A New Book and A New Home

Happy belated Labor Day, all. I am always grateful to the men and women who came before me and fought for workplace rights. I am proud of my grandfathers, aunts, uncles, and cousins who still pay their union dues faithfully, and I am particularly proud of my union-member wife. She works hard in a critical and often contentious academic climate at a time when her union is increasingly under attack from right-wing politicians trying to censure academic freedom and privatize education in order to cut off access for working classes. It is only because she continues to do her work and reap her union benefits that I have the freedom and stability necessary to do jobs that I love.

And I do love my jobs. Both of them. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I accepted a position as the social media director of Bywater Books over the summer. I am really enjoying the work of helping to foster better relationships and communication between authors and readers. But I am, first and foremost, a writer. Writing is the work that sustains my soul.  That is the work I feel most strongly called to do. Writing is the work that makes me feel grateful every single day for the opportunities I have.  It is also the work I am most proud of. Which is why I found it a little disconcerting to have a new social media job and a new book to be published, but nowhere to publish it.

I finished my 9th novel, Perfect Pairing, in July.  It’s a story I can’t wait to have out there, but because my new job at Bywater created a conflict of interest with Bold Strokes Books, we decided it would be best to part ways.  I am and will always be eternally grateful to Radcylffe and the amazing team she built for the start they gave me and the wisdom they imparted over the last eight years. I will always consider the people at Bold Strokes my friends and colleagues, and I am thrilled that we were able to part company amicably. (So amicably, in fact, I will be reading with them in Ptown, but more on that later)  However, with one door closed, I had until the past few weeks not opened another one.

I considered self publishing, but as so much of my work, both writing and otherwise, revolves around relationships and relationship-building, I’m not inclined to “go it alone” in many areas of my life. I love being part of a team, which led me to look at the team I’d just joined in the business capacity in a new way. I already knew that I liked and respected the management team at Bywater, or else I wouldn’t have started doing their social media, but the more I worked with their authors and publicized their books, the more I grew to respect the creative work they do. Everyone I interacted with had a passion for good books, for quality writing, and for the larger lesfic community. Bywater has published everyone from trailblazers like Marianne K. Martin and Katherine V. Forrest to bold new voices like Carol Rosenfeld and Wynn Malone.  They published established genre fiction writers like Georgia Beers , Ellen Hart and Baxter Clare Trautman and some of the funniest women I know in Ann McMan and M ari San Giovanni. They don’t shy away from nonfiction either, with writers as diverse as Julie Marie Wade and Fay Jacobs. The more research I did, the more I became certain that no matter what you write, if you write it well, there’s a space for that writing at Bywater Books. I am thankful that Kelly, Marianne, Salem, and Ann felt that my work qualifies as quality writing.

I am proud to announce I have contracted with Bywater Books to publish my next romance novel, Perfect Pairing, for release in June of 2016.