The one where I finally hit publish
I finished the book.
I mean I actually finished it. Edited it, formatted it, wrote the copyright page and the dedication and the about the author and the book description and figured out KDP categories and keywords and royalty percentages. I did all of it. The book is done and it is sitting there waiting for me to hit a button and let it exist in the world.
And I am scared out of my mind.
Here is the cover.
I drew it myself.
I want to say that plainly because I think it matters. I couldn’t afford a cover artist. I have been sick for a long time and money has been tight and the list of things I couldn’t afford was longer than I wanted it to be. But the book needed a cover and I needed the book to exist, so I sat down and I drew it. It is a cafe style pen and ink sketch of the museum in the book, the Museum of Ephemeral Arts, a converted Victorian townhouse attached to a mismatched seventies annex that collects the last of things.
I am not a great artist. I will tell you that upfront. But when I look at this cover I get excited, and it feels real in a way nothing else about this process has made it feel real, and I think that counts for something.
The book is called The Museum of Ephemeral Arts: A Mel Jones Mystery.
Mel Jones has been aware of the dead since she was nine years old. When she takes a job as a tour guide at the Museum of Ephemeral Arts she immediately knows the east corridor is trying to tell her something. What she finds buried behind a wall built to hide it changes everything. A lost WPA mural. A Romani artist who died in 1938 under circumstances nobody looked at too closely. And a love story that has been waiting eighty-six years for someone to find it.
It is a paranormal cozy mystery. It has a slow burn romance. It has a found family of museum staff who become the people Mel didn’t know she needed. It has a cat named Jolene who has opinions. And it has a ghost who has been waiting long enough.
I have been working on this book for a while. Longer than I planned. I have been sick and I have been scared and there have been days when finishing felt impossible and days when it felt like the only thing keeping me functional. My wife has been beside me through all of it, which is the part of this I am most grateful for and the hardest part to put into words.
I am neurodivergent in several directions at once, which means I feel everything about this very loudly and all at the same time. The excitement and the terror and the pride and the doubt are not taking turns. They are all just here, simultaneously, at full volume.
But I am ready.
I am scared and I am ready and those two things are apparently not mutually exclusive, which is something I am choosing to believe today.
The book goes live soon. I will post the link the moment it does.
If you have been here since the beginning, thank you. If you just arrived, welcome. Either way, I am glad you are here for this part.
The museum is waiting.
Find the book and everything else at harlomalone.com
Come find me on Substack at harlowrites.substack.com
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