A Relationship is a Team Sport
Sparks follows two former friends with unfinished business who wind up working together and navigating the complicated path from friendship to heartbreak to second chances. What inspired the idea for Olivia and Trevor’s story?
Sparks grew from a short story to a full-length novel because I ended up writing a story for my close friends to enjoy. Key elements of the book—like the long separation between Olivia and Trevor despite their chemistry—were inspired by a relationship I saw blossoming and flourishing over years. I think there’s something beautiful about the right person at the wrong time growing to becoming a person who’s the best fit for you no matter what time of life you find yourself in.
Olivia’s determination to solve every problem herself becomes one of her greatest challenges, while Trevor balances confidence with vulnerability in a way that makes him especially appealing. Which of the two characters proved more difficult to write?
Trevor, without a doubt. Trying to write a character who is a strong romantic lead while also seeming like a real person with charms and faults is a balancing act that can easily topple. Once I hit my stride with him, though. I LOVED writing Trevor’s chapters.
The novel presents love as something that can coexist with independence and ambition. Why was that idea important to you?
Independence and ambition doesn’t need to be crushed when entering into a relationship. Compromises might need to be made, sure, but to me, a great partner is one who sees your talents, your weaknesses, and says, “Hey, I want our lives to be about helping each other reach our individual goals together.”A relationship is a team sport.” Something that Olivia finds out in the book!
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
The next book is a workplace romance that is not a workplace romance. I don’t want to give too much away, but our main characters find themselves in a bind as they are immediately attracted to each other. Unfortunately, they also work together, and when you’ve got a strong sense of ethics, you don’t date your co-workers! Especially when there’s a power imbalance. There’s going to be a lot of yearning. On both sides. The book will be available next year!
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This contemporary romance is a fast-paced, lighthearted read that stills manages to address issues women face today. The love story between Trevor and Olivia is one of second chances and allows room for both characters to mature and own up to past mistakes, letting readers see a grown-up romance that is both communicative and passionate. With instantaneous chemistry and vivid characters, readers will be drawn into this world and won’t be able to stop turning the pages.
Love Beyond Eros
Love Beyond Eros, the third book in Chris Neo’s The Love Secret series, is an ambitious mix of romantic drama, psychological exploration, family story, and high-stakes adventure. The novel begins with Aris missing from the remote Greek village where his relationship with Angelica has reached a painful turning point, then quickly turns his disappearance into a life-or-death crisis. From there, the story keeps expanding, bringing friends, family members, military figures, enemies, and former lovers into an increasingly elaborate chain of events. That scope fits Neo’s stated purpose for the series: he wants an emotionally driven story that explores love and relationships while keeping the plot moving quickly. What makes the book distinctive is how fully it commits to that combination. Love here isn’t simply romantic attraction. It becomes the force behind friendship, loyalty, sacrifice, jealousy, forgiveness, parenthood, and the difficult choices people make when someone they care about is in danger.
The emotional center of the novel is Aris, but the story works through a large ensemble, and several of the most interesting developments happen because other characters are forced to reconsider who they are. Angelica’s devotion to Aris becomes fierce and protective. John and Uri discover that friendship means showing up even when they’re frightened, inconvenienced, or powerless to fix the situation. Varo has one of the book’s largest arcs, moving through obsession, suspicion, buried trauma, loyalty, and a growing understanding of her own past. Granny, Zoe, Gina, Adonis, and others each contribute another variation on the book’s central question: what does loving someone actually require of you? The title gradually earns its importance because the novel keeps pushing beyond eros, or romantic desire, toward agape, family bonds, friendship, compassion, and self-sacrifice. Angelica eventually gives that idea its clearest expression when she describes a love that reaches beyond eros, tying the title directly to the emotional argument the story has been building.
Neo tells all of this in a deliberately heightened style. The book moves from a Greek village and a mysterious poisoning into military flights, international maneuvering, assassins, rescues, betrayals, martial arts confrontations, family reunions, pregnancies, old romances, and long-delayed revelations. It has the energy of a serialized adventure, with short chapters and frequent shifts in location and perspective designed to keep another complication arriving just as the previous one settles. That can make the experience feel almost breathless, but it also gives the novel its personality. Serious conversations about love and identity can sit beside broad comedy, sensual scenes, action sequences, and larger-than-life characters without the story losing its basic emotional direction. By the final chapter and epilogue, the sprawling cast has been drawn back toward family, healing, changed relationships, and the possibility of another journey, giving the ending the feeling of both a conclusion and a continuation.
