“Artists: Do not ask what a work of art means. Ask what a work of art does to you. Art is not a thing or a noun. Art is a verb. Art is something that does something to you.” ~ Jerry Saltz

Drowning (Moon Lake Book Two) ia available now everywhere.

This fall I’m going to be working on a new writing project altogether, something you’ve never seen before. From anyone. It’s quite large, so I can’t say when it will be out. We’ll see what we see. I’ll try and keep you posted.

In the meantime, here’s Drowning to tide you over.

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Cole held Savannah in his arms as long as he dared. She hadn’t so much as stirred since collapsing in his bed just a few hours earlier. He debated raising hell with Grant this early in the AM versus risking an argument with Savannah when she finally did wake up. It was still dark outside when he curled one large bicep around the brunette and used the other to reach for the phone. He kept it in silent mode as he typed. 

Need the day off. 

He knew Grant wouldn’t like it, but so what? Cole hadn’t had a day off since they’d stepped off the plane in Boise months ago. He was due, and Savannah needed him. To his surprise, Cole’s former Marine Captain texted him back rather quickly. 

Me, too. Fishing?

Cole frowned and tapped his thumbs on the keyboard in the dark.

Can’t.

If he thought that would be the end of it, he was deluding himself. Grant Daniels ran the Moon Lake Lodge the same way he’d run their unit in the Corps. With zero tolerance for bullshit.

Why? — came the answer.

The Cap somehow managed to sound imperious even in 10-point font. Cole didn’t feel like typing out a long-winded explanation. And what would he say, anyway? He had no idea how long she’d be at his place. For all he knew, she’d play dumb again, pass off her promise to give him anything he wanted in exchange for a place to crash as just another drunken faux pas. Then he’d get her paws right in his puss. 

He sniffed. 

Speaking of puss. 

He looked down at the half-dressed New York debutante. She wasn’t quite naked. She was wearing a bra and matching panties. Cute, but that wouldn’t do. Not at all.

Savannah’s with me, he typed. He pressed send. 

The reply was swift and brutal.

I don’t care if she let you go around the world. Get your ass to the cabins by 0730. 

Cole sighed quietly.

He’d hoped the Cap’s girlfriend, Paige, would have done a better job blunting the man’s sharp edges. But apparently the Captain was only soft for his woman. 

Meanwhile, Cole was getting hard for his. 

His dick was a bastard. 

Good thing the rest of him wasn’t. 

Cole copied and pasted the headline he’d discovered the night before. Rereading it still managed to stir murderous feelings in him. 

Real Estate Mogul Caught Running Underage Prostitution Ring.

Cole hated sharing Savannah’s business like this, but the Cap’s self-imposed social media boycott would only isolate him for so long. Eventually, Paige and Tallulah would know, if they didn’t already. Indeed, half the world knew by now. The other half was merely still asleep. 

Grant’s response was as quick as before, reminding Cole that although the older man shunned most forms of technology, it wasn’t because Grant didn’t know how to use them. 

Take as much time as you need. 

Cole smiled. It was good when the boss had your back, in and out of the field. He turned his phone completely off and picked up Savannah’s phone too. Then he unzipped her suitcase. Quietly, he set about separating Savannah from her clothes, so she couldn’t leave, and her gun, so she couldn’t shoot him when she discovered that she couldn’t leave, and her phone so she couldn’t do anything stupid with it.

He put them all into the bottom of his foot locker. Just before he closed the lid, he selected a pristine white folded handkerchief and a pair of stainless-steel handcuffs. Then he closed the trunk and slid the cool steel of the padlock back into place.

Cole had never met a woman as resourceful as Savannah, except maybe Tallulah. If she called Tallulah for help, Cole was almost half convinced the pixie really would just wave a magic wand at the footlocker and pop it open like an overripe gourd. But Savannah, he was sure, couldn’t get the locker open even with a hammer, and he knew she’d never find the key.

Now, he stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at Savannah’s sleeping form. It seemed a shame to wake her. But you could only find out so much from an unconscious person. Which was not to say you couldn’t discover anything at all from someone who was asleep. You absolutely could. 

For example, Cole had slept beside Savannah enough times now to know that despite what she said, she enjoyed cuddling. She also liked the room temperature a bit on the cooler side, just like he did. 

Six months in the jungle would do that to a man. 

He didn’t have a blanket which might have accounted for some of the cuddling. Cole didn’t mind keeping the temperature a little low every time they were together. He wasn’t above setting up traps for his little fox 

His dick was being a hound, though.

It twitched while he watched her.

He crossed to the bed and gingerly slid the cuffs around one of the rails of the headboard. She’d never slept in his bed before and hadn’t realized it wasn’t like the other hotel beds. It was good for a few surprises. When he was finished, his fingers brushed the gold man’s watch she always wore on her left wrist. 

He had questions about that.

About other things, too.

But this was Savannah’s game.

No questions, she’d said.

And he had agreed.

She had fallen into his trap, but she still set the rules. Of course, she didn’t need to know that she set the rules. Cole extracted information. He didn’t give it. At least not freely. If she wanted anything from him, it would cost her.

Dearly.

As he looked her over, he wondered if she could afford it. Her pride was the monster in the room. Sometimes it took chunks out of lesser men. Cole had seen it. The girl had a jab that had broken at least one nose since Cole had known her. She also had a tongue like a samurai sword, and she wielded it like an Old Master.

Pity, because he found himself wondering what that tongue would feel like on his shaft. 

Too close to her teeth, though. 

If Cole had set a trap for Savannah in his bed, the one in her mouth was far more dangerous. He’d have to tread around it like a land mine. He only had one type of Bouncing Betty in mind. 

He crossed the room again and turned up the thermostat a bit. In just a few minutes, the room would be downright uncomfortable.

Unless you were naked. 

His cock twitched at the thought. 

As many times as he’d been in bed with her, he still hadn’t seen her naked. Unless you counted that moonlit night up over the Rim when Cole had been too far away to touch her, and he did not count that. 

When she’d knocked on his door last night in the wee hours, she’d said he could have whatever he wanted. Cole wanted a lot of things from Savannah. About half of them involved her naked. A few of them required it. 

They could start with that.

Besides, it was harder to lie without any clothes on.

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Savannah woke to the not-unpleasant sensation of Cole’s body stretched out over hers. She liked sleeping with him, though she would never tell him that. He was always warm, something she could find in the night when she opened her eyes and couldn’t stop herself from making sure the bathroom door was shut tight.

His hands slid over her arms and she sighed. She loved it when he touched her. She wished he could touch her everywhere at once, but again, she’d never admit it. It wasn’t until his hands suddenly clamped down on her wrists that she felt a spike of panic. Her eyes fluttered open.

He forced her arms over her head and she heard a sharp, metal click that sent a violent shiver down her spine. It happened so fast. He was pinning her body down with his own weight. She struggled against him until he finally let her go, but she could see— and feel— that it was already too late.

Above her head, her wrists were sporting a pair of silver handcuffs. She jerked on them, hoping the rails of the headboard would give way, but they remained steadfast as she pulled.

“What the fuck?” she hissed. “Get these fucking things—“

Suddenly, Cole had one hand on the back of her neck and the other at her mouth. Before she realized what was happening, he’d stuffed something that felt like fabric between her lips. She tried to bite him, but he pulled his fingers away just in time.

Savannah clamped down on the fabric in her mouth. There was no point in screaming. No one would hear her anyway. She tugged at the cuffs, knowing they wouldn’t give an inch, but still trying, just in case. The steel clanked against the gold of her Cartier watch. There was no escape. No hope for rescue. She looked up at the Marine towering over her with a knife in his hand.

Cole looked down at her, his expression was totally unreadable, but his cock was already beginning to rise to the occasion behind his shorts. Then his lips parted. “Rent’s due.”

So, when last I left you in April, I had 50K words on the Moon Lake Book 2 manuscript. Four months later that word count has jumped to 62K.

That’s not a lot. I’m well aware. The thing is, sometimes I tell myself, “Just shit out a story already. Who cares if it’s good? Who cares how many subplots and how much character development it has? Just get it done!”

But then I think, the majority of people who read my books, actually read them YEARS after I’ve initially published them. For example, just this morning, for some reason as yet unknown to me, I’ve sold 20X more copies of Shooter than I have been selling in recent months. It’s a significant increase. Shooter is 10 years old at this point. But it’s experiencing a mini-Renaissance today for some reason.

So, I can’t put out shitty (to me) books. I can’t just load canon fodder into the tube and pelt you all with it and then move on. Even if many of you didn’t like some of my books, like, say, the Stark Ink series. To this day, I still get emails from people who say, “I had to take care of my parent while they were dying and this series really made me feel like someone out there knew and understood what I was going through.”

Those emails keep me going. Even if I’m not technically PUBLISHING as often as I used to, those emails make me fire up Scrivener, over and over again, try to push through.

