Those of you who subscribe to my newsletter have already seen this news, but I’m about to launch a new book that I hope will be the start of a totally new series.

It’s something I’m calling cottagecore cozy romantic fantasy, and it’s a story I wrote largely to amuse myself, as it was the sort of thing I wanted to read, and like Enchanted, Inc. was a mashup of chick lit and fantasy, this book is a mash-up of women’s fiction and fantasy.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been less interested in the old-school chick lit books of the sort I was reading when I first came up with the idea for Enchanted, Inc. Instead, I find myself reading the sort of women’s fiction books in which a woman’s life has fallen apart — she’s lost her job and/or her relationship — and she ends up in some village, where she works in or runs a coffee shop/bakery/candy shop/bookstore. Of course, I want to add magic. But I didn’t want to do it in a more straightforward way, just adding magic to these contemporary books. I wanted to be in a fantasy world. I find that I’m not too interested in the real world these days. I want to escape to a magical world in a simpler time, a place where I don’t have to deal with real-world problems and current events.

Fortunately, this time around I don’t feel like I’m essentially inventing a new subgenre. “Cozy fantasy” has become a huge trend, with books set in traditional fantasy worlds but without the traditional fantasy stakes. Thers are books about the kinds of characters you’d find in a fantasy world, but instead of saving the world from a great evil, they’re opening coffee shops, working in bookstores, or running inns. The stakes are more personal than global. My story idea fits right in with this. I’m actually on-trend, for once!

And so, I present Tea and Empathy, which will be available next week (and is ready for pre-order from a lot of the online booksellers). This is the story of a healer with a magical empathic talent who’s on the run after she lost a patient and was accused of murder. She stumbles into a hidden village, where she takes refuge in a cottage that turned out to once belong to a magical healer. She uses her knowledge of herbs and her gift for reading what people want to open a tea shop. Everything’s going well until she finds a wounded man unconscious in her garden. Although she doesn’t trust herself as a healer, she has no choice but to help him. She doesn’t know who he is or how he got there — but neither does he. He doesn’t remember his past and she’s running from hers.

I threw in a lot of tropes I happen to love in a book. I guess you could say this one is both genre Fantasy and personal fantasy. For one thing, there’s the perfect little village. There’s a house that does the housework for itself (I want one of those). Why not have the perfect guy just land in your garden? I’ve always been fascinated by amnesia stories and the idea of figuring out what you’d be if you didn’t know who you were. All of that is in this book.

There is a little peril, but the stakes aren’t really life-or-death. If you’re looking for a page turner with lots of excitement, this isn’t that book, but if you just want to spend time in a fantasy world, soak up the vibes, and have some feelings without being too stressed about it, this may be what you want.

I’m planning for this to be a series, as there are a lot of people in the village who could have their stories told. There’s a mystery behind the village itself, and that will gradually unfold. But more books will depend on sales. My threshold for that is lower than it would be for a traditional publisher, but I can’t afford to spend the time it takes to write a book and only make what amounts to minimum wage. So, if you like this book and want more, please tell people about it, write reviews, post on Goodreads or social media, etc. Every little bit helps. Just ten more readers finding me can make a big difference.

After a brutal summer and an August and most of July full of 100+-degree days, we finally have a break, with a string of days only in the low 90s, even sometimes in the 80s. It’s the kind of weather they consider “summer” in more civilized climates, but here it’s a taste of fall. We’ve even had a bit of rain, the first in about six weeks. I’m trying to enjoy it as much as I can, since we’ll be going back to summer weather, though possibly not more 100-degree days.

My body has gone into “fall” mode, so I’m sure it’ll be disappointed. I’m enjoying sitting on the patio in the mornings for as long as I want, until I feel like I need to get to work, without having to retreat indoors because it’s too hot. I walked to the library yesterday without feeling like I would die from heat stroke. I may even begin cooking again instead of just eating a lot of salads. Last night, I mixed up a batch of refrigerator biscuit/roll dough and made cinnamon rolls with it for breakfast this morning. It’s baking season again. Next up will be soup. I feel like I’m trying to cram all the fall things in this week before it gets hot again, in case this is all we’ll get.

Fall is my favorite time of year, but we don’t get much of it here. We might get a week like this one in September, then summer returns, and then we might get a week or two in October. It doesn’t start really feeling like proper fall until Thanksgiving, maybe. By then, Christmas has taken over.

