We’re back to off and on ceiling leaks and a telemarketer call woke me at 6:30 am so my concentration is terrible today–let’s do my quarterly update!
What’s New
The Killing Beach now has a large-print edition, available at Amazon.
Livi Talbot 1 – 3 (including Ashford’s Ghost for the first time) are out in paperback with the new covers.
Since it’s just a few days away, I’m counting it: Watcher of the Woods will have a large-print edition on Tuesday.
It’s…not a lot! Weird not having a fall new release. And I won’t have on this year either, but I’m still gonna have something–which Patreon knows about and I won’t reveal the cover yet but I’ll tell you about below as well…
What’s Upcoming
More large-print editions–A Wild Kind of Darkness, Alone at Night, and Odin’s Spear will cover the next few months (March, May, and July respectively)–are incoming. They aren’t really selling but print doesn’t in general, and I don’t mind stealing a few hours here and there to do them, the ISBNs are free, and there are a couple of blind and low-vision readers who appreciate them. Plus I think in the long run they’ll be good to have. I wish I could price them lower for people, but it’s based on page count and most of them are around five hundred pages.
Although I’m not serializing the final Elis O’Connor this year–I put that on pause as I want to write and it’s still cooking in my head–I decided to try something a little different. Starting next month, I’m running a novella where patrons will get to choose the story direction–including who Elis kills–month to month as I write it.
When touching grass is not enough and you need consequences to happen to bad men…there’s serial killer witch Elis O’Connor to the rescue, happy to throw the whole man out.
Elis has been stalking some awful men on a dating forum and has decided one (or more) of them must die. Will it be Luke, recently divorced God-fearing homesteader whose tradwife left him after he seemed to plan for her to die in childbirth? Will it be self-described “woke feminist” Hunter, who praised his ex-girlfriend as the best thing that ever happened to him but destroyed all her beloved plants in a late-night fit of rage? Or will it be Andy, who kept pressuring his former girlfriend to euthanize her pet because she spent more time with it than with him?
Where will they go on their date? How will she kill him? Can she avoid witnesses?
Patreon supporters decide how the story will go!
I’m nervous because I hate writing chapters last minute, but I need to do something fun. I’ve written the first chapter and have some rough scaffolding in mind for the different story branches. New chapters will go up on the first Friday of the month along with a poll and patrons will have a few days to respond, then I’ll have about three weeks to draft and post the next installment. I expect this will cover a few months (I’ll get a break in May for the extended preview of A Dark and Distant Home if it’s still running then). When it’s done, it’ll count as an Elis O’Connor entry into my “First Date (That End Badly)” collection and I can finally put out a collected edition since I’ve already got them written for other series.
This is also a prequel so no one has to be caught up on Elis’s books and can dive right in–all anyone needs to know is that she’s a witch and murders bad men.
Patrons have a longish single story in lieu of two bimonthly shorts, with The Assistants posting in March. .It dovetails into A Dark and Distant Home, about Waverly’s struggle to hire an assistant, which is not easy when you hate everyone and everyone hates you.
So of course the big release is the fifth Waverly Jones book and I’ve got a cover reveal for you there.
The last six months have not been great for Waverly Jones.
The settlement conference for the defamation suit against her approaches—though she has no intention of settling.
The Crossroads Butcher case is considered “closed”—even though she knows the police are wrong about the killer.
The love of her life is lost—and it’s her fault.
When an American man approaches her agency for help locating the son he just found out about, who was “rehomed” to a couple that crossed the border years ago, Waverly feels a spark of interest in her that has been dormant since she lost everything in the fall. No one is looking for the boy despite what seems to be a situation of child trafficking to her, and a difficult, complicated case might be exactly what she needs to feel more like herself again.
Sure, she’s stretched thin from breaking in a new assistant, babysitting her little brother again, and trying to keep her agency going as a one-woman operation. But even with her only backup in the form of the hallucination of her dead sister, catfishing people within the online child adoption “rehoming” industry shouldn’t be that hard for someone with her skills.
And it can’t possibly be dangerous…
MAY 12, 2026
Kobo | Apple Books | Smashwords
There is no print preorder (Amazon doesn’t allow it) but I’ll aim to get the paperback and hardcover uploaded a few weeks before the eBook’s release so it’ll be delivered by the 12th.
I do have a hardcover front cover finally! I fought with this a lot but none of the covers are ever exact depictions so I gave up on that and just tried to have the right vibe again.
The sixth hardcover also has a cover but I’ll hold that for now (it’s posted in my general Discord server for readers, though).
