��辱�����.��

“Should be ‘bout ten minutes for your food. Drinks comin�� right up.�� Kalina gave him a quick smile and walked off.

A soft, almost secret chuckle slipped from Autumn’s lips, and she swiped her phone open. ���’m always surprised how great the reception is out here.��

Cox leaned back and studied her. ��� guess you know why, studyin�� up on us like you did.��

She looked up and set her phone aside. ��� do. The Horde paid to put in a tower.��

He nodded.

After another stretch of quiet, she said, ���s it that you ��Dz�’t like to talk, or you ��Dz�’t like to talk to me?��

��� say what I need to say. Not everything’s about you.��

Kalina arrived with their drinks. When she was gone again, Autumn said, “You are every bit the jerk you look like.��

Now Cox did grin, briefly. “Yeah, I am. But ain’t you s’posed to be makin�� nice with us hicks out here?�� He let his voice settle into his father’s Ozark drawl. “Ain’t that the way with you big city business folks? Stealin�� food out our mouths while you grin at us all pretty?��

For about two seconds after he finished that volley, she looked hurt, and then angry. Her expression didn’t change; it was all in her lively eye��—which were a light, coppery brown that did, in fact, seem gold when the light hit them right. Then her eyes settled, and a predatory smirk shaped her mouth.

��� tried that. I came into this sincerely wanting to work together to make Signal Bend better, and you all shoved that up my ass. Now I ��Dz�’t have to take your abuse with a smile anymore, because I have what I wanted. That property is mine. Signed, sealed, and paid in full. And now you have to be nice to me to get something for yourselves.��

��� ��Dz�’t have to be nice to anybody.��

“You know I meant your ‘club.’�� She made quotes with her fingers, as well as with her voice.

He didn’t take that bait. “Why d’you think anybody’s gonna be nicer to you now? You took what nobody wanted to give you. That ��Dz�’t make you a hero.��

“The mayor wanted the deal, and he’s not the only one. This project will help Signal Bend when it’s finished and operating. And it will help whoever gets the construction contract, too.��

“We ��Dz�’t need your help. Not now, not in the future. We’re fine here without your stupid strip mall.��

Her fists balled up with sudden, palpable frustration, and Cox noted with some surprise that she was about to slam them on the table. But Kalina arrived right then with their plates, and Autumn smoothly returned to nonchalance.

When Kalina was gone again, as Cox reached for the ketchup, Autumn said, ���t is infuriating that you dunderheads refuse to see what I have shown you repeatedly: Heartland Homesteads are not strip malls. They are designed to be community centerpieces, not basic services.��

“T�󾱲� community has a centerpiece. It’s called Main Street, and we’re on it.��

“Yes. True. And it’s charming as hell. This is a great little town, with great potential. But you ��Dz�’t have the infrastructure yet to realize that potential. One ten-room inn inside the town limits. One market. Two bars. A diner, a Sonic, one slightly more upscale restaurant, and a tea room. That is nowhere near enough to keep people in town, enjoying all you offer here, spending money here. I bought a building that has stood empty for more than a decade. I didn’t displace anyone. I didn’t force a business to close. I bought an abandoned building.��

He noticed that she spoke of the deal as hers, not her company’s. Not knowing what to make of that, he filed it away in case it mattered later. “And you’re buying out a whole block of houses, too. Some of those houses are rentals. You think their landlords are gonna help them out?��

���’m offering move-out packages to tenants, and I’ve offered the Zillow value for everybody who’s sold so far—and Zillow is higher than fair market value calculations, trust me.��

��� ��Dz�’t trust you.�� He trusted almost no one. His Horde brothers. Mostly. But that was it.

Autumn sighed. ���’m not the enemy, Cox. I’m not a monster.�� She sagged back in her seat, as if he’d exhausted her reservoir of snark.

He felt a glimmer of guilt but shoved it away at once and said, “You’re human. That’s bad enough. And I ��Dz�’t give a shit if you’re an enemy or not. You can have that out with Badge.��

More quiet. Cox waited a bit to see if this spell would finally stick. When Autumn seemed to be finished making her case for how she was going to save a town that was doing just fine without her, he picked up his sandwich and got to eating.

She took his cue and picked up her sandwich as well.