So I’ve added 12K words to Moon Lake Book 2. I estimate it’s 2/3rds done. It’s changed a lot since I first conceived it, which is why it’s taking so damn long. But I want to be happy with it. I want people, 10 years from now, clicking randomly on a book to cuddle up with over a rainy weekend, to stumble upon Drowning and think, “Wow. That’s so much more than I was expecting from what appeared to be a Throwaway Romance Novel.”

Can I tell you that Shooter still gets Kindle Pages Read? Shooter has not been enrolled in Kindle Unlimited for over 5 years. So someone has kept Shooter in their very limited list of 5 titles borrowed for more than 5 fucking years at this point. And that’s really the best indicator that you fucking nailed something. Isn’t it? That someone would keep their very limited KU borrow slots occupied with a book I published way back in 2013.

That’s literally a Desert Island book. If you could only take 5 books with you on a desert island, Shooter makes SOMEONE’S top 5. That blows my mind.

It also tells me that I’m on the right track. Even if a blizzard, or a mudslide, covered the track for a while and slowed down my progress. I’m doing something. I’m leaving something behind in my wake that people can go back to 5, 7, 10 years later and still get something out of. And that’s really the whole point, right?

A dude read Shooter once. I have absolutely no idea how. But he emailed me, years ago. He said, “So I read your book.” I was thinking, “How? Why? You have a penis. This conversation should not be happening.”

He said, “I liked your book, actually. But I just wanted you to know that .45 revolvers don’t have safeties on them.”

And I FUCKING KNEW THAT! Because I’m from Indiana, and things like that become part of your operating system even if you, personally, do not own a .45 revolver. But halfway through writing Shooter, I switched the .45 revolver to a Desert Eagle, inspired by the always amazing, supernaturally super sexy, Magnum P.I. “team gun.” And while the revolver has no safety, the Desert Eagle does. It was a continuity error that I didn’t catch. My bad.

But my point is, people read my books that I didn’t expect to read my books. And people like some of my books longer than I expected anyone to like my books. And that’s really what I’m going for, quality (such as it is, typos and all) over quantity.

Anyway, I’m still poking away at Drowning. But I want to get it RIGHT. I want it to be a noir set in the woods of Idaho with a touch of Twin Peaks thrown in. And that’s not as easy to do as you might think. Keep in mind that RIGHT doesn’t necessarily mean “you like it.” You might not. It sucks if you don’t end up liking it, but some people get me. And when they do, it’s better than any other feeling on the planet.

Someone said Shelter “reinvented the erotic thriller genre.” And that’s basically the highest compliment any writer could ever receive.

Savannah is both the Femme Fatale AND the Damsel in the Distress, but in an effort to write her as a compelling character with the most agency possible is a tough task. I work at it every day. And I just hope that, 10 years from now, people stumble onto Moon Lake, like they are doing today, for some reason, with Shooter, and finding something compelling enough for them to keep reading.

So the second Moon Lake book has grown from 30K words to 57K words, just a little over halfway done. It’s the only partially completed manuscript I have, but I am working on it, tinkering away. I’m watching a lot of film noir, The Thin Man, Chinatown, Moon Lake just has that noir feel to it, even though it’s set in the woods of Idaho.

In the background, I’m contemplating a book about Elizabeth Taylor, specifically the movie Cleopatra, which gets a bad rap as “the movie that bankrupted the studio and changed Hollywood” but let’s be honest, the studio was already in the red even before the picture was thought of and it wasn’t Liz’s fault that they tried to shoot it in England and pretend it was Egypt.

I’ll be tinkering with that this summer, YEARS away from actually writing it. But I’ve been wearing a lot of White Diamonds in the afternoon and thinking about La Liz. You know, for a Walgreens toilet water, White Diamonds packs a real punch and I quite like it, even it is only $30 a bottle. I think Liz was onto something there. Some People say it smells like old lady. I want to punch Some People. But not in the nose, as they are obviously already olfactorily challenged.

For Drowning (Moon Lake Book Two) I’m wearing vintage Opium. It smells like Savannah, boozy and peppery with a hint of great sex once you get her in the sack. What are you wearing?

The Rites of Spring in my house include wiping down the baseboards, washing the windows, and watching Enchanted April for like the fourteenth or fifteenth time. Sometimes I follow it up with Ladies in Lavender, Tea with Mussolini, or My House in Umbria. But I’ve put it all off this year for Rebecca. Despite having 2 copies (because I’ve been meaning to read it for so long that I forgot I bought the first copy) I still haven’t read it.

But I’ve seen the movie twice now.

