Asking For Help Is Not Weakness
Travis Heights follows your journey from a violent 1970s Austin childhood to military service, career survival, and a fraught final reckoning with the father whose love and harm shaped your life. Why was this an important book for you to write?
For most of my adult life I carried that story alone. After I left home, I “put my feelings in a box in the back of my head.” The Marines taught me to accomplish the mission and move on: you don’t dwell, you don’t complain, you drive on. That worked well enough until it didn’t.
When I called my father near Austin, and he needed help, I had a choice: stay stuck in twenty-five years of distance, or go get him. Writing the book was how I made sense of everything that led to how I got to where I am today. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d find in that box.
Decades of compartmentalized experience don’t just sit quietly forever. They shape how you lead, how you love, and how you show up for the people who need you. And here’s what that taught me: the mission I thought I’d completed — surviving, building a career, moving on — was only half the work. The other half was understanding what I’d carried to get there, and deciding what was worth keeping.
I also kept thinking about the kids who are living what I lived. If one person reads this and decides to ask for help instead of walking out the door alone, it was worth every uncomfortable page.
How did you choose which “rules” to include, and did writing them change how you understood those lessons?
The rules chose themselves. Each one represents an important life lesson for me at that time. I’d be deep in a scene, like leaving home, the library, or hitchhiking, and I’d realize there was something I learned there that I still carry.
Some of them I was proud of. Others I had to sit with because writing them out made me see they were survival strategies that had outlived their usefulness. But I still needed to capture them, examine them.
The Marine Corps gave me a framework for rules and discipline, but it also reinforced the walls I’d built around the harder stuff. Putting the rules on the page forced me to ask whether I’d actually learned what I thought I had. What I found was that some of those rules had been running my life quietly for decades — shaping decisions I thought I was making freely. That’s the thing about survival mode: it works so well you forget you’re still in it.
Was it difficult to write about your father and Beulah with both honesty and complexity?
My father was the hardest. Beulah was easier in a way. The hypocrisy, the racism, and the manipulation were clear-cut, and time had given me enough distance to name them plainly.
My father was different. He could be genuinely warm and funny and present, and then the switch flipped. Writing him meant holding both of those things at once without letting either one cancel the other out. I didn’t want to write a villain. I wanted to write the man I actually knew — which was more unsettling than a villain would have been. Because if he were just a monster, I could have put him down and walked away clean.
The harder truth is that I loved him, and that love is what made the distance of twenty-five years hurt as much as anything he ever did. Writing that cost me something. But it’s also the most honest thing in the book. And I think that honesty is what readers feel. The people who’ve reached out to me after reading it don’t say “I hated your father.” They say “I understood him.” That’s the response I was hoping for. Not absolution, not condemnation, but recognition. Because most of us didn’t grow up with monsters. We grew up with complicated people who didn’t always know what to do with us.
What do you hope readers from chaotic or abusive families take away from your story?
That reconciliation doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t happen. You don’t have to forgive and forget, and you don’t have to stay stuck in the wound either. What I found — slowly, and not without resistance — was that I could tell the truth about what my father did and still choose not to let it define the rest of my life.
That distinction matters, because a lot of people I’ve talked to believe those are the only two options: bury it or be consumed by it. There’s a third way, and it’s harder than either of those, but it’s the one that actually lets you move forward.
I also want readers to know that asking for help is not weakness. I wish I had. If you’re in a situation like the one I grew up in, there are people who will show up for you. Covenant House International exists for exactly that reason, and ten percent of the net profits from this book go to support their work with homeless, runaway, and trafficked kids.
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Then Ray made a choice: he reached out.
It wasn’t the reconciliation either of them expected. No apologies. No pretending. No going back to who they were. Just two men — changed by time, shaped by separate lives — choosing to find each other anyway.
Travis Heights is the story of what happens when healing requires not forgiveness, but transformation.
Some broken things can be repaired, even after twenty-five years. For every family that went quiet. For everyone who wonders whether reaching back is worth the risk.
It is.
It Forced Me To Tell The Truth
The Galloping Snapper is a vivid memoir in which you transform loss, addiction, and restless drift into a life of craft, horsemanship, sobriety, and hard-earned meaning. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This book mattered because it forced me to tell the truth about a chapter of my life I could have easily softened or skipped. Losing the pony act wasn’t just a career shift—it was the collapse of an identity I had built my world around. What followed was drift, addiction, and a kind of quiet unraveling. Writing The Galloping Snapper became a way to face that honestly and show how meaning isn’t something you find once—it’s something you rebuild, often from wreckage. I needed to document that transformation, not just for others, but to understand it myself.