I’d recommend Love Beyond Eros most strongly to readers who enjoy emotionally intense stories that combine romance with adventure, family drama, friendship, danger, and questions about why people love the way they do. It should especially appeal to readers who like big casts, dramatic reversals, passionate dialogue, Greek cultural touches, and characters whose emotional growth matters as much as the physical action surrounding them. Since this is Book Three, it will have the greatest impact on readers who already know Aris, John, Uri, Varo, Angelica, and the relationships developed earlier in The Love Secret series. The novel asks for a reader willing to enter its heightened world and care about its characters with the same intensity that they care about one another. For that reader, this is a generous, eventful finale built around a sincere idea: desire may begin a love story, but loyalty, sacrifice, forgiveness, friendship, and family are what reveal how deep love can become.
Pages: 416 | ASIN : B0CXB6NQTL
Love’s Cauldron: Reclaim Your Wild Feminine, Book 2: Savior
Love’s Cauldron: Reclaim Your Wild Feminine, Book 2 – Savior by Jennifer J. Lehr is a deeply personal spiritual memoir about healing, intuition, feminine power, and the gradual work of becoming more fully oneself. Lehr describes the book as a nonlinear memoir, and that structure suits the material beautifully. Rather than following a conventional timeline, she moves among childhood memories, relationships, illness, therapy, spiritual experiences, encounters with animals and nature, and moments of sudden inner knowing. Poetry and brief meditations are woven throughout the narrative, giving the book the feeling of a collage made from memory, reflection, image, and emotion. At its center is Lehr’s understanding of the witch as a person willing to listen inwardly, honor the natural world, develop intuition, and consciously transform what life has handed her.
As a witchcraft memoir and book of feminine spirituality, Love’s Cauldron is especially interested in the relationship between wounds and power. Lehr writes candidly about an authoritarian childhood, frightening early experiences, difficult relationships, chronic illness, and the ways trauma can fracture a person’s sense of self. She then follows those fractures into the years of therapy, meditation, twelve-step work, spiritual practice, writing, and self-examination that helped her build a more integrated life. Her idea of healing is active and ongoing. Anger can become a boundary, vulnerability can become connection, grief can open into love, and an old story can be examined until a different way of living becomes possible. That process gives the memoir much of its emotional weight.
The book becomes increasingly expansive as Lehr explores intuition, spirit guides, Wicca, the numinous, tarot, yoga, ritual, words as forms of magic, death, transformation, and communication with realities beyond the five senses. These subjects make Love’s Cauldron a distinctive spirituality and self-discovery memoir, but Lehr keeps returning them to ordinary human concerns: How do we trust ourselves? How do we love without abandoning ourselves? What do we do with suffering? How can we become gentler without becoming powerless? Some of the most memorable passages connect those questions to the physical world, from birds and apple trees to weather, water, animals, moonlight, and the changing seasons. Nature isn’t simply scenery here. It’s part of the spiritual vocabulary through which Lehr understands belonging, abundance, death, renewal, and the feminine.
By the final chapters, Love’s Cauldron has become a memoir of reclamation. Lehr gathers together the writer, therapist, wounded child, intuitive, healer, animal lover, wife, seeker, and witch rather than asking any one identity to replace the others. The closing movement toward empowerment feels earned because the book has spent so much time showing the slow work beneath it. Her recurring language of alchemy is particularly fitting: difficult experiences are held, examined, and transformed into greater self-knowledge and a capacity to offer something useful to others. For readers drawn to spiritual memoirs, witchcraft, divine feminine spirituality, and personal transformation, Love’s Cauldron, Book 2: Savior offers an intimate account of a woman learning to trust the many parts of herself and to treat that wholeness as both a source of power and an expression of love.
Pages: 326 | ASIN : B0GY43NQZ7
That Is Juicy Story Material!