He’d been surprised that a chick like her—tiny and obviously glued to the fashion magazine��—would order such a robust meal (a not-Diet Coke even), and he’d expected her to pick at it, but she grabbed that fried chicken sandwich in both hands and took an impressive bite. She chewed for a while, washed the rest of her bite down with a big sip from her soda, and went in for another big bite.

The way she was putting away that sandwich would give some of the Horde a run.

She looked up and saw him watching. “What? Are you horrified by a woman who’s not afraid to eat?��

Cox registered that he’d been staring while she put down most of her meal, and his sandwich was growing cold and soggy in his hands. He set it down on his plate.

��� ��Dz�’t care how you eat.��

“Then why are you staring?��

“Just surprised somebody like you eats like that.��

She paused with a fry halfway to her mouth. “Somebody like me?��

He waved a hand at her. “Little and skinny and dressed like a model. I thought all you shiny city girls eat six almonds and a strawberry and call it a meal.��

Setting the last bit of her sandwich down, Autumn wiped her hands with a napkin. “Shiny?��

“Now you’re just repeating words I say.��

“They’re provocative words. What about me is shiny?��

Cox felt like she’d maneuvered him into a trap. This was the kind of shit that happened when he put any effort into a conversation—he missed some double meaning, or some sneaky stratagem, and ended up wedged in a corner with no way out, like a rat in a maze.

“All of you. Like plastic,�� he said, hoping to put an end to it.

He succeeded. She reacted like he’d hurt her, even wincing subtly.

She slid to the outside of her bench. ��� need to use the bathroom. I’ll pick up the check on my way back.�� She stood. “Then I’m going down Main Street. I ��Dz�’t give a damn what you do.��

Cox watched her walk toward the restrooms. He hated that chick. Fucking snake.

So why the hell did he feel guilty?

©2024 Susan Fanetti

Welcome to June’s News & Notes! If you’ve noticed that there was no May post, apologies. The end of the semester always brings with it a mountain of work, and I just didn’t have time to write up anything worth posting. But now it’s summer, so let’s do a quick update!

PUBLISHING NEWS

on : Earlier this year, I announced that I am this complete story—a women’s fiction/contemporary romance—on Kindle Vella, which is Kindle’s platform for serial stories. Almost 20 episodes are currently available (the first 10 are free). I’m publishing two episodes per week (each one equivalent to about one full chapter).

Signal Bend Heritage: Book Two of the next-gen Night Horde series is complete and currently in beta. So far, feedback has been very positive, so I anticipate publishing this later in the summer. Details coming soon, so if you’re interested, keep an eye out! ��, Book One of this series, is Gia Lunden’s story. It’s available now.

Awhile back, a reader wrote to ask me for a , like the one I did for the . With the spring semester over, I was finally able to put that together, it’s here on the blog as its own page.

PLANS FOR SUMMER (and beyond!)

This year, my summer extends quite a bit. I was awarded a sabbatical for the fall semester, so I won’t be back on campus until January! The sabbatical was awarded for an academic research project I’m working on, and my focus will be on that for the rest of the year, but I will also be writing fiction, of course. I’m actively prepping two WIPs, one of which is Book Three of Signal Bend Heritage.

As for personal stuff, we’ve got a major few trips planned this year. We’re about to head back to St. Louis, our hometown, for a week to visit our older kids and bask in some hometown nostalgia. At the end of the summer, our eldest son is getting married at the in Colorado, so that’ll be gorgeous! And finally, this fall my husband and I are headed back to Italy to celebrate our birthdays (which are less than a week apart) in our favorite country.

So the rest of my 2024 will be all about the writing, researching, traveling, and family. And also reading, and movies and TV. And LEGOs!

Pretty much the usual, actually, but with 50% less work stress!

And that’s about it for now. I hope your summer is off to a great start!
xoxo
����

Episode one is available now. –and that’s where you can also follow the story so you’re instantly informed of all new episodes. I plan to publish episodes twice a week!

If you ��Dz�’t know about Kindle Vella, you can also find information about the platform at that link.

