Blog Archives
During a Shared Psychedelic Experience
a three body solution centers around three lovers who become unlikely leaders trying to save the Earth from global collapse. What inspired you to write a three body solution?
If I can be completely honest, the idea was “downloaded” during a shared psychedelic experience with two other people. Like much of the best science fiction, the novel exaggerates reality just enough to help us see it more clearly. My queer reply is that the book edges reality just enough to make readers blush, laugh, and hopefully think.
One of my closest friends is Thai and fascinated by aliens, so TaