Gosh, is it August already? Really??
I don’t know why I’m surprised. I always feel this way when it gets into the second half of the year—like the first half of the year didn’t actually happen, and tomorrow I’ll wake up, and it’ll still be January.
It’s not January, folks! It’s August! Which means we have only four months until advance copies (ARCs) of Desire & Deceit go out. As always, here is the button for that sign up link.
I am seventy-seven percent done with line edits, which means that much of the book is ready for you guys to read and judge and possibly throw across the room.
But wait, there’s more!
In addition to Amazon, you can officially purchase ebook copies of Luc & Lila from Google Play, Kobo+, and Barnes & Noble Press. You can also purchase physical copies of Luc & Lila from Barnes & Noble Press (the online store, not physical stores), and I recommend purchasing paperbacks from them over Amazon as their print quality seems to be much nicer (at least from the books I’ve gotten myself).
I have been wanting to have Luc & Lila available somewhere other than Amazon for a while, and I’m so happy I was able to directly upload the book to all of those platforms, which is more cost-effective for me than going through a third-party distributor, such as IngramSpark.
Moving forward, I will have the Universal Book Link (as opposed to the Amazon store link) for Luc & Lila down at the bottom of this email, and it will have all of the places you can buy it from.
Preorders for Desire & Deceit will still only be available on Amazon for reasons [gestures vaguely to the madness that is book publishing], but after it releases, you will be able to purchase it in all of those places.
In case you missed it, there is a preview chapter of Desire & Deceit free to download at the button below.
Desire & Deceit Preview Chapter
Happy Reading!
My author mini-interview for the month of August is with my third beta reader for Desire & Deceit, H. K. Sears. She is the author of The Phantom’s Bride, a YA Regency-era historical fantasy, about a young woman being haunted by her betrothed’s murdered brother. I had the honor of reading an early copy last year, and it is a magical piece of storytelling with stunning prose that completely immerses you in the time period. I cannot wait for the next book in the series, The Phantom’s Curse, which she is currently hard at work on.
As someone who grew up reading a lot of historical fiction, I’m always curious about what draws people to write about particular time periods. Why did you choose the Regency setting for your debut series? Do you think you will write more in this period once the series is done or branch out to other settings?
This is always an interesting question for me because the decision was mostly made for me! The Phantom’s Bride started life as a university assignment where we had to write a script for a ten minute radio drama, and I’d settled on doing a ghost story set during the London frost fairs, just because it was going to be so juicy for sound! And I chose the 1814 frost fair simply because it was the era I was most familiar with (I was on a deadline and didn’t have much time for research!). I knew I loved Regency as I’d read Austen throughout my teens, and it was around that time I was reading the Bridgerton books for the first time, so everything just fell into place for it.
And yes! I’d love to come back and write more Regency stories one day! The social structure and the inner workings of the ton are so fascinating to me, but the ideas I have for my next projects actually take me back a century or two further - one is set in 17th century Scotland, and the other would be more suited to the Elizabethan era. But I’m excited for it all!
One really cool (or really foreboding!) piece of magic in the story is the ability of word weavers to turn spoken stories into reality. Where did you get the idea for this element?
Yes! This is my absolute favourite thing about The Phantom’s Bride - it allows me to get up to so much mischief as an author. The inspiration came from The Binding by Bridget Collins. It’s such a beautiful, heartwarming love story (and one of my absolute favourite books!), but in this world you can “forget” awful or traumatic parts of your life by having a book binder bind those memories into a story. I remember becoming obsessed with that idea of storytelling itself being part of the magic system, so I really leant into that when brainstorming the word weavers.
There are two main characters in The Phantom’s Bride: the bride, Camilla, and a down-on-his-luck storyteller, Finley. Do you have a favorite POV to write between the two of them? If so, who and why?
I can’t believe you’re making me choose! I love them both so I’m going to cheat.
For The Phantom’s Bride, I’d have to say Finley is my favourite POV (sorry Camilla!). My all time favourite scenes from book 1 are with Finley and the company - some of those chapters are definitely the comic relief in an otherwise quite dark story, and they were such a blast to write. But I think as well that Finley grows as a character much more than Camilla does, as you see him dealing with the heartbreaking backstory of his mother and then completely rediscovering the world and himself when he learns about his talents as a word weaver. I think all that suffering and how he responded to it was more challenging for me to write than the Steinbauer brothers’ mystery and Camilla’s life with the ton, so it was more satisfying for me as an author.
BUT now that I’m writing book 2, The Phantom’s Curse, I’ve been loving Camilla’s POV chapters a lot more! I won’t give too much away, but Camilla heads off to Prussia and gets wrapped up in the Anhalt curse, and makes some very questionable and very stupid decisions that are a lot of fun to write!
I read five books this month!
I read an ARC of Harnessed in Gold by Mara Heath. The first book in her college fantasy romance series, Caged in Silver, was one of my favorite reads of last year, so I was super excited for the second one, and it did not disappoint! As with the first, I read this in one day. I just couldn’t put it down.
It’s difficult to say much about this book because if you haven’t read the first one, my notes on the second one would be very spoilery. However, if you want a set of novels that truly captures the college experience while also having a good bit of fantasy world building (particularly in the second book; the first book is more suspenseful with unexplained phenomenon), a steamy slow burn (that really picks up steam in the second book), a very relatable FMC, and a lot of humor throughout, I highly recommend this series.
