Hello, friends. Happy new year! Once again, it’s been a while. Now that I have a Patreon account, I try to update my subscribers over there each month, which means I’ve been visiting this blog less. (If you’d like to keep up with my writing and other parts of my life, you can subscribe to my Patreon feed for as little as $1 per month. Shameless plug now over…)

That said, I am going to try to update my website blog more frequently, even if only to keep track of new releases! My latest is Between the Dawn and Day, the second book in my urban fantasy series where alien refugees live on the fringes of society, Kenzie Shepherd may well be the last daughter of a long-dead planet, and Ava Westbrook wishes everyone could just get along. Inspired by Supergirl in general and SuperCorp in particular, this series covers new territory for me, and has been super (heh, heh) fun to write.

I don’t think I posted at all about Girls of Summer book #6, Under the Lights, in which Emma, Jamie, and their USWNT teammates return for additional adventures set after the 2015 World Cup. That book came out in June 2021, my first book since Drum Up the Dawn in mid-2020. Like many writers and other creative types, I’ve struggled with production during the pandemic. 2020 was also rough due to my mother’s death just before the first lockdown, so yeah. I’m glad to be through that difficult period.

2021 has been a bit better. The kids went back to school with masks and are now fully vaccinated–woot! Last summer, even with the kids and myself unvaccinated (for health reasons, ugh), we managed to drive from Washington State to Minnesota without setting foot in a single building thanks to the awesome camper our families helped us purchase. We were also able to camp throughout Washington State, which lessened our cabin fever immensely. The first trip that took us more than an hour from home last June involved a circumnavigation of the Olympic Peninsula. While camping at Kalaloch on the Pacific Ocean, we met a group of queer families on a group camping adventure, and they kindly invited us to share in their activities, from beach soccer to chatting over campfires. Talk about an amazing welcome back into the world!

My writing mojo has also returned, slowly but steadily. I managed to get two books done in 2021 (Under the Lights and Between the Dawn and Day), and I worked on two others: Galaxy Girl #3, tentatively titled Ends of the Earth, and my queer revisioning of Jane Austen’s Emma. I’m looking forward to completing those in 2022, preferably sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, we’re hunkering down in our house in the woods surrounded by way too much snow, expecting a few more inches this weekend along with high winds, and crossing our fingers that the power doesn’t go out. A bit of an extreme winter this year, but we were due after the past few milder ones. We’re definitely getting in some excellent sledding adventures!

Happy new year again. If you get a chance to pick up the new book(s), thanks for your support. I’m actually releasing Galaxy Girl #2 and #3 first on Kindle Unlimited, which Amazon advertises as Netflix for books. All the “free” books on KU were becoming difficult to compete with, so if you can’t beat ’em… We’ll see how it goes. If you subscribe to KU, you can download Between the Dawn and Day for free. Although if you’d like to buy it, I would appreciate that, too. I earn a larger royalty through purchases. But either way, happy reading!

Stay warm, stay healthy, and here’s wishing you a wonderful start to 2022!