Passion’s Duty follows an Irish woodsman and a fiery officer’s daughter stranded in the wilderness of Mohawk Valley who, despite their carefully laid plans, find themselves drawn to each other. Why did you choose 1755 and the Mohawk Valley as the place to begin the Romance and the American Ranger series?
The French and Indian War/Seven Years War has always fascinated me because it shaped so much of what was to come in America. There were major shifts in people’s identities during this time—most importantly a sense of becoming American. And the Mohawk Valley of New York already had a richly diverse population with competing loyalties and a long, colorful history. Most importantly, nothing about the people—especially the valley’s most famous resident, William Johnson—was simple. That is juicy story material!
Faith understands finances, property, mills, medicine, and practical management, yet she lives in a society that continually undervalues those abilities. How did you approach balancing her historical circumstances with her independence?
It is really a case of how Faith balances her circumstances with her independence. She is smart and understands consequences, so she needs to balance her independence in the moment with how acting on it will impact her ability to meet her aims in the future. Reading history, it is easy to forget that women have always been capable and independent, even when social rules and laws didn’t give space for it. We tend to read about the rules from the perspective of those who made them, rather than those who were hemmed in by them. Today, we can hardly imagine being legally “covered” by a father, husband, or son, but that was reality for British women like Faith. A man like James, a former indentured servant with little education, had more legal freedom than Faith, despite her greater wealth, education, and status.
James and Faith begin admiring one another’s competence before either fully acknowledges the attraction between them. Why was mutual respect important to the foundation of their romance?
Competence is always attractive! And I love exploring relationships between equal partners and how they reach that place of true partnership. And, contrary to popular myth, America has always been very class conscious. It was nice not only to explore that but also to have Faith and James blow it up.
Because this is the first Romance and the American Ranger novel, which elements of Passion’s Duty are laying groundwork for the larger series?
I am so glad you asked! The series will follow the ranger company James raises throughout the course of the war. They are a found family, and in Passion’s Duty, you have met at least one main character for the next six books, and in some cases, you have already met both main characters. David’s book, Passion’s Claim, is the next in the series, and oh my goodness, it has been fun to write!
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
New York Colony, 1755
Irishman James Carroll is hellbent on independence. In the wilderness of the Mohawk Valley, armed service to a powerful benefactor offers a rare opportunity for a once-indentured servant. But as hostility brews between the British and the French, a beautiful trespasser threatens to shatter James’s singular focus on his one path upward.
Faith Richmond was supposed to have been a son. A disappointment to her military father, despite her quick intellect and obvious talents, she chafes at being bartered to a wealthy officer to prop up her family’s fortunes. Stranded with a surly Irishman who risks his livelihood for her, she refuses to ignore the heat his gaze kindles.
War is coming. But the spark between them ignites into something neither can resist. And once they stop fighting it, there will be no protection from patron or family—even as it puts them directly in the path of French raiders bent on revenge.
Book One of the Romance and the American Ranger series, Passion’s Duty is a steamy, open-door historical romance of forbidden love and forced proximity, with a strong heroine and a hero who is worth the wait. Set at the outbreak of the French and Indian War.
Grab your copy to be swept up in their passionate journey today!
TwinStar
D Cohen’s TwinStar, the first novel in the GW Canyon series, is an aviation thriller built around a technological catastrophe and the people drawn into its widening consequences. The novel opens with Sierra West Flight 721 behaving as though an unseen operator has taken control, leaving its crew unable to command the aircraft before it crashes near Melrose, New Mexico. From there, Cohen expands the story into an investigation involving aircraft manufacturer TwinStar, software entrepreneur and pilot GW Canyon, systems engineer Allison Tobias, and an increasingly disturbing trail of compromised technology. The author announces his governing principle before the story begins: “Plots fade. Characters don’t.” That statement proves to be more than a preface to the novel. Although TwinStar contains sabotage, corporate intrigue, hidden alliances, violence, and multiple aviation emergencies, its central interest lies in the lives caught inside that machinery.