I just finished another big revision pass and sent it for edits and I still love this book. I’m so glad I reworked things to write this one and SATY, because this arc for Waverly has been so crucial and let me get back to her core elements as a character (mainly: extremely hostile with the added bonus of depression, and terrible at risk assessment).
I have no date yet because it’s pending a lot of revisions, but I will also be serializing a new novella/short novel at Patreon called The Tree of Life.
I have no further details I can give as it’s not something I want to use to entice new patrons, but it’s…an action thriller and also a trauma book.
It’ll be exclusively at Patreon, an excerpt was posted this month, and the announcement can be found there as well. Patrons can expect a cover reveal in a few months after I’ve settled on a launch date.
Finally, my fall release…I’m holding off on a cover reveal until I’ve decided on what extras will be in it, but in September it’ll be the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Solomon’s Seal and I intend to do a ten-year anniversary print edition of the book.
It won’t be a bling book–I’m glad that people love them, but it just seems like so much work and expense for me, more than I’d like to take on–but packed with extras that either I can provide myself or that I can afford to hire out (which will be…minimal lol). At this point, I’m hoping for some behind-the-scenes stuff (maybe commentary pointing out easter eggs?), maybe a short story if I can revisit the world and come up with something, and I’m debating whether I can conceivably draw a survey map of the cave system (it would require me to actually reread the book and I don’t know if I can) and what illustrations might be possible. I would love a to see if a writer friend could write an introduction but I don’t even know what that would entail or if anyone would want to.
It will have a pulpy adventure cover that I think is really fun.
In the event I think I can crowdfund the third Livi audiobook, I’d make this anniversary print edition part of that, but pushing print rewards would just jack up the overall goal since print costs eat into the budget to pay the people involved in making it (like the entire goal of this would be to just pay Kristi Burns and for mastering/proofing/etc, not give money to a printer for paperbacks). So don’t expect a ridiculous bedazzled shelf trophy, just a keepsake book for fans who want extra stuff. Like the Waverly hardcovers but as a one-time thing. I haven’t decided whether they’ll be paperback or hardcover yet either.
Aiming for that out around September, though.
(Is the KS for the third book coming? I don’t know. I’d like it to. SS has sold ten copies across all platforms in audiobook since August. The eBook is routinely stolen more than bought now even when it’s on sale for $1.99. The new covers aren’t helping. I am pretty sure Livi doesn’t have a readership anymore BUT because she’s a great human being, Kristi recorded Ashford’s Ghost as a KS reward if I go through with it, and I would REALLY like to raise some money to give to her, and I would like the three-book arc for audio readers, therefore I’ll talk it over with friends and see if I can come up with a viable strategy. So click that follow button.)
What I’m Working On
Revisions, revisions, revisions.
I just got ADaDH sent off, and I figured it’s best if I try to get a round in on Sins of the Mother, even though it’s not releasing until 2027, because I thought ADaDH would be so easy since it was in good shape and then I just had crisis after crisis in the fall (which has bled through December and January, basically every two weeks) and I don’t want to be behind again. If I can get the big pieces in better place now (I have to rewrite the beginning, add another character, and flesh out a bunch of stuff with new scenes), I can switch to finishing the draft of Waverly 8 and then make my entire personality the Tree of Life revisions which will be tremendous work.
And writing the Elis choose-your-own-murder adventure.
And at some point, I have to write some stuff for the ADaDH hardcover–I think I might use one of the Patreon backstory shorts (leaning toward A Heart that Yearns because teen Waverly is just so funny in it) plus a mini case investigation set after ADaDH that delivers on a funny set up in that book.
When I have time: re-proofing Livi 4 – 6 for the cover rebrands, re-proofing all of Demons of Oblivion for those cover rebrands, revising Hell Fire and Demon Fall for print (and then writing Dark Fates).
It feels like a LOT but they’re projects I’m excited about and provided I can keep juggling (and provided my writing income does well enough to support all this like it did last year), it’s set to be a year of fun things I’m very proud of.
Who Is This Little Fat Cat???
Oh yes, this other news…look at him!
Look at his round belly! No, that is not fluid build-up like I kept fearing…
It is fat. Rodney is fat. He’s put on TWO POUNDS. Because he’s eating so well.
Two and a half months later, guess whose vet can’t find the abdominal mass anymore!
We know it’s there, a second vet felt it three weeks after the diagnosis but it’s shrunk enough AND he’s so fat now it’s hard to find. He’s happy and thriving and very normal, not just for a cat with cancer but one who is turning fifteen in March. Everyone’s stunned and I am very lucky.
Temperatures are dropping here but at least the leak has paused again for the night and I have a pile of napping cats on the heated blanket, so it could be worse.
Writer of horror, mysteries/thrillers, and urban fantasy.