How did painting scrollwork and restoring showpieces change the way you understood performance, beauty, and your own identity?
Painting taught me that performance doesn’t end in the ring—it lives in the details people almost overlook. Scrollwork, line, balance, color—those became a different kind of choreography. Instead of movement through space, I was creating movement for the eye. I began to understand beauty as something intentional, something built through discipline and patience, not just flair. That shift grounded me. It took me from being someone who performed identity to someone who crafted it. The work slowed me down, demanded precision, and in doing so, reshaped how I saw myself—not just as an entertainer, but as an artisan.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
I wanted to show that reinvention isn’t glamorous—it’s gritty, uncertain, and often lonely. I wanted to talk about addiction without dressing it up, about loss without rushing to resolution, and about the slow, deliberate process of rebuilding a life with integrity. Another key idea was that creativity can be a lifeline—not just expression, but survival. And underneath all of it, there’s the idea that purpose isn’t handed to you. You earn it through showing up, through doing the work, even when no one is watching.
Bingo feels like more than a horse in the book. How would you describe that partnership in your own words?
Bingo wasn’t just a partner—he was a mirror and a stabilizer. Horses don’t respond to who you pretend to be; they respond to who you actually are in the moment. With Bingo, there was no hiding. If I was scattered, he felt it. If I was grounded, he met me there. That relationship demanded honesty and presence in a way nothing else did at the time. He gave me something steady to build on when everything else felt uncertain. In many ways, he carried me—not just physically, but emotionally—through a period where I was learning how to stand on my own again.
Author’s Linktree: https://linktr.ee/letterfly
Overwhelmed by difficulties, a troubled young circus performer is forced to sell his beloved liberty horses. Although he is consumed with grief, the self-reliant and adventurous Dave recognizes the need to forge a new path and decides to take a chance on his artistic talents. He soon launches his career as an itinerate sign painter, landing among the turbulent world of the traveling carnival. Embracing the benefits of the voyager lifestyle, Dave finds talented tradesmen to mentor his insatiable curiosity and enhance his skillset.
But even his passion for his growing art can’t keep Dave’s heart from yearning for another chance to perform in the spotlight, this time with a classically trained dancing horse. He begins to seek the influential personalities of the classical dressage world to help him develop horsemanship skills and guide his seat, hand, and heart to promote oneness with horses. As his talents grow in both art and horsemanship, he is amazed to discover each of his passions influencing the other—the future looks bright with opportunities aplenty in both fields.
Yet an invisible adversary threatens to interrupt his momentum and take everything away if he can’t admit his problem. Although the evidence is strong, Dave finds himself continually falling prey to old habits with the bottle. Only after another tragedy strikes and a deep depression takes root in his heart does Dave face the facts. But perhaps hitting bottom is the bedrock upon which he can build his new life.
Fly Stone, Fly
Fly Stone, Fly by Dust Kunkel is a feral, river-haunted dark fantasy about Clayton Bergmann, a boy left alone in the Idaho wilderness after his parents disappear, who grows into grief, prophecy, and revenge with a foul-mouthed dog named Dammit, a Shakespeare-soaked mind, and a family curse snapping at his heels. The story moves from survival tale to Western Gothic blood-feud, with Big Jim looming as both villain and nightmare, and with stoneflies, river water, old stories, and bad dogs carrying more meaning than they first seem to bear.
I admired how strange this book is willing to be. Its voice has burrs on it: funny, wounded, profane, lyrical, and sometimes gloriously overgrown. Clayton narrates like someone trying to lash a broken raft together while already in the rapids, and that urgency gives the novel its pulse. The Shakespeare references could have felt ornamental, but here, they’re weighty, private, and handled often. The book’s best passages do not merely describe wilderness; they make the canyon feel sentient, accusatory, almost liturgical.
What I enjoyed most was the book’s refusal to sand down pain into easy nobility. Clayton’s loneliness is not pretty. His friendships are not tidy. Dammit, Lina, MK, and the rest feel carved from contradictions: loyal and dangerous, comic and damaged, ridiculous and mythic. The novel’s maximal style asks for patience; it can wander and double back. But that excess is also part of its charm.
