I owe you an update, and it’s a good one, because I’ve spent the last stretch living in two completely different corners of my brain at once. One foot in a rain-slicked European city with a woman who can’t stop chasing her grandmother’s ghosts. The other foot in Charleston, in a house that’s decided it’s done keeping secrets. Let me walk you through where both stand.
Deliberately Lost is done-done
This one just came out the other side of a full developmental and line edit, and it grew in the process. What started as 27 chapters is now 31, sitting around 76,000 words, and every one of those new chapters earned its place.
If you haven’t been following along: this is Maxine’s book. She’s a travel blogger who built her whole platform on other people’s stories, and now she’s chasing the one story she was never supposed to find, her grandmother Marion’s pre-wedding trip through Europe, the one nobody in the family talks about. It’s paranormal detective noir with a romance running underneath it, and the mystery isn’t decoration. Maxine actually has to solve it. Nobody hands her the answer.
The edit sharpened a few things I’m genuinely proud of. The blog Maxine writes for stays a live threat the entire book, not a device that fades once the plot gets moving, which meant going back through and making sure it was still breathing down her neck in the later chapters. I also rebalanced the love triangle so that Veronica’s advantage over Maxine isn’t romantic charisma, it’s that she’s simply the better writer. That felt more honest, and frankly more dangerous, than the usual competition.
I won’t spoil where it lands, but I’ll say this: I chose the colder ending. The one where Maxine doesn’t get to walk away clean. It’s the version that respects what the book has been building the whole time, even though it was tempting to soften it.
The chapters are locked, and I’m in the middle of one last read-through before it’s fully ready for release.
Dead Reckoning just crossed the biggest finish line
This is the one that’s been eating my brain for months, and I finally have a complete draft, prologue through epilogue. Book 3 of Inconveniently Haunted, and the one that’s been waiting to happen since the wedding night spell in book one.
Dani inherits her biological mother Margaret’s house in Charleston, and almost immediately the house stops being a house and starts being a Waystation, a sanctuary for the kind of people who need somewhere safe to land. Threaded through it is the story of her biological father, Julian Reyes, who died the same night he saved infant Dani from a Regency operative. That loss has been sitting underneath this whole series, and this is the book where it finally surfaces.
What I care most about right now, before a single editorial pass touches it, is that the whole found family made it into this book intact. Dani, Bex, Zora, Erin, Lizzie, Spencer, every one of them is present or accounted for in every scene, because a book about a house that takes people in shouldn’t leave any of its own people standing outside. Bex and Dani are married by this point. Zora and Lizzie are together. Marcus, Spencer’s partner, is carrying his own complications as a werewolf caught up in everything happening at 14 Corbie Alley.
A full draft is a real milestone, but it’s not the finish line, it’s the start of the next stretch: developmental work, continuity passes, all the sentence-level care that turned Deliberately Lost into what it is now. Dead Reckoning is going to get that same attention before it’s ready for you.
Where that leaves us
One book polished and staged for release. One book freshly drafted and about to go under the knife. Different stages, same amount of care going into both. I’ll keep you posted as Dead Reckoning moves through edits, and I’ll let you know the moment Deliberately Lost has a release date.
Thanks for sticking with me through both of these. It means a lot to have people who care where Maxine ends up, and who Dani’s house decides to save next.