I’ve found that a lot of the books that are the first in my series seem to take place in September. Some of that may be because I tend to start new projects in August or September, and I write the season I’m in. September is also a good time to travel, since prices tend to drop after Labor Day, and that means my research trips tend to come around that time, so I write the season I researched. That’s why Enchanted, Inc. starts in late September. In a week or so, it will have been 20 years since the trip I took to New York to research the setting before I started writing, and I wrote that time of year because it was what was vivid to me. But I think my tendency to set new series in September also has something to do with the sense of new beginnings that comes around the start of the school year. New school year, new book — it’s pretty much the same in my mind. In a couple of works in progress, the September setting means there’s a ticking clock—they have to deal with things before winter sets in—so it’s actually relevant to the plot.

The book I’m working on now is set in the spring, which is a real mindset shift. I was going with the time of year when someone was likely to be hungry, and spring was a difficult time before hothouses, good food preservation and storage methods, and transportation that allowed food to be brought from other parts of the world. In the spring, not enough new things had grown to provide much food, but the food stored over the winter was running out. I wanted a character to be on the edge of desperation and not able to find much to eat, so spring it was, and it fits with an idea of the character gradually blossoming as the world wakes up. Though I’ll admit that habit keeps trying to kick in, so my brain wants it to be fall. I’m writing a festival scene now, and although they’re decorating with garlands of flowers, my mental image keeps trying to be of fall leaves and corn husks. Another book, brain. We’ll do a fall book in this setting, I’m sure.

I think I’m finally going to acknowledge the holiday season. I’m planning to put up my decorations tonight, and this Friday will be my “office party.” Yes, it’s just me, but I’m going to start my holiday week a bit early by spending a day reading and relaxing, with maybe some festive food. I figure if I’m a good boss, I owe myself a party. So this may be my last post until I do a year in review just before the new year.

This year, I planned in advance and have stockpiled some Christmas books. If I started reading something that turned out to be set during the holiday season, I marked it and set it aside. I’ll get out the seasonal music, turn on the Christmas tree lights, and immerse myself.

I’ve written one Christmas novella, Twice Upon a Christmas, which is sort of a “Sliding Doors” scenario of a woman living out two different lives based on a quirk of fate, only she’s conscious of both lives as she lives each day twice and has to choose which life she wants to keep. This story started as a screenplay for one of those TV Christmas movies, then I realized I had no idea what to do with it, so I adapted it into a book. I must have been somewhat on the right track for the movie thing because I keep getting queries from networks and production companies about it, but no one has yet actually optioned it.

Within my other series, there are also some options for holiday reading. There’s the latest book, Mystery of the Secret Santa, in the Lucky Lexie series. The holiday season spans two books in the Enchanted, Inc. series. Once Upon Stilettos leads up to the office holiday party, then Damsel Under Stress covers Christmas itself. The third book in the Fairy Tale series, A Kind of Magic, happens in the lead-up to Christmas, with the heroine, Sophie, dancing in The Nutcracker. And Rebels Rising, the third book in the Rebels series, takes place around Christmas.

I keep saying I need to write another Christmas book, but I learned the hard way this year that writing a Christmas book early in the year makes me want to avoid the holiday season when it actually comes. I initially wrote that screenplay during December when I was between projects (I may have been waiting on edits on a book) and I wanted to keep up the routine of writing regularly, so I did something seasonal just for fun. My brain is too fried this year to write during the holiday week, and I’m in the middle of a book, so it’s not going to happen this year. I have so many ideas, though. If I could figure out how to sell scripts, I could keep Netflix and Prime supplied with movies (but not Hallmark because my ideas don’t fit their current mold).

Have a happy holiday season, and happy reading!

We’re now truly into December, right during the time of year when Mystery of the Secret Santa takes place, and I have to confess that I’m still not really into the holiday spirit. I’m pretty much actively avoiding anything Christmassy. I think part of the reason is that we finally got “fall” around Thanksgiving. The leaves started turning brilliant colors the day after Thanksgiving, so it’s one of the more spectacular autumns we’ve had in ages, and then it got warm. It feels like October in Texas and looks like September/October in New England. Since fall is my favorite season, I want to enjoy it before I move on to the Christmas season, so I’m denial about it being December.

I think it also didn’t help that I spent the late summer writing a book set during the holiday season. I didn’t do anything like listen to Christmas music while I wrote or put up holiday decorations in my office to get in the mood, but I still ended up essentially experiencing the season in my head from making up what this town’s festivities would look like and then spending hours a day mentally experiencing it. I may have overdosed on the holiday season during August and September.

But I did have fun creating my ideal small-town Christmas. I based a lot of it on Grapevine, Texas, a town near me that’s had itself proclaimed the Christmas Capital of Texas. This town has an old-timey main street full of little shops and restaurants. The area gets covered in lights, the stores do elaborate window displays, there’s Christmas music piped in that you hear on the street, and there’s a light show synchronized to music in the city park. I like to go there and just walk up and down the street, soaking it all up. I understand it’s even bigger now that they’ve built a new hotel near the train station and there’s a whole new commuter rail line that runs through there. They have an outdoor ice rink and a new plaza where I believe the light show is now. Here are a few pictures of Grapevine at Christmas to help you imagine what I was trying to convey in the book.

Another town that provided some inspiration is Marshall, in East Texas. They started outlining all the buildings in the old downtown around the courthouse square with lights back in the 80s (when my uncle was mayor there), and it’s exploded from there to be a big deal people travel to see.

The new book came out yesterday, and you should be able to find it at most places. It may take a while to show up on the various library services, and I just remembered that I haven’t yet put it on Google Play (but I haven’t sold a single book there yet, so that’s low on my priority list right now), but it’s at the big ones, and the paperback is available via Amazon. It should also eventually show up at other places, but it takes time to propagate.

This will be my last release of the year. I don’t yet know what the schedule will be for next year. It depends on a lot of things. I’m frantically writing the start of what I hope will be a new “traditional” fantasy series (secondary world, quasi-medievalish setting with horses and castles and an adorkable wizard because of course).

In the meantime, I’ll be taking next week off for the Thanksgiving holiday, so no blog posts from me. I need to do a little writing in between feasts and travel days, so keeping up with other stuff is more than I want to do when I need to take some time off.

See you after the holiday.

I can’t believe how quickly this crept up on me, but the holidays are almost upon us, and that means we’re a week away from the release of my holiday paranormal mystery, the latest book in the Lucky Lexie series, Mystery of the Secret Santa. It’s available for pre-order now. The release date is November 17, for those of you who aren’t like me and can’t deal with Christmas at all until after Thanksgiving. Or you could just make sure you’ve got it before you dive into Christmas stuff. The action in the book begins on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, in case you want to be totally in sync.

This is a fun little book that doesn’t get too dark. I didn’t want to write a murder for Christmas, so there are different kinds of cases. Mostly, it’s about Lexie getting to live out her Hallmark Christmas movie fantasies as the town goes all-out with a spectacular holiday celebration and finds out that Wes isn’t a big fan of Christmas. She thought she was living the “big city career woman comes to small town and meets local guy” story, but maybe it’s the “Christmas lover persuades Christmas grump to learn to love Christmas.” Unfortunately, she’s sidetracked in this effort by the Secret Santa, someone who seems to know all the secrets in the town and is sharing them, leaving notes for people letting them know what other people are doing behind their backs. There’s also the occasional gift left, things people never told anyone else that they needed. The gifts are good, but the secrets are really damaging the holiday vibe. And then there’s the wave of robberies at fast-food places and convenience stores — crimes in which the robber only takes small things, not money. Who is it and why is he doing this?

This is a fairly short book, so it should be good for the busy holiday season. You can sit down and read it when you have time to take a break. Make some cocoa, get some cookies, put on your favorite holiday music and escape to a small town right out of a Hallmark movie for a couple of hours.

The order links are on the book’s page.

The new book is out in the world, and I’m busy revising the next one. I’ve realized while working on these that I talk a lot about food in these books. Probably not enough for them to qualify as “culinary” cozy mysteries, but still, there’s a lot of food, considering the heroine herself doesn’t actually cook. She just appreciates good food when it’s given to her.

I started cooking a lot of Mexican food when I wrote the first couple of books, after all those scenes in the Mexican restaurant. I got a good recipe for cheese enchiladas and for chili con queso.

Then in Broken Bridge, it was hamburgers. So much talk of hamburgers cooked out on a grill. Hamburgers are a big comfort food for me. If I’m not feeling well, kind of tired and run-down, a burger is my go-to cure, possibly because I don’t eat a lot of red meat, so when my body needs iron, I crave burgers. Oddly, though, I don’t think I ate a lot of burgers while I was writing this book. The act of writing those scenes satisfied the burger craving. Instead of the writing making me hungry, I imagined the food so much that I felt like I’d eaten it. I’ve done that before, when I spent a day writing a dinner scene, then felt dizzy at the end of the day and realized I’d forgotten to eat because writing the scene made me feel like I’d eaten dinner.