The target audience is readers who want dark fantasy, Western Gothic, revenge fantasy, mythic coming-of-age, and literary fantasy with a rough comic streak. Readers who like Neil Gaiman’s myth-in-the-modern-world sensibility or Stephen King’s gift for giving childhood terror a local address will find something kin here they enjoy, though Kunkel’s voice is more backwoods-baroque and river-drunk.
Pages: 498 | ASIN : B0DTDDG3T8
There Is An Unseen World
Shadow Walkers follows a married couple who are pulled into a spiritual war in which gifted women and their paladin partners answer to an old sacred order. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
There is an unseen world, not just something whispered about in sermons, but something real, organized, and ancient. This unseen world does have rules, hierarchy, and even strategy. So, to counterbalance this I came up with the concept of gifted women and their paladins. Theirs was a blend of faith, responsibility, and partnership.
And then I asked the more personal question: what would that kind of calling do to a marriage? Because at its core, Shadow Walkers isn’t just about demons. It’s about two people who love each other deeply, trying to navigate a life that keeps asking more of them than feels fair. That tension—that “we didn’t sign up for this, but we’re here anyway”—was really the spark.
Lisa is portrayed as capable but also uncertain and burdened. What drew you to writing a leader who wrestles with doubt?
Because everyone has flaws and strengths. Lisa’s strength isn’t that she’s fearless—it’s that she feels the weight of every decision and keeps going anyway. She knows people can get hurt based on what she chooses. She knows she doesn’t have all the answers. And yet… she still steps forward. It mirrors faith in a way. You don’t always feel certain, but you move forward because you believe you’re being called to.
The story shifts between intense action and moments of humor and tenderness. How do you approach balancing those tones?
I’ve been in combat, in Vietnam. Conflicts don’t happen in one tone. Even in the middle of something terrifying, someone cracks a joke. Someone reaches for a hand. Someone says something completely ridiculous just to break the tension.
Jason, especially, became my anchor for that balance, and then the quieter moments—the tenderness, the marriage, the little bits of normal life—they’re not breaks from the story. They are the reason the story matters. If you don’t care about the relationship, the stakes don’t land.
Who do you most hope connects with this book—fans of fantasy, readers of Christian fiction, or both?
I wrote Shadow Walkers for readers who want action, mystery, supernatural tension, and a little pinch of romance. But they also want meaning underneath it. Readers who enjoy a good battle scene and a conversation about purpose. Readers who laugh at a well-timed joke and then sit quietly with something deeper a page later. And maybe, most of all, I wrote it for people who just want a story about love that holds steady, even when everything else gets a little apocalyptic.
Author Links: Website | Amazon
But the rules have changed.
When the team’s spiritual gifts refuse to go dormant after a routine mission, Lisa knows a “great evil upheaval” is coming. The summons arrives from the regal Dorinda Fletcher: the team must deploy to Haiti. A powerful bokor named Alqadim has risen, commanding an army of the possessed, ancient demons, and a relentless horde of the undead.
To fight a physical war in a spiritual realm, the Gifted are joined by their Paladins—husbands and protectors armed with high-tech, non-lethal weaponry designed to incapacitate the possessed without taking innocent lives.
The Face of Expression 3: Fall of A King
The Face of Expression 3: Fall of a King by Aaron Woodson is a sprawling, deeply personal poetry collection about faith, masculinity, love, Black identity, heartbreak, endurance, and spiritual repair. It moves like a long testimony, beginning with surrender in “Chess With God,” swelling into declarations like “Leading With Love,” “Black By Popular Demand,” and “Heart of A Lion,” then circling through romance, loneliness, self-worth, social pain, fatherhood, exhaustion, and legacy before arriving at the title poem, “Fallen Kings,” and the quieter ache of “Swan Song.” The book feels less like a neat, curated volume and more like a life poured straight onto the page, sometimes polished, sometimes raw, but almost always emotionally direct.
I felt the force of that in poems like “Still on My Feet,” where the speaker is bruised but refuses to retreat, and in “Quitting,” where the honesty turns darker, wearier, and more vulnerable. Woodson writes often from the posture of a king, a soldier, a lover, a believer, but the most moving moments come when the crown slips a little and I can see the tired man underneath it. In “Anchor,” the prayer isn’t ornamental. It sounds like someone genuinely close to breaking, asking God to hold him in place before the storm takes him. That kind of naked need gives the collection its heartbeat.