It should be a trilogy when it’s complete, and believe me, it is well worth it to get invested now! Harnessed in Gold will release on August 10, 2026.
I read The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and fell in love with her lovely prose all over again. I also finished this book in a day. I had fallen for the premise of this historical noir immediately: a con artist in 1940s Mexico who writes love letters to lonely women in order to steal their money? a spinster harboring secrets in an old boardinghouse? the niece that threatens to upend all of the con man’s plans to make away with her fortune?
Where do I sign up?
At the library, obviously, which is where I got my copy on, like, the day of release! (This never happens—I wait months, I tell you. Months!)
Anyway, this was just as charming and suspenseful and seductive as it promised to be. So many little details immerse you in the time period and the way each character moves through the world given their social class. I really enjoyed having all three points of view—the con man’s, the widow’s, and the niece’s—which was something I did not expect going in. It definitely added layers of history (read: generational trauma) to the story as well as layers of suspense to the plot.
This book had a very Bonnie-and-Clyde feel to the slow burn romance between the con man and the niece, but with everything that’s revealed, you really do root for them to get away with it. Crime has never felt so good.
I read The Gravewood by Kelly Andrew. I think I finished this book in two days but only because life stole me away from it. This was my first book by this author, and now I really want to read her backlist. It’s part one of a darkly romantic YA vampire duology that is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and the take on vampires and how they are linked to what’s happened to the world was very unique to me.
This is the sort of toxic, bloody romance I will one hundred percent devour every time. We have blood bartering for scarce resources, an unhinged love triangle, paranormal bonds that blur the line between affection and obsession, and some pretty gruesome consequences to the fantasy plot. I would have stayed up till 3 AM reading this in high school.
But just to warn you, the cliffhanger ending is brutal.
I read The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox by Katrina Kwan. May I just say that Kwan is hilarious? I love the humor she puts into her books, regardless of the setting. Her dialogue, especially, has so much delicious sass.
This is a fast-paced, action-packed story with a really cool (also terrifying lol) fantasy take on Hell, but my favorite part, of course, was the romance. This has an enemies-to-lovers subplot that is excellently done. So much banter, I love it! But also, a lot of heart and depth that makes it feel rather epic given the high stakes that I actually can’t reveal without spoiling the book (oops!).
The basic premise is that a nine tailed fox (possibly the last of her kind) is captured by a demon hunter, but she ends up dragging him and his subordinates with her when he tries to banish her to Hell. Then they have to work together to get out while facing many demons from all of their respective pasts. The found family aspect was wonderful in this! At the beginning, you will have no idea how these people will be able to work together, but by the end, your heart will be so full from the ways they are able to help and heal each other.
Finally, I listened to the audiobook of Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, which was honestly the best thing I could have listened to while I was on the train heading to visit my dad in the hospital.
Oh, yeah, a bit of backstory there, which I suppose will count for my personal news this month. In mid-July, my dad was at church when he started sweating and struggling to breathe. The church staff called 911, and he was rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a heart attack. They cleaned out one of his arteries and put in a stent, and he has an outpatient surgery this month to clean out a second one and put in a second stent. Honestly, the fact that he made it to the hospital so quickly truly saved his life, and I’m so grateful that he was in church when it happened.
My dad has always been my biggest supporter; he raised me as a single parent and gave me every opportunity he could afford (and some he really couldn’t). My husband and I live several states away from him and my stepmom now, so I took a train down to be with him in the hospital. It was a fifteen hour train ride, overnight, but I can’t sleep sitting up (ever, anywhere), so I listened to an audiobook.
One of my friends had recommended Remarkably Bright Creatures before this happened, and it seemed like the type of story that would distract me without requiring intense focus, so I put it on, and I loved it.
This is literary fiction with a dose of magical realism. It’s a story about a widow who works the night shift at a local aquarium, cleaning to keep busy, and about the octopus she befriends there who holds the key to finding out what happened to her son who mysteriously vanished when he was eighteen. It’s about a future that she wouldn’t have imagined possible showing up at the strangest time. And it’s about the simple wonders of nature that put everything in perspective.
It’s a gentle story in that it has the feeling of a bunch of anecdotes being told one after the other. You don’t necessarily see how everything connects until you’re a good ways in, but it also only requires you to be present and take in one thing at a time. My favorite aspect of this story was by far the octopus’s chapters—yes, the octopus is a POV character, and his sections are hilarious. The narrator in the audiobook captured his snarkiness so well, and I have to believe this is how all octopuses feel about humans now. You cannot convince me otherwise.
The ending is tear-jerking in some ways, but very healing in others. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I plan to!
Desire & Deceit (ebook preorder)
She was Lucifer’s lover. She was Heaven’s hostage. Now Lila is something else entirely.
The Fall of Lucifer. The Creation of Earth. But make it a love story.
Short stories, including one in which you kill your neighbor, one that may or may not be Luc & Lila origin material, and a Christmas-vibes vampire/human romance with dark undertones.
I shared my personal news for this month in the final book rec section where I talk about Remarkably Bright Creatures. Other than that one terrifying week, things have been pretty normal day-to-day. I did go for my annual checkup, and the doctor tells me I’m still breathing, so there’s that!
Until next month, take care out there.
Jodi :)
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