Without Further Ado

Barista is now available on Amazon for the obscenely low price of $0.99.

This short novel has quite a history. Originally I planned for the book to be much longer. Halfway through I introduced another character (who does not even appear in the final draft) to serve as a competing love interest for one of the other characters. There was an explicit sex scene, and the story took many different turns...

I got to what I saw as the 3/4 mark in the story and, no matter what I tried, just couldn't close it out. Nothing was working. That was back in November, 2014. I tried different endings, removed a subplot, added a different one...and nothing seemed right. I shelved the book at that point, chalking it up to a "learning experience" I could use for the next book.

Except I couldn't learn anything from it because I didn't know where I'd gone wrong.

Fast-forward a few months. With the passage of time I figured I had enough distance to perform an adequate post mortem. So I went back in to see just how bad the story was. I loved about half of it and thought the second half was plain old dreck.

So I tinkered and re-plotted and after some excavation, found what I thought was the "real story" buried in the manuscript. I went back to work, jettisoning most of the book and starting anew from the about the 2/5 mark.

At that point, the story began to make sense again. I put the finishing touches on it, worked with my editor, and hit publish two nights ago. It's now available on Amazon.

Maybe it still stinks. I don't know. But I'm happy with it and have decided to let the readers tell me what they think.

It clocks in at 45,000 words which historically would be wayyyyy too short for a standard romance novel. But in the brave new world of publishing, there is so much more opportunity. I believe this story works at this length--and only at this length. In the old world, it would never have been given a chance. But now? Now I can release it into the proverbial wild and see what happens.

I look forward to hearing what readers think.

~~~

Next Project: Corinne, an erotic suspense thriller that combines elements of Vertigo and Rebecca. I LOVE the idea that's brewing in my head. Now whether I can actually pull it off is a different matter. We shall see...

Next Release: Held, the third short story in my paranormal erotic series. This one gets dark and pretty weird...can't wait to hit publish to see what everybody thinks.