I’m also trying to dust off the second book in the Moon Lake series. It has about 30K words in it already, so I’m not starting from scratch. It’s so floaty, though. Sometimes it feels more like a fantasy than a gritty neo-noir.

I’m also reading Rebecca for the first time to prepare for a family visit. Apparently my brother in law is dating a reader and now I’m not only woefully behind on my marathon training (I think I actually gained 10 pounds during the pandemic) I am now also woefully behind on my To Be Read list.

So I’ve got to finish Rebecca by the first week of April. And hope that some scenes show up for Moon Lake Book 2.

Happy Spring, Campers!

So apparently Brandon Sanderson broke the internet a few weeks ago with his record-breaking kickstarter campaign. I have only read two of his novels so far, but I do own several of his books that I’ve been saving back to start reading.

More importantly, back when I was writing Shooter in 2012, I watched EVERY SINGLE LECTURE of Sanderson’s from his time as a writing professor at BYU. I watched them multiple times and it was, hands down, the single greatest resource that helped me with my writing and figuring out how to actually complete a novel.

These lectures are still available on YouTube and I highly recommend that anyone who is thinking about or in the process of becoming a writer to watch them. He’s a great teacher with very practical ideas and exercises and his lectures are a wealth of information that I couldn’t do without.

I donated to his campaign because there was no way I was missing out on FOUR! new books available in leather-bound editions.

So congratulations to Sanderson for this well-earned victory! He is so generous with his time, his advice, to his fans. He’s an inspiration and has single-handedly helped launch the careers of more writers than he will probably ever know about.

I don’t know why I’m doing this to myself. But…here it is, the book that paralyzed me for 5+ years. At the peak of Burnout, basking in my success as a self-published author, I launched Star Valley, a cowboy version of Burnout. I was so confident, so assured of its success that I did crazy things. I bought Kindle e-readers to giveaway at its launch. I spent tens of thousands of dollars on advertising. I even bought all the covers up front and put them on Goodreads, so sure I was that this series would be as well received as Burnout.

Oh…sweet summer child.

Star Valley flopped so spectacularly that I gave up writing romance and I switched to writing horror under another pen name.

But recently my husband asked me to publish something, anything, ASAP. I think he just needed to feel that I was “trying,” you know? It doesn’t matter if it sells. It only matters that I published. So, I went through all my unfinished manuscripts, of which, surprisingly, there are MANY. So, so many. Twister was the closest to being done, having almost 50K words when I officially gave up on it more than 5 years ago. So, I fired it up, dusted it off, and finally finished it.

It’s not great. It’s not even close to my best work. But sometimes writing “The End” is the most important thing, you know? Sometimes “The End” gets you over the hump. Sometimes “The End” is all you need.

Available Tuesday January 18, 2022.

Update: I’m officially retired from writing. Maybe now I can finally relax and take a deep breath.

Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed the books and be well!

So I nearly drowned at an oxygen bar to bring you Star Valley.

No, really.

Only me, right?

I went to Wyoming with KiKi to see the sights and get a feel for the place. KiKi gets carsick easily and has to drive everywhere she goes. So she drove me all over the entire state of Wyoming while I hung out the window to take photos. I really do have great friends. I can text them at Midnight on a Saturday and not even phase them.

“Want to go to Wyoming and look around?”

“Sure. When do we leave?”

So KiKi really wanted to go to an oxygen bar in Boulder and even though I have no taste for granola, I agreed, because hey, she was driving for the whole trip.

It was a nice place, and the attendant was friendly. And she was appropriately concerned when the “Star Warrior” (or whatever, Boulder’s a weird place) oil that she put in my O2 canister started burning my nose. She offered to replace the canister with “Regular People” O2 and I said that’d be great. But when she tried to walk away, the heel of her boot got caught on the plastic tube and she tipped over the canister. Which promptly sent several quarts of highly pressurized Regular People water straight up through the cannula and into my nose.

Concerned I might drown and drive away her other customers, she frantically ripped at the tubes, but instead of reaching for the tube on my face, she ripped out the other end, the one attached to the canister, and proceeded to douse me with water from head to toe.

I did not feel like a Star Warrior. Or even a Regular Person, since all the other people were…you know…dry and able to breathe normally.

But anyway, here are some photos from our trip and you can see KiKi giving me the thumbs up. “You lived!” she’s saying. “Right on!”

A lot of these locations feature prominently in the actual series: Snake River, the dam at Cody, the Teton Mountains. One of them is the valley I used for inspiration for the Barlow’s ranch.

Enjoy!