As for writing updates, I’m about 50%-60% through the first draft of Book 2 of the Signal Bend Heritage series, and continuing to plug away there. March wasn’t my most productive writing month ever, I have to say. To be honest, I got in my head quite a bit after a couple of very angry emails from readers who were extremely disappointed by my characterization of Gia, and of the Horde itself, in (Book 1), and that, combined with surprisingly soft sales for Virago, knocked me on my butt. I had to work my way through a couple weeks where I felt sure I was done publishing completely.

The soft sales I understand. Well, I didn’t expect a return to Signal Bend to be my poorest-selling biker book ever, but I am fully aware that I ��Dz�’t do, can’t do, the self-promotion required these days to get the word out. In fact, with every new release, it is increasingly clear that the industry is leaving me behind. Back in the olden days, followers saw posts on Facebook, Insta, wherever, simply because they followed a page, but those days are far behind us. Now it costs a lot of money and requires a personality I simply do not have to be Hype Girl constantly just to reach even the readers who are looking for new stuff from me.��

Anyway, that’s just a mini-rant about stuff there’s nothing I can do about. I worked my way through my funk, because the truth is I love writing. I’ll write even if nobody but me reads a word, and I might as well put my stories out in the world, where they can have a little bit of life out there. I ��Dz�’t do this to earn my keep; it’s basically a hobby that pays. So if you’re one of my small band of loyal readers, ��Dz�’t worry. More stories are coming.

But it would be really, really cool if everybody would leave their anger and criticisms to their reviews and not email me. I’m not going to respond to angry emails, by the way. I delete them, but they take their bite on the way out the door.

But while we’re on the topic: The readers who emailed me to complain expressed their feeling that I’ve made the Horde “boring�� in this new series (one said I’d “ruined�� the club), and I wanted to talk about that a little.

The last thing I want to do is diminish the affection so many readers have for the original series. But I am not interested in writing the Missouri Horde as hardcore outlaws again. I’ve written dozens of books across multiple series about drug- and gun-running bikers. I’m over it.��

I am interested in how the Missouri Horde struggle to stay out of that life. I would consider the club a failure, and Isaac and Len’s sacrifice of years of their life a waste, if they fell back into that dangerous world. Though I ��Dz�’t have specific plans for the series arc beyond this, I intend SBH to be much less bloody and fraught than the original series, more of a (somewhat edgy, occasionally gritty) small-town romance with bikers.��

I also intend most if not every female lead to be a complicated/flawed/prickly woman whom not everyone in the story world likes. You know, just like virtually every male lead in the entire genre gets to be.��That’s actually the hook that opened a way into this series for me.

I disagree with those readers that Gia is a brat and the Horde is dull. But the underlying truths that Gia isn’t perfect (and that, raised by Isaac and Lilli, she is assertive, chock full of self-confidence, and not remotely shy) and the club is pretty much just running a construction company these days and doing their damnedest to stay clear of big trouble—those are intentional decisions on my part.

I just thought I’d say that up front (more or less), so you can make decisions about your interest in continuing the series. (And yes, I’m aware this is pretty much the opposite of what I’m supposed to do to promote my books.)

On that note, I’d better get out of here! Have a great month–and watch out for merry pranksters today!

If you’d like to keep up with my anemic self-promotion and get word when I have new stuff for you to read, the best way to do that is to subscribe to this blog!

The Next Thing Coming:
A while back, when it was brand new, I tried out , first publishing my witchy paranormal romance, The House on Bitternut Street, on that serial platform (it’s now available in conventional ebook or paperback editions on and ). I think Vella is an interesting platform, but I ��Dz�’t think a serial format works all that well for my stories in general. However, Bitternut lent itself nicely to serial publication, and it worked pretty well on Vella, so I told myself if I ever had another book that worked as a serial, I’d put it on Vella first again.

Well, I’ve got such a book now, one unlike anything else I’ve written that also, I think, will work serially, so I’m preparing it now to release on Vella. It’s called The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn, and it’s a single-POV women’s fiction story (with a romance at its heart because I love love), written in first-person, past-tense perspective. It’s a full-length novel, and I’m planning to release it in twice-weekly installments. If you’re a Kindle Vella user, I hope you’ll check it out!

The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn is set in a small fictional town in coastal Northern California. It’s about a woman who ran away when she was a girl and has returned many years later because she has nowhere else to go. I’ll be announcing the first installment in a few weeks!