Allison is especially important to the book’s design. Her expertise in TwinStar’s onboard systems places her at the center of the technical investigation, but Cohen gives equal attention to the way she evaluates relationships, friendship, grief, and her own decisions. Her methodical temperament carries naturally from the laboratory into the rest of her life, creating a character whose professional intelligence and emotional intelligence continually inform one another. Other women, including Connie Finley, Elaine Ionello, Ming Hunter, Heidi Mesmer, and NTSB investigator Lisa Myers, broaden the novel beyond a single heroine and give its events several distinct human perspectives. GW remains a major presence, with his history as a rancher’s son, pilot, software entrepreneur, widower, and father gradually filling in the man behind the public success. His developing relationship with Allison becomes one of the novel’s principal emotional threads, and it works because their attraction grows through shared work, danger, candor, and increasing trust.
The technological mystery is carefully constructed around the CCS flight-control system and, eventually, a tiny P120 microchip capable of responding to concealed commands. A second aircraft incident at O’Hare, a dangerous live test aboard TwinStar #43, Ian Wunderlich’s suspicious death, and evidence of an insider at TwinStar progressively turn an apparent systems failure into deliberate sabotage. One of the book’s most effective discoveries comes when Heidi tests the suspect chips and realizes, simply, “It listens.” That compact observation changes the scale of the story. What first appears to be an aviation problem becomes a vulnerability embedded in ordinary electronics, with implications far beyond a single manufacturer or crash. Cohen handles this escalation through engineering details, corporate maneuvering, investigation, and physical danger, while keeping the technical material connected to recognizable stakes. The closing “News from the Future” section then carries those implications forward, showing how the P120 scandal eventually grows into an international crisis.
As a whole, TwinStar is a character-centered technological thriller with substantial strands of romance, corporate drama, aviation fiction, and family history. Its three-part structure allows the initial disaster to develop into a larger conspiracy while also making room for mourning, friendship, sexuality, parenthood, and second chances. The ending brings the investigative and personal arcs to different kinds of resolution: the immediate threat is exposed, the larger P120 story is positioned to reverberate beyond the novel, and Allison and GW arrive in Colorado with the possibility of a shared future that feels deliberately chosen. That balance defines the book. TwinStar treats technology as consequential because of the people who design it, exploit it, investigate it, and depend on it, and it treats intimacy with the same attention to observation and decision. The result is a novel in which the aviation mystery provides the structure, but character gives the story its lasting weight.
Pages: 337 | ASIN : B0H6T1J8BB
The Worst In His Psyche
The Darkness Within follows a fading author who takes an experimental serum that restores his health and sends his creativity soaring, but also amplifies the violent darkness inside him. What first inspired the idea for The Darkness Within?
Frankly, I wanted to write something from an author’s perspective, but for a considerable length of time I was thinking of something along the lines of “Misery” by Stephen King. It wasn’t until I read “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” that I realized that I wanted to do it along those lines in a modern-day reimagining.
How did you approach making Tanner someone readers could understand even as his actions become increasingly disturbing?
I truly believe that every indie publisher can utterly relate to Tanner’s hopes and fears… as well as his plight. Knowing that, I knew that I had to create a character who might be repulsive. The serum that Tanner ingests simply brings out the worst in his psyche. It serves as a megaphone. He’s a bit narcissistic, bitter, irritated, and angry. His worst qualities get amplified by the serum, and they are given an outlet and license to act through it.
Ambition is one of the novel’s central themes. What interested you about the emotional effects of reviews, rankings, sales, and other measures of creative success, and the point where healthy ambition can become destructive obsession?
Well, we’re all familiar with the effects of sending our books off into the ether riding on all our hopes and fears, and then seeing it fall flat, right? We must be gluttons for punishment because we do it over and over and over again. The drive is there to produce something people will love, that will sell well and resonate, that will climb up the charts, that will help us establish a career for doing this. But that drive can definitely become destructive. We are not our hustle, though we may think we are. We are a valuable human being independent of our hustle, and Tanner has to learn that the hard way.
Did writing a novel about an author’s obsession with success change the way you think about your own relationship with writing and publishing?
Sure, it made me commit to avoiding any and all genome-enhancing serums. 🙂
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
A chilling reimagining of Jekyll and Hyde set inside the cutthroat world of self-publishing.
Struggling author Tanner Barrett is desperate for a breakthrough. When a mysterious serum offers a shortcut to the perfect book, he takes it… and something ancient and violent awakens inside him. The monster wears his face. It knows his enemies by name.