The next book takes place in December, so I talk a lot about hot cocoa and cookies. There are fewer food scenes, in general. I’m not craving cocoa, since I wrote it during the summer and it’s still hot as I’m revising it. I think there are more breakfast scenes in this book than I usually write.

Maybe I should have written a culinary series, like with Margarita as the amateur sleuth who follows up on things she hears at her restaurant. But I’ve worked in a restaurant and when I was in high school I had a summer job working in the kitchen at a summer camp, so I’m not sure I want to relive those days. I’ve also worked as a reporter, but that wasn’t quite as miserable. It just wasn’t a great fit for my personality.

I hope I don’t make anyone too hungry from reading these books. All my favorite local Mexican restaurants have closed recently, so I’m glad I learned to cook some of those dishes for myself in case I make myself hungry while I’m writing.

I got my act together, so I will hit my targeted release date. Case of the Broken Bridge will be released next Thursday in e-book. I’m aiming at getting the paperback around that time, but you never can tell how long it will take for those to go live and be shipped. You can pre-order at Amazon, Kobo, and Apple, so far. I’ll try to keep up with the links as stores go live. Check the book’s page on my site for all the information and purchase links.

This book was a very long time in the making. I first outlined it last year. I think it was going to be #4, happening during the summer and before the back-to-school timeframe of Vanishing Visitor. And then I realized there was no way I could get three books written before Halloween, and I really wanted to do the Haunted Hotel book then. So, I put this story aside to use it later.

Early this year, I got out those notes to write the book. It actually fit even better in the timeline this way, since it involves a bridge that got washed out during a storm, and there’s a bad storm in Haunted Hotel. There was just one problem: I seem to have knocked over a water glass and spilled something on my notes, and the ink washed out on the page where I wrote my ideas for how to resolve the story. So, I had all the setup but I couldn’t remember how to resolve it and had to figure that out all over again.

Then as I was writing the book, on the scene in which the victim is found, I heard several loud pops coming from the street by my house, and soon I was watching a crime scene team on the street my office window overlooks for what turned out to be a murder investigation. It was a shooting, someone in one car shooting at the person in the next car, and from what I can tell, the actual shooting happened right in front of my office window (my office is on the second floor, and it overlooks a major road that’s on the other side of a tall brick wall from my house). I didn’t see anything because I was writing, but I heard the gunshots. Not long after that, I was watching the evening news, and they mentioned a shooting at a coffee shop in a nearby town — and I knew the victim. She was the daughter of some friends from church. I’ve known her since she was born. In fact, I had her baby photo on my refrigerator until I got a new one a couple of years ago and cleared off the baby photos of kids who were in college.

At that point, I just couldn’t make myself write murder mysteries. Murder wasn’t something for fun and entertainment. I put that book aside and worked on something else. But then this summer I found myself thinking about it, and I wanted to get closure, so I finished it. And then the timeline worked out so that I needed to do a Christmas book.

This book is a locked-room mystery, but with a paranormal twist. I ended up having a lot of fun writing it, and I think that the emotions I associated with it because of everything that happened around it ended up making it a really strong book, probably the best in this series so far. I’m proud of this one.

I’ve drafted the Christmas book, and I’m about to start revising it. I hope to get it out just before Thanksgiving.

I’m not sure at this point when or if I’ll do more mysteries beyond that. I’ve found that I still don’t really want to read mysteries. I have a few vague possible plot ideas, but nothing firm. We’ll see what pops into my head, but for now I need to take a break from these characters. You’d think I’d learn my lesson about doing two books in the same series in a row. I can’t read two books in a series in a row. And we’ll see how the series sells. It’s been profitable, but based on the time spent writing and the amount it’s earned, I’d have made more money working those hours at a grocery store. There are some promo things I’d like to try, but if things don’t perk up on this series, I may have to call it quits at 7 books and try something else. That’s more books than a regular publisher would have given it before pulling the plug. I tried the move to mystery because it seemed like there was a big crossover audience from the Enchanted, Inc. books to cozy paranormal mysteries, but it seems not. Or else they haven’t found out about it. It’s a pretty crowded field. I don’t know if it’s a visibility/discoverability issue or a problem with the books themselves, but I need things to tick up a bit before I invest a lot more time in these. Or maybe I’m just tired after a few months of crunching and I’ll be eager to return to this series after I work on something else. I’ve actually planned my writing schedule for the next two quarters, so maybe that will help me stay sane.