Here’s a teensy teaser for this story:
As I steered around the familiar turn on US 101, a fresh burst of anxious adrenaline showered my synapses. I took a long, deep, quiet breath and steadied myself again—tried to, anyway.

Every mile closer to our destination was another turn of the ratchet, tightening the muscles through my neck and shoulders, but this next milestone soured my belly and sped my heart.

“Oh, cool!�� Wyatt exclaimed from the passenger seat of the fifteen-foot U-Haul I’d muscled across the country for the past week. “Are they real gold?��

A pair of golden bears stood guard at either side of the entrance to the bridge over the Klamath River. Though I hadn’t seen them in almost twenty years, before that, they’d been so much a part of my world I’d stopped noticing them.

Now, glinting in the rich light of the evening’s golden hour, they loomed large and terrible, menacing sentries of the past I’d fled and harbingers of a future I’d tried to escape.

“No, not gold,�� I answered my son as the bears slipped past. “Just paint.��

Wyatt focused on the side mirror to watch the bears disappear behind us. “Still cool, though.��

He sounded a little disappointed. My intuition told me it wasn’t painted bears smothering his enthusiasm; it was my lack of engagement. I’d been lost in my head most of the day.

Remembering my Mom Face, I smiled and brightened my tone. “They are cool. They’re not the original bears, actually. A little farther downstream are two big black bears that stood at the original bridge. A flood took out that bridge, and the whole town of Klamath, about �� I ��Dz�’t know, maybe sixty years ago? Something like that. When they rebuilt, they moved the road and the bridge up here, and put up the golden bears.��

Wyatt didn’t respond, but I glanced over and saw him nodding, his attention fixed on his window. As the redwood forest enfolded the highway again, he murmured, ���t’s so pretty here.��

On that we could agree. Chief among the few things I had missed in the past two decades was the world of Humboldt and Del Norte counties itself. Majestic redwoods walled in the highway, and the lowering sun shone through the narrow gaps around their rough-hewn trunks, turning the world into a pirate’s treasure of glinting gold. The air wafting through our half-open windows was a potpourri of rich wood, eucalyptus, and sea spray. Somewhere above us, an osprey cried out for its mate, its piercing cry overcoming the noise of the U-Haul’s engine.

Nowhere else I have ever been is as beautiful as the place in which I’d been raised.

“Yeah, it is,�� I said softly, speaking as much to the forest as to my son.

“Forests and mountains, and the ocean, too,�� Wyatt enthused, oblivious to his mother’s melancholy musing. “And it’s not hot!��

“No, not hot. It hardly ever gets hot here—in fact, a lot of places around here ��Dz�’t even have AC.��

Wyatt had been born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. I looked over at him again and chuckled to see his mouth hanging open.

���t’s true. The cottages ��Dz�’t—at least they didn’t when I was here. But ��Dz�’t worry, you won’t melt. Even in August you’ll need a hoodie, at least in the evening and early morning. And there’s lots of fog, almost every morning.��

“So cool!�� he said again.

“L���ٱ����������.��

“Ugh. Mom. We talked about this. No puns.��

���s that even a pun, though?��

He answered with a look, and I laughed fully—and felt sincerely a little better. Wyatt always found my sunshine. I turned back to the windshield and focused on the final stretch of our long journey.

Only a few more miles to go. Back to a world, and a life, I’d been desperate to escape.

But this time, I would this place my home.

For my son.

And because I had no choice.

©2023 Susan Fanetti

Stay tuned for more information about The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn on Kindle Vella!

What I’m Writing

If you’ve been here for awhile, you know I ��Dz�’t like to share too much of my work in progress or make too strong a forecast about things that aren’t finished, but I can tell you that I’m closing in on the 50K word mark of Book Two of the Signal Bend Heritage series, and I’m enjoying the heck out of writing it.

This new series is a “next-generation�� series, taking place when the oldest of the children born in the are old enough to find love (and have sex haha), but not every main character in this new series will be a child of the first series�� leads. They will, however, all be connected to the Horde.

Book Two features two characters who appear in Virago, and the MMC is a Horde patch who also appears (very late) in the Signal Bend series, but I ��Dz�’t think you’ll guess which characters are leading Book Two. Heehee.

And that’s the news for March!! I hope you enjoy Virago, and I’ll see you here again soon!

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