Told through deteriorating diary entries that crack and splinter in real time, The Darkness Within follows Tanner’s slow, irreversible unraveling. His career rises. His mind fractures. The line between the writer and the beast disappears.
What would you sacrifice to write the perfect book?
Literary horror at its most intimate and relentless. Tanner Barrett wanted to be remembered. He got his wish; just not the way he imagined. A slow-burn psychological descent that builds dread page by page and leaves an ending that stays with you.
The Knight’s Squire
John J. Curta’s The Knight’s Squire is a coming-of-age fantasy built around knights, squires, tournaments, royal succession, hidden magic, and the messy gap between the stories people tell about heroes and the choices those heroes actually make. At the center is twelve-year-old Jory Turner, a talented but wounded young squire who wants desperately to live up to the reputation of his dead father. His knight and guardian, Sir Cley Woods, is famous, charming, and genuinely devoted to Jory, but he carries his own war trauma and makes compromises that force Jory to reconsider what honor really means. That relationship gives the novel its heart. Their conversations gradually move the idea of knighthood away from winning jousts and looking impressive and toward courage, honesty, judgment, and protecting other people. Cley eventually tells Jory that the Knights of the Realm are sworn to protect the kingdom, which neatly captures one of the book’s biggest ideas about loyalty and conscience.
The story gets wider as it goes, and Curta handles that expansion through several points of view. Prince James has to grow from an uncertain teenager surrounded by stronger personalities into someone capable of making decisions for an entire kingdom. Emily begins as a healer’s apprentice and discovers that she’s a Drasani with the rare ability to influence emotions and heal, while Aiden slowly develops from Jory’s mysterious new friend into one of the book’s most important wild cards. Magic also arrives gradually. By the time Marwyn explains Firecasters, Summoners, Windcallers, Dragontalkers, Dreamwalkers, and other surviving Drasani, the supernatural side of Terros feels like something buried beneath the official history instead of something pasted onto the setting. I especially liked how the battles change the younger characters. Jory, Theo, Emily, and even Cley learn that real violence has very little in common with tournament glory. Deaths matter, fear lingers, and Jory’s growing competence comes with memories he’d rather not have.
Readers of John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series will probably recognize some of the appeal here. Both stories get a lot of mileage from a young protagonist learning practical skills under an experienced mentor, and both understand that training scenes can reveal character just as effectively as combat. Curta takes that basic mentor-and-student pleasure and places it inside a much broader political story. Jory may be the emotional anchor, but the succession struggle between Prince James and King Ivan, the competing regional lords, the Temple of the Four, the secret Knights of the Realm, and the reappearance of magic keep pulling the camera outward. That makes Terros feel lived in, especially because its politics affect farmers, healers, soldiers, servants, and children. One of the sharper moments comes when a farmer tells Jory that an army takes what it needs regardless of which side it serves, a small observation that says quite a bit about how ordinary people experience the grand causes knights fight over.
The Knight’s Squire turns Jory’s dream of becoming a knight into something much more complicated and much more interesting. He’s brave enough to face a Summoner who tempts him with the image of his dead father, loyal enough to ride into a collapsing battle to reach Cley, and still young enough to be hurt by jealousy, homesickness, fear, and questions about whether his mother loves him. The final chapters land hard because the story refuses to let battlefield courage guarantee a clean victory. Sir Cley is gravely wounded, Jory falls into the hands of his abusive stepfather, James escapes a disastrous betrayal, and Aiden is revealed as the son of the Pirate King after secretly helping the high priestess. Those revelations give the ending real momentum while also circling back to the book’s central question: who deserves to be called honorable when titles, bloodlines, legends, and loyalties can all be manipulated? The Knight’s Squire is an adventurous medieval fantasy, but its strongest quality is the way it makes growing up inseparable from learning that courage is less about becoming the hero from a song and more about deciding what kind of person you’ll be when the song no longer matches reality.
