February 26, 2023
Listen up - audio has arrived!
It’s live! Grab your copy of Dead & Buried in audiobook format. Narrated by the amazing Christian Black, this is my first professionally narrated audiobook and I love how well Christian portrayed the characters. If you order it from my shop, you get it immediately delivered by BookFunnel. (It’s on Chirp, too - but slow to get fed out to the other shops.)
Click on the image below and get to listen to a sample.
In other news - (see what I did there?) Breaking News is halfway done. Hoping to get it finished in a couple of weeks and get it out mid March. Have you preordered it yet? It’s up on my shop here - where it will be released first, but if you need to get it from your usual spots, you can get it here.
House update - got the new sink put in and oh, if this is adulting, I’ll take it. I’m so happy with the update. It’s larger, deeper, has a nicer faucet that doesn’t leak, and all kinds of add-ons that just make me feel so fancy. Slowly but surely I’m getting this kitchen updated. Bit by bit.
The next kitchen update is to get the ceiling and crown molding finished, but before that there’s another project happening here. Back in December, I put down a deposit on an 8x12 shed that we’ll be turning into a studio for my son. We’ve had to wait for the delivery until the ground was dry enough for them to get it up the steep slope of our front yard to the side of the house where it will be placed. The unpredictability of mountain weather has made this take a lot longer than we’d hoped. Friday, it was finally delivered!
He runs a gaming community, streams on Twitch and YouTube as Diesel_Fueled. If that’s your thing, check him out.
Also, something to consider - a lot more of you are subscribing, and it’s truly appreciated. You can still get it in your email when you subscribe - you’re not forced into the app. Someone had asked about that the other day, so I wanted to make sure you knew.
I think I’ve figured out how to not screw up too much with this - and everyone SHOULD be able to comment. If you can’t, let me know. It means something got reset.
Thanks for reading! (And listening!)
Excerpt from “Luck of the Irish” - preorder the Monster Hunter’s anthology here.
(Pronounciation key: Saoirse – sair-sha Siobhan – shivawn)
Chapter 1
Saoirse tied off the end of her reddish-blond braid and flipped it back over her shoulder. There were three days left until her eighteenth birthday and she couldn’t wait to finally be legally an adult.
“Saoirse Maureen O’Brien, get your butt downstairs now, or I’m leaving without you!” her father called up to her.
Sair grabbed her sweatshirt and headed down the stairs, pausing to kiss her father’s scruffy cheek before she jumped the last step.
“I’m ready, Da. Three miles today or only two?” Sair asked.
“Two for me, today. You can keep going if you want. I’ve got office hours at the college later this morning. With finals coming up, and the holidays, I’m going to be busier than ever for a while,” Michael O’Brien replied.
“Ma said she’d be home tonight and was bringing take-out for dinner because her last appointment was a later one today,” Sair told him. “Pat and Siobhan will be home for dinner, too, so if you can be back for dinner, it’ll be the first time all week we’ve had everyone at the table.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Michael said as they stepped outside and locked the door behind them.
Their usual route took them down their neighborhood street, across the main road through town, and around the park that spread across several acres and bordered the ocean on one side.
Sair watched her father as the stress disappeared and the joy of the run took over. He was a little over six feet tall, with dark curly hair dusted with gray, and his unshaven face showed gray mixed with the black. Bright blue eyes and fair skin spoke of his Irish heritage, a heritage that led him to his lifelong love of Celtic mythology and folklore – the classes he taught as Professor O’Brien.
Her mother was a doctor – a general practitioner – and Sair took after her with the reddish blond hair and green eyes. Her brother, Pat, was twenty-two and the eldest of the three kids. He not only shared their father’s name – Michael Patrick O’Brien – but his looks. As a junior, he went by Pat instead of Mike to avoid confusion.
Her sister, Siobhan, was twenty, and had Da’s dark hair and Ma’s green eyes. Both of her older siblings were working and going to school the next town over, but while they shared an apartment in Lakeridge, they came home often for laundry and meals.
“Are you excited about starting at the college next semester?” Michael asked. “Not worried about being the prof’s daughter, are you?”
“No, Da. If anyone knows you, they know you’ll be tougher on me than any of your other students,” Sair replied. “But you’ve taught me to love the old tales as much as you do, and I’m excited to see where I can go with it.”
Ever since Saoirse had been a baby, her father had taught them the old myths and legends. The Cailleach was as much of a grandmother figure to her as her own father’s mother had been. While some kids had ‘elf on the shelf’, Sair and her siblings had the leprechaun, hiding his treasures in the house for them to find on St. Patrick’s Day.
They finished up their run back at home and Sair waved to her father as he headed up to the house while she did another mile on her own. She ran in the opposite direction of where they’d just come and passed the end of their street, then crossed over to the next. This neighborhood was more apartment buildings than single-family homes, so there was a lot more traffic. Even so, Sair noticed a black SUV with tinted windows that seemed to be following her as she took a right and made her way around the block, then back towards home once more.
As she ran up the steps, she met her father coming out, all showered, shaved, and in his usual jeans, dress shirt, and suit jacket. He kissed her cheek as she ducked into the house, then went to get into his car and drive away. Sair paused as she locked the door behind him to watch the SUV slow down at the house, then speed up and drive off as her father backed out of the driveway.
She’d have to ask him about that SUV when he got home that night. It was weird.
Now I gotta get Spotify. 😁
That sink is a dream 🥰 also, can we talk about how exciting it is that your audio book is on SPOTIFY? And Christian did such a great job.