Woodson’s style is conversational, repetitive, sometimes sermon-like, and he often leans into big declarations rather than subtle turns. I admired the sheer openness of the voice. Poems like “Waves” and “Pilot” stretch an idea almost playfully until it becomes metaphor, memory, flirtation, joke, and testimony all at once. “Black By Popular Demand” has a proud, pulsing confidence that feels communal rather than merely personal, while “Hello Handsome” turns self-affirmation into something funny, sensual, and strangely tender. The ideas in the book are not shy ones. Love heals. God rescues. Blackness is beautiful. Men hurt. People fail each other. Grace remains.
By the end, I felt like I’d spent time with someone determined to bless the wounds that shaped him, not deny them. The Face of Expression 3 isn’t a delicate book, and it isn’t trying to be. It’s loud, searching, romantic, wounded, faithful, proud, and full of hard-earned hope. This collection works best when read as a testimony in motion, not as a pristine literary object. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy confessional, faith-centered poetry with a strong spoken-word current, especially those drawn to reflections on Black manhood, resilience, love, and spiritual recovery.
Pages: 414 | ISBN : 1953526322
Tied To Something Older Than You Are
Daughter of Ash and Bone follows a chemist who inherits a strange Norse pendant and finds herself pulled into a world of tokens, gods, dreams, and old violence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I was drawn to the Brísingamen myth and the conflict between Loki and Heimdall—there’s a tension there that feels unresolved in a really interesting way.
I wanted to take that dynamic and reframe it by placing a woman at the center of the story as Odin—someone who isn’t just affected by that power but becomes the point it revolves around. That shift opened up a lot of questions about control, identity, and what it costs to be tied to something older than you are.
Alice begins as a grounded, practical chemist. What interested you about placing someone so rooted in logic into a mythic conflict?
I come from a scientific background, so I’m used to thinking in terms of logic and proof.
Alice starts from the same place. She doesn’t believe in the impossible—until she’s forced to confront it.
That shift gave me a way to explore mythology through resistance instead of acceptance, which feels like a fresher perspective for readers.
Beckett and Alice’s relationship grows alongside danger rather than apart from it. Why was that balance important to you?
I wanted to take a different approach to romance. Alice and Beckett start as friends, with a real sense of trust already in place.
So, when things become dangerous, their relationship doesn’t fall apart—it deepens. Instead of struggling to hold on to each other, their connection is what helps them move forward.
That felt more grounded to me, and more reflective of how some people actually respond under pressure.
Can you give us a peek inside the next book in the Ravens and Runes Saga? Where will it take readers?
The next book goes deeper—both into the mythology and into the consequences of what’s already been set in motion.
The world opens, but it also becomes more dangerous. What seemed contained starts to spread, and the lines between who can be trusted and who can’t begin to blur.
Alice is no longer just reacting—she must make choices that carry real weight. And some of those choices don’t have clean outcomes.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | SRamseyBooks.com
ODIN CLAIMS.
AND SHE’S CAUGHT BETWEEN GODS.
Alice Reed built her life on control—routine, logic, certainty.
Until a package arrives from a man who died centuries too late.
Inside: a pendant pulsing with impossible power.
Now storms follow her.
Shadows move.
Reality bends.
And the truth is worse than magic—
she’s been pulled into a war between Norse gods.
The pendant isn’t a gift.
It’s a weapon.
And it’s choosing her.
As her power grows, so does the cost.
She’s stronger. Faster. Changing.
But the deeper she’s pulled into the war, the more her life begins to fracture—
including the one person she trusts most.
Because in a world of gods and monsters,
even love can be used against her.
Loki is rising.
Odin is waiting.
And if Alice can’t control what’s awakening inside her—
she won’t just lose herself.
She’ll burn the world.
Perfect for fans of American Gods and Lore
Previously published as A Legacy of Ravens.
Lucky Storm: A Romantic Suspense Thriller
Lucky Storm by E.K. Rose is a romantic suspense thriller about Stormé LaChance, a successful woman in her 50s whose life is shaken by a calculated fraud scheme, old betrayals, and dangerous romantic entanglements. What begins with a chance encounter with Emile quickly becomes part of a larger con involving identity theft, corporate sabotage, revenge, and secrets tied to Stormé’s past. As the plot widens, private investigator Maurice Constantine enters the story, bringing both investigative skill and a second-chance romantic current that gives the book its emotional center.