Pages: 367 | ASIN : B0GYLPQF1Z
Choose Kindness, Honesty, Faith
On the Thresholds of the Spiritual Realm explores extraordinary true-life encounters, moral crossroads, and moments of grace to ask whether coincidence, suffering, and choice may reveal an unseen spiritual reality. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I wrote this book hoping readers would see parts of their own lives in these stories and begin to think more deeply about their own situations, choices, and challenges. By sharing some of my personal experiences involving coincidence, conscience, prayer, suffering, and unexpected joy, I would like readers to become aware that many life events may hold a hidden significance beyond what first meets the eye. Ultimately, I hope the book inspires people to choose kindness, honesty, faith, and a strong sense of right and wrong, choices that can bring greater peace, a richer sense of purpose, and a deeper connection with others, themselves, and the spiritual side of life.
Your book places great emphasis on free will even while exploring spiritual guidance and providence. How do you distinguish between divine influence, coincidence, and a person’s own choices?
Divine influence and coincidence are parts of life we cannot fully control or always understand. God moves through events in mysterious ways, whether through natural disasters or unexpected encounters, which often demand a response from us. The questions become not just “Why did this happen?” or “Why is this happening to me?” but also “How will I respond?” These unforeseen events invite us to pause, seek guidance, and open ourselves more fully to God’s grace.
This is where free will comes into play. While we cannot control everything that happens to us, we hold the power to decide how we respond. We can stand with courage or shrink in fear, choose kindness or settle for indifference, offer forgiveness or cling to resentment, act with honesty or hide behind dishonesty. Those choices shape our character, and for me, divine influence does not take away our freedom. It invites us to use that freedom well—to choose love over selfishness, what is right over what is easy, and to seek light over darkness.
You write about people from different countries, cultures, and religious traditions. How did those encounters broaden or challenge your Catholic understanding of spirituality?
Meeting people from different cultures and faith traditions strengthened, rather than weakened, my Catholic understanding of spirituality. Whatever name people give it—faith, conscience, moral responsibility, or the search for meaning—there is a spiritual dimension to life that touches us all.
My Muslim friend from Pakistan showed me a profound faith in God through his sense of responsibility, kindness, and deep devotion to family. His example reminded me that faith is revealed not only in what we say we believe, but in how we live. My friendship with the Missionaries of Charity from India had a similar effect. Their selfless care for children with severe disabilities and older women abandoned by their families, without expecting anything in return, opened my eyes to new depths of empathy, compassion, and Christian service. I was also moved by my former secretary and friend whose Orthodox Christian family endured displacement, war, and hardship from Armenia to Palestine to Jordan, while holding firmly to their faith. Witnessing her blissful joy when we visited the places her family once called home in Haifa gave my wife and me a powerful sense of spiritual unity with her that rose above our different histories and backgrounds.
As a Catholic, I remain grounded in my faith and its view of God. Still, meeting people with different beliefs has taught me not to limit where to look for goodness, wisdom, compassion, or a glimpse of God. These relationships with people from many backgrounds have widened my understanding of spirituality and made me more humble.
Many of your strongest stories involve people facing corruption, betrayal, violence, illness, or grief. Why do you think moments of crisis so often become spiritual turning points?
Moments of crisis often become spiritual turning points because they strip away the protections and distractions of ordinary life. When things are going well, it is easy to move through our routines without thinking deeply about who we are becoming. But betrayal, violence, illness, grief, or disaster can leave us vulnerable and bring our deepest fears, doubts, and values into the open.
In those moments, we are often forced to choose, and sometimes with little time to think. We can respond with anger, fear, or despair, or with forgiveness, courage, compassion, and faith. Those choices can shape our character long after the crisis has passed. The true spiritual turning point is not just the crisis itself but the choices we make within it: who we decide to become, how we choose to live, and whether we let temptations or suffering defeat us or lead us toward greater courage and faith.
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Each story shows moments that go beyond the physical world, like surprising coincidences, unexpected answers to prayer, gentle nudges that change a life’s direction, and struggles with temptation that reveal the battle between good and evil. These stories encourage readers to look past what they see and consider that a deeper spiritual reality may be present around us.
With personal stories and inspiring examples, the book looks at how faith, conscience, free will, and divine guidance shape our daily lives. It invites readers to think about their choices, who they listen to, and how those decisions can have lasting effects.
Written from a Christian perspective and based on real events, On the Thresholds of the Spiritual Realm brings hope, encouragement, and a fresh sense of God’s presence. If you are looking for answers, wanting spiritual renewal, or just curious about the unseen side of life, this book can help you find more meaning, joy, and purpose in your life.
