This probably isn’t a big deal to anyone but me, but six months ago I moved to a city I’ve never lived in before, never wanted to live in, and would have put money on the fact I never would live in. 

It doesn’t feel like home, but there are things I like about it. For one thing, it’s a lot smaller than the city I moved from, and the smaller-town feel speaks to my hermit heart. I like the hills and nearby mountains. 

Also, I now live closer to my Beckstead relatives, so that’s notable. Beckstead was not a name I ever heard on a regular basis in my last city, but in this small corner of my state, I hear the name Beckstead a lot more often. I can pretty much guarantee any Beckstead here came from my Becksteads.

I spent my life living far away from cousins and any place connected to my family history. In my new town, my great-great grandfather is buried in the local cemetery. He ran a sawmill here with my great-grandfather. They settled a place originally called Rattlesnake, so named for obvious reasons–there were lots of rattlesnakes there. *Shudder* There are piles and piles of distant cousins living within shouting distance. So that’s kinda fun. 

We had our first snow last week. Early October. Early snow is not okay with me. But I guess one good thing about heavy winters is the option to stay indoors and do lots and lots of writing!

So yeah, there’s an update on me. The above picture was taken out the back window of my new place after our snow last week. Note the sagebrush. It’s everywhere here!

I’m kidding. There exists no comprehensive list of all the stories I’ve ever written. But hey, I’d love to tell you about some of them! It all started a long, long time ago…

(Harp music playing.)

I’ve been writing stories ever since I was about six, some of them in crayon. Tethered by Blood is the first to be published. Between the crayon stories and Tethered by Blood, there have been some fascinating tales of fantasy, adventure, and…lawn mowing. Of course, there’s a chance I might be biased on just how fascinating they were.

There was the story I wrote in the third grade about a new girl at school (shortly after I had also been the new girl at school when we moved states).  The highlight of the story, in my eyes, was when the girl placed her peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the seat next to her in the cafeteria, and her teacher sat on it without noticing and walked away with jelly smeared across her backside. I read it to my family and had them roaring with laughter.

Somewhere around the fifth or sixth grade I decided to try rewriting fairy tales. The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel.  I kept the classic plot of the fairy tales, but I got creative with the details.  In The Three Little Pigs, I made the first little pig a former track star, and the second a heavyweight wrestling champion, while the third was attending Harvard.  Meanwhile, the wolf was a chain smoker. 

In Cinderella, her fairy godmother was actually a godfather and a long-haired hippy who, when he waved his magic wand, always uttered the magic words, “Be bop, de bow.”  Goldilocks had a bedwetting problem, Sleeping Beauty had halitosis, and Rapunzel had lice.  And on and on and on.  My stories entertained my siblings.  So I kept at it. 

In high school I took a creative writing class. One story I wrote was about two retired old men who took care of the grass at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.  There was a lot of lawn mowing and lemon drop eating in that story. This may have been my first legitimate original idea. Unfortunately I had no idea how to end it, and on the advice of my teacher I concluded the story with, “And then he woke up.”

My next story was about a couple of guys out to have the best summer of their lives.  Really what they ended up doing was belly-flopping a lot in the local public pool, getting jobs flipping burgers, and joining the local community theater.  All of these were things that, strangely enough, I had recently read novels about.  My characters may have been semi-original, but the plot was all stolen.

And there are probably about a hundred more half-finished stories in my past! Just wait…you never know when one of these stories might pop up around here.

What do you think? Do any of these sound like something you’d like to read?

Guess what, guys? Tethered by Blood has now been released for two whole weeks! I hope you’ve had a chance to read it. If not, what are you waiting for? Click here to purchase it as an ebook or paperback! 

Meanwhile, I am currently writing the sequel, which shall be called…drum roll, please…

…wait for it…

Shadowed by Death!

Book 2 will be released later in 2018. Stay tuned for an official release date.

Stories tend to evolve over time. Tethered by Blood certainly did. Here’s how.

I remember as a child sitting on a sandbar and watching the ocean drift in and out. People littered the beach, playing in the surf, building sandcastles, hunting for shells. A boy sat nearby, older than me. The tides didn’t interest him. The warm day didn’t interest him. He hardly seemed aware of the sand beneath him.

He’d been led to the beach by an older woman who left his side in favor of feeding macaroni to the seagulls. I spoke with her and assisted as she spooned pasta out of a bowl onto the sand. Seagulls flocked nearer, eager for a taste. I must have been hungry, because I remember wondering why she was throwing away perfectly good macaroni rather than eating it.

I could tell the boy was mentally disabled. He didn’t talk or look around or seem aware of anything but his own world. The seagulls didn’t interest him. He just sat there and tugged at his hair and stared at a place a few feet in front of him. A smattering of self-inflicted sores covered his face and head.

The image of that boy remained with me over the years. In a college writing course, I reimagined the scene in a short story. In my fictional version, teenagers picked on a mentally disabled boy at the beach, and my character, another teenage boy, defended him. I titled it “Out of Control,” because my teenage boy character had an anger control problem.

Later, in another writing class, the professor challenged us to radically revise a story we’d written, changing major elements to breathe new life into something old. I took my beach scene and plopped it down in the middle of a fantasy world. I made the teenage boy into a wizard apprentice and the boy he defended into someone his tormentors called “the fool.” In the end the wizard apprentice realized that while everyone called the picked-on boy a fool, he, the apprentice, was the real fool.

The story was a vast improvement over my earlier attempt.

More years passed, and I decided to enter a first chapter contest. Lacking any completed first chapters that I felt were good enough, I took my short story, which I’d previously titled The Fool, and further revised it, adding in the fact that “he” was actually a girl in disguise, and tacking on an appearance at the end of the chapter of a formidable new master.

The chapter won first place. People kept asking me how much of the book was written and how soon I’d try to publish it. It didn’t even seem to be a question to them whether I would write it. The question to them was when.

And so I plotted and wrote. Then I replotted and rewrote. Finally, one day, I felt like I’d done enough.

In its new form, the title “The Fool” no longer fit, and so I retitled it “Tethered by Blood,” a nod to the core conflict of the book.

So there you go. The full evolution of Tethered by Blood to date. 

I can’t believe we’re just nineteen days out from its release!

Big news, people. I have a release date!

May 29, 2018.

Yep. That is the date that Tethered by Blood will see the light of day.

More than that, the book is now available to preorder!

Additionally, for everyone who subscribes to my newsletter, you will receive a free copy of the first four chapters of the book.

Yes, all kinds of news to report today!

Announcing my first book, coming soon to Amazon! It’s called Tethered by Blood, book one in The Counterfeit Apprentice Series. The book will release soon, so subscribe for updates and I’ll let you know when.