The book doesn’t treat romance as something reserved for the young or untouched by history. Stormé is grown, accomplished, guarded, lonely, sensual, and still figuring herself out. That felt refreshing. The romantic suspense genre can sometimes lean into danger to the point where the characters start to feel like chess pieces, but here the author keeps returning to Stormé’s inner weather: her doubt, her desire, her need to trust, and her fear of being fooled again. It gave the thriller pieces more weight because the threat was not just money or reputation. It was dignity. It was the awful feeling of realizing someone got close enough to use your softness against you.
The author makes bold choices, especially in shifting between romance, crime, family drama, and steamy intimacy. The book moves fast and goes big. The villains are tangled in personal motives, the betrayals stack up, and the emotional temperature stays high. I found that entertaining. Rose clearly knows the kind of story she’s telling. This isn’t a cold procedural. It’s a romantic suspense thriller with heat in the room, secrets in the walls, and a heroine who has to reclaim the story people keep trying to write over her. The writing is direct and accessible, with a soap-opera pull that makes it easy to keep turning pages.
I would recommend Lucky Storm to readers who enjoy romantic suspense with mature characters, high-stakes betrayal, second chances, and a strong blend of passion and crime. It will especially appeal to readers who want a heroine in midlife who is still desirable, complicated, and capable of starting over. If you want a story with romance, danger, family secrets, and emotional payoff, this book has plenty to offer.
Pages: 264 | ASIN : B0FLTPFKGW
Every Place Held A Story
Question: Whispers of Blue Ridge follows a young woman tied to her family’s wealth and their North Georgia winery as she finds a connection with a charming rodeo rider. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Nina’s Answer: The inspiration for Whispers of Blue Ridge began during my time as an author-in-residence in Blue Ridge, Georgia. Spending two months there allowed me to fully absorb the rhythm of the area, the landscape, the community, and the feeling that something was always just beneath the surface, as if every place held a story.
Being surrounded by vineyards, local history, and the strong presence of the annual rodeo sparked the idea of bringing two very different worlds together. The vineyard represents legacy, tradition, and the weight of family expectations, while the rodeo embodies independence, discipline, and a life constantly in motion. That contrast became the foundation for the relationship at the heart of the novel.
From there, the story grew into an exploration of how the past shapes us, especially when it’s tied to secrets, and what happens when those truths can no longer stay hidden.
Question: What drew you to Blue Ridge as the setting for this story?
Nina’s Answer: What drew me to Blue Ridge as the setting was, in many ways, the idea of contrast. After writing five internationally set novels filled with diverse cultures and far-reaching landscapes, I felt a strong pull to bring the story home, to the United States, but in a place that still felt distinctly different from my own everyday life by the sea.
Blue Ridge offered that shift. The mountains carry a different rhythm, a different pace, and a sense of rooted history that contrasts beautifully with coastal living. It allowed me to explore a new kind of atmosphere while still grounding the story in something familiar.
That change in setting also signaled a new direction. While my previous books traveled across the world, Whispers of Blue Ridge begins a story that is more contained, more intimate, and deeply connected to place… where the landscape and the community become as integral to the story as the characters themselves.
Question: Do you think love in this book is more about attraction or about healing?
Nina’s Answer: I think the romantic love in Whispers of Blue Ridge begins with attraction, but it ultimately becomes something much deeper rooted in healing. There’s an element of opposites attracting… Jake lives a more transient, independent life, while Savannah is deeply tied to her home and her family’s legacy.
What draws them together at first is that contrast, that sense of curiosity about someone so different. But as they begin to peel back the layers, it becomes clear that their differences are exactly what allow them to connect. Because they’ve built such different ways of protecting themselves, they don’t trigger each other’s defenses in the usual ways. Instead, they’re able to see past them.
At its core, their relationship is shaped by shared loss and unspoken grief. What they begin to recognize in each other isn’t just attraction… it’s something familiar under the surface. That recognition allows them to truly see one another, and in doing so, they begin to find a sense of healing… not just through each other, but within themselves.
Question: What do you hope romance readers take away from Whispers of Blue Ridge?
Nina’s Answer: I hope romance readers are drawn to the connection between Jake and Savannah… the chemistry, the contrast, and the way their relationship unfolds. There is certainly a romantic thread at the heart of the story, and it plays an important role in bringing them together.
At the same time, Whispers of Blue Ridge is very much a work of women’s fiction, where the relationship is part of a larger emotional journey. Their connection is shaped not just by attraction, but by what they’ve each carried… loss, expectations, and the weight of the past.
What I hope readers take away is that love in this story isn’t simply about finding the right person. It’s about what happens when two people see each other clearly, and how that can open the door to healing, growth, and ultimately, truth
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