It’s Release Day!

It’s also #1linewed, so that’s below, BUT FIRST:

I’m losing my mind.

In a good way.

Mostly.

After six years of worrying what to do with these characters and this story, it’s finally over, and if you could hear my inflection, you’d be hard pressed to know if I was happy or sad about it, and you’d…be right.

I mean, I am a little sick of these jerks. Like, my god, just get on with it already, ya know? (I know that’s not a great sales pitch, but I promise my inner turmoil doesn’t come out on the page, not like that anyway.)

But it’s hard to let go of the first real story I’ve ever written. I wrote plenty of beginnings to books before this, rarely knowing where they would go (and failing to finish them for exactly that reason), and I published three novels before novelizing The Weary Traveler (which is free today, by the way), but I was serializing this story long before that, and the ending you’re going to see in this book? I’ve been finessing it for months, but I knew way back in 2016 the crux of how it would go. And, like, man…I finally got Lorelei to the beach.

I know it’s dumb, I’m well aware I’m not writing literature here–these are fun books for fun people who like stupid magic and idiots tripping over themselves to fall in love–but to finally put that scene down on paper and be able to hand it to someone and be like, “Here, this is exactly how sadness feels to me,” is the utter fulfillment of a dream. That’s the point to writing, right? Communication from your soul, using words to project some image into a stranger’s mind to try and cobble together feelings that really can’t be defined. Do you see this picture I’m describing? Is it doing anything for you, buddy? Because I really need it to even though I don’t understand why!

But at least I don’t have to scream into the void anymore, or a little less now, because these books do the screaming for me. Which is all to say, really, this was so much fun, and it’s not that serious, it’s just finally here and done and accessible and being read as I type this out by people who have told me they actually like it. Like, for real, someone who is a total stranger told me, today, “great book.” I mean, it’s so simple, but fuck does it stab me right in the heart in the best way (and the fact I’ve said that instead of “gives me butterflies” probably tells you the new thing I’m working on is very different from Vacancy.)

Oh, hey, #1linewed, right!

One guess as to who would say this to Lorelei and how they’d even get the opportunity. That’s right, baybee, all the chickens coming home to roost! Cluck cluck, bitch.