I am figuring it out and you get to watch
Here is something I have learned about myself recently: I contain multitudes. Specifically, I contain two very different writers who apparently share a brain and a coffee habit but not much else.
Let me back up.
The pause on book three
Inconveniently Haunted was always going to be a trilogy. A Haunting Before I Do, The Static, and one more book to close it out properly. I know that. I believe that. I am just not ready to write it yet. Book three deserves to be the ending, and right now I do not have the ending. So I am putting it down gently and trusting that it will be there when I do.
This is not giving up. This is not losing the thread. This is me being honest that forcing it would make it worse, and these characters deserve better than that.
The shiny thing
In the meantime, something new has pulled at me. A Harlo Malone story called Blood Ledger, though I will be honest with you: that name probably will not survive. The story I originally tried to write went somewhere too dark, too heavy, and I followed it right off the edge before I realized it was not a Harlo story anymore. So I am starting fresh. Same bones, different register. Lighter. Warmer. More like itself.
Is this shiny object syndrome? Maybe a little. But it feels like more than that today, and I have learned to trust that feeling.
The other writer
Here is where it gets interesting. While I have been sorting through what is ready to edit, I have noticed something: the other manuscripts do not belong to Harlo. They are darker. Spicier. They have storylines that go places Harlo does not go. Apparently I have a whole other creative register that has been quietly writing its own things this whole time.
That writer is Ruby Devereau.
I am still figuring out what this means for how I show up here and what I share and when. Two voices, two vibes, two audiences that might overlap a little or might not at all. I do not have it sorted yet, but I am sitting with it.
If Ruby is your vibe
If the darker, spicier side of things sounds more like what you are looking for, Ruby has a Substack and an Instagram. I will not be keeping them updated as frequently, but they are there:
rubydevereau.substack.com AND instagram.com/rubydevereau
Go find her if she sounds like your kind of trouble.
For now I will be here, figuring out who Harlo is next, and apparently rewriting a book that finally knows what it wants to be.
More soon.
Harlo
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