Release Day for ONE DARK WISH and the Grace of Waiting

It’s release day for ONE DARK WISH, the second book in the Amazon bestselling Deadly Force series, and I’m so excited and grateful to send this book into the world.

This book was supposed to have its release day in January 2019, but my publisher decided to change the cover. That decision led to other decisions and I ended up with a September 24th release date.

While I was totally fine with the decisions–and this amazing cover was worth the wait–I wrote this book almost two years ago now. In the meantime I’ve written a third (that comes out in February 2020) and am finishing up a novella. To see this on the shelf, and listen to the Audible version, is like stepping back in time. I was a different writer when I wrote this book. I was more tentative because everything was so new and also more bold because I was also naive. Not naive in a bad way, just in a I-had-no-idea-what-was-going-on-so-I-did-my-own-thing kind of way. So while I’m so excited to see this book on the shelves today, I’m anxious: It’s hard to let it go yet I feel like I’ve been waiting forever.

This book is a romantic suspense story with a National Treasure-type plot. The heroine, Sarah Munro, is a historian who specializes in 17^thcentury pirates. Her hero, ex-Green Beret Nate Walker, has just been released from the U.S. Army’s secret prison hospital in Maine. When Sarah and Nate meet in a remote colonial-era cemetery outside of Savannah, GA, and they’re threatened by a Fianna assassin, Sarah and Nate realize their very different lives are somehow connected. Unfortunately for them, that connection is a 17^thcentury unsolved pirate cipher.

While Nate is on a secret mission of his own to redeem his honor and save the rest of his men in prison, he’s also been ordered to stop Sarah from solving that old pirate cipher. An order he ends up ignoring that, in turn, puts the two of them in even more danger. 

This book has non-stop action, adventure, and romance and was by far one of the most difficult things I’ve ever written. Multiple POVs, two subplots, and having to come up with a cipher that I then had to solve left me with many sleepless nights. But, so far, it’s also my favorite book that I’ve written. I fell completely in love with Nate Walker, the ex-Green Beret who spent two years in an Afghan POW camp only to discover the rest of his men were convicted of war crimes and sent to a military prison. Nate, who still suffers from migraines and seizures from his time as a prisoner, proves over and over again that he would do anything for his men and the woman (his heroine Sarah) he loves.

And Sarah is one of the strongest-willed women I’ve ever written. She’s smart and, as the daughter of a cop, isn’t intimidated by Nate or his buddies–all ex-soldiers from the 7th Special Forces Group. Because she’s so confident in her belief that she can solve this cipher and save Nate’s men, these tough men begin to trust her–even if she can’t trust them back.

Yet, as much as I love this book and no matter how much I learned by writing it, it was hard to wait for the new release date. Yet, within that waiting, I found something even more important: I found time.

I was able to change my marketing plan (such that it is). I edited the third book and the novella to make sure the overall series arc stayed intact. I had time to clean up my website (a work still in progress), change my blogging schedule, and join a number of fabulous reader Facebook groups.

I also had the time to evaluate those things that weren’t working such as writing in the evening instead of the morning, certain types of advertising and book events. I even got to experiment with swag–some worked great, other things failed quite spectacularly. (I even have photos of the epic fails!)

And I’m so grateful for that time. I’m much less stressed about this release than the last one, so much so that I may actually enjoy the day! One could even say that I’m entering this release day in a state of peace.

In a state of quiet.

In a state of grace.

Thank you all for being such a wonderful, supportive group of readers, authors, colleagues, and friends. I write alone in the dark but these books only enter the light in the arms of others.

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