May 25, 2025

Celebrations

For the past three years, my cousin has come to spend a week at my place so we can celebrate our shared birthday week. Mine was a few days ago and hers is today - and spending a week together is always wonderful.

Even when times are difficult, it’s important to take a moment and celebrate the good things, find the joy in the experiences and live your life.

Peonies after a heavy rainstorm

I’ve had a couple of people reach out and I’m going to tell you what I told them. Until it is illegal to write and sell my books, I’m going to keep writing and selling my books. If they make it so I can’t write LGBTQ+ characters in romantic relationships, then I’ll figure something out. Either way, I’ll still be writing books - just slightly different ones, I guess.
I’m not going to ‘borrow trouble’ though - things keep changing so quickly. For me, I focus on my communities - in person and online - and keep doing what I can to stay informed while I build my business and write.

I finished Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series and am about halfway through J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series. I’m looking forward to seeing what it looks like on the screen when the Black Dagger series hits TV in June.

I’m still working on Storm’s Witness and I’m really liking where it’s going. This one is more along the lines of the Chess Club mysteries, so I hope y’all enjoy it. Make sure to grab your preorders.

Snip from Storm’s Witness:

There was a dim light over the back door of the pizza place, and another at the entrance to the lot around the corner, but with the sun truly gone, there wasn’t much light back here at all. Ellie wedged a rock in the door and started down the path that led to the waste unit the apartment dwellers used. She checked to make sure the top was open, then threw the bag up and over, hearing it hit more plastic before she turned to head back inside.

Ellie had just put her hand on the doorknob to slip back inside when she heard a man yell and a woman scream. She turned to look in the direction of the scream and saw the couple from earlier, and they were loud. The man had a wooden baseball bat, and the woman was stumbling away and crying.

“Please, honey. Please, don’t…” she begged. Hands lifted as her butt hit a parked car and she slid along the side of it. “I’m so sorry. I’ll do better,” she said. Her hair was light-colored and tangled around her shoulders. She was curvy, not fat or thin, and wore jeans and a sweater that showed off those curves. Ellie couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the woman was barefoot and it was cold out here.

The man was a lot larger than the woman. She barely came up to his shoulders. He was bald and reminded her of one of those wrestling guys because his arms were probably the same size as Ellie’s waist. He wore jeans and a hoodie, and work-style boots on his feet—and he didn’t speak—he just growled as he lifted the bat and swung it hard. The sound it made as it hit the woman’s head was, Ellie thought, a lot like the sound a watermelon makes when you drop it.

The woman spun around with the force of the blow and landed face down on the pavement. The bat lifted again and came down on the fallen woman. She didn’t make another sound, unless you counted the sound of the bat hitting her body.

Ellie stared for all of ten seconds before she slid through the gap in the door and held the handle until it quietly snicked shut. She’d never been so grateful for the light to be out over the apartment building’s door in her life.