The Apology You Should Have Gotten

Hellloooooo my lovely ones!! Much to share today but I’m feeling flirty so I’m going to save book news till the end - as usual, you are the first to see A Brand New Thing, so please keep it a secret until 9AM EST on May 13th! After that, if you feel like screaming with me, it’ll be all over my Instagram. Come by, why don’t you?

Anyway I’ve been sitting on this essay for a bit, and it merits some trigger warnings, so if you need to scroll on by, I’ve put a big chonk of text below that says OKAY IT’S SAFE. Read with care! <3

(TW: death of a complicated parent, addiction)

Recently, I saw a post on Threads (and pls friends if you see me on that hellsite, tell me to get off) asking a question I think about a lot:

What can I do to move past someone who has wronged me deeply?

There were some funny answers along the lines of throwing the betrayer into the La Brea Tar Pits, but alas, as your perpetually earnest autistic friend, I replied with a little trick I learned in therapy:

Write yourself the apology this person should already have given you.

In my life, I’ve gotten myself stuck many a time, waiting for someone to apologize to me. As it turns out, that is a trap. I was hungry for validation and closure, but those were just the shiny bait hiding the steel hook. For all the years I spent tethered to those old hurts, I didn’t get one single morsel of apology from the person who hurt me. I think maybe the closest I ever got to someone saying “sorry” was the time this woman named Heather told me she’d run into my ex a while back and he told her that he realized he’d been a real asshole to me. I mean, if the chain of who said what to whom is so convoluted that it’s hard for a professional writer to explain what happened, I think we can agree: that’s not an apology.

Of course, this made me think about romance.

In some ways, romance is speculative fiction. I don’t necessarily write about the world we live in as much as I write about the world we could live in. A better world, frankly. And I think the huge uptick in romance readership in the past few years shows that readers are hungry for that better world.

We want to see the things we don’t get enough of in our real lives, and perhaps the most important of those things is justice. Much is made of the spice in romance novels, but seeing people get what they deserve — whether that’s scorching sex, true love, or being taken down a peg or two — might be better than sex, actually.

My favorite example of justice in romance is the apology that comes after one of the main characters screws up and hurts the one they love. They know their beloved deserves an apology, and WOW do they ever give it to them. They admit they fucked up, acknowledge the harm their fuckup caused, express genuine remorse, and name the ways they have already started working to make up for their mistake. I can’t tell you how healing it is for me personally to see people — even fictional ones — stepping the fuck up and humbling themselves simply because it’s the right thing to do. It is just *chef’s kiss*.

Alas, in real life, you sometimes have to give that apology to yourself. Since learning to craft the apologies I should have gotten, I’ve written myself letters from a number of people I once cared for deeply. Writing them is both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world, and reading them is both predictably sad and surprisingly freeing. There’s nothing stopping you from giving this feeling to yourself, my loves. Hell, you can write a 363-page apology to yourself, if you like!

Why 363 pages? Well, it happens to be the page count of FOSSIL FEUD.

Preorder FOSSIL FEUD and feel like THIS

If you’ve read the ARC (you can click here to request it on Netgalley, by the way!), there’s a quiet line about apologies in Chapter 24. Ripley realizes that one thing she and James have in common is that they will never stop hoping that the parents who hurt them will one day find a way to apologize, so they themselves can find a way to forgive.

I’ve talked about Complicated Parents before. They’re a well-known trope, both because they’re a great shortcut for character development and because a lot of us have Complicated Parents in real life.

My own dad was one such Complicated Parent. Two and a half years ago, he was diagnosed with an advanced case of a disease that is common among people with alcoholism. Barely three weeks before Rules for Second Chances was released in June of 2024, he died.

I wrote and edited much of my second novel during his final illness.The Ripple Effect’s main character, Stellar Byrd, struggles with what it means to see the face of your Complicated Parent every time you look at your sister—or, for that matter, any time you catch a glimpse of your own reflection. Stellar’s father is not a good man, and he’s literally inside her, in her very bones, so what does that say about Stellar herself?

The tricky thing about my dad’s death was that I suffered the loss of both the Complicated Father I had and the shadow of the good father I deserved but did not get to have, even at the end. It was the death of any possibility that he would ever, ever apologize, or even acknowledge what he had done. I would never be able to offer him my forgiveness because he had never asked for it—neither for his own sake, nor for mine. He would never read my books.

He would never have read them anyway.

If The Ripple Effect was me waiting to receive an apology as the clock counted down to midnight, FOSSIL FEUD is the apology I gifted to myself after the numbers rolled over to a new day.

I wrote Ripley’s father, Steve Adams, for me. For me, I made him the best goddamn father in history, and I mean one hundred million years of history. He teaches his daughter everything she needs to know about love, whether that’s a shared passion for dinosaurs or how to accept a hug without overthinking it. He’s been through a serious illness, and Ripley must confront what it would mean to lose a parent whom she loves dearly, a man who has given her his best and still screwed up and apologized and tried again, for her whole life. He is her safe landing place, her greatest champion, her wise mentor. Her dad — the best man she’s ever known.

Steve Adams is the father a lot of us should have had, and didn’t. But in a better world — a just world; a romance world — we can have the things that heal our hearts. It’s not that romance gives readers “unrealistic expectations” or teaches us that love has to be perfect. It’s that we should be able to expect to be treated fairly by the people who love us. And by the people who don’t love us anymore. And by everyone else, too.

And if they don’t treat us well?

Then they should fucking APOLOGIZE.

Preorder the apology you deserve <3<3<3

OKAY!!! Who among you noticed that the header at the top of this message was perhaps a little different this fine day??? O.O

YES IT IS TRUE! FOSSIL FEUD has gotten an absolutely smashing glow-up for the full wrap and I could not be more excited!! The cover art by the sublimely talented Sophia Chunn is as saucy and loaded with possibility as always, but I have to admit (in my nerdy Star Wars heart) that the title text was my special fave and LOOK AT IT NOW!! It pops its little heart out! It is pink like Ripley’s shirt, and also Ellie Sattler’s shirt in the original Jurassic Park movie! There are bones on the spine! I frickin LOVE. IT. And peep that amazing blurb from Canadian icon Hannah Bonam-Young!

Just a reminder: PLEASE DON’T REVEAL the new cover until 9AM ET tomorrow, May 13th! I’ve never had a leak, but some author friends of mine tell me they don’t post secrets to newsletters anymore . . . I dunno, I feel like we have a relationship of trust going on in here??

In other news, FOSSIL FEUD has a Goodreads Giveaway for 50 paperback ARCs going on right now—maybe try to win one of those if you want to possess both the original cover and the final cover?? Might be just me, but the ARCs seem even more intensely collectible now?

ENTER THE GOODREADS GIVEAWAY

Keep your eyes open for my official US preorder campaign announcement from Lovebound Books, coming as soon as I can jam everything onto my socials! Every order comes with a signed bookplate, art card, and Clever Girl sticker, not to mention my undying love! Just to remind you, my Canadian store is Evermore Books in Ottawa and they will have all the same swag.

AND . . . FOSSIL FEUD is coming to the UK, Australia, and New Zealand! I’ve already asked my team at Penguin Random House to please make the Netgalley ARC available in these territories (and Canada, lol) so rest assured I have your backs! Please send thoughts and prayers as Real British People will be reading my straitlaced, proper, yearning British hero and possibly sighing deeply into their Earl Grey, hah.

That’s all I’ve got, my loves. Thank you to everyone who’s requested and read and reviewed and said the most wildly lovely things on Netgalley and Goodreads, y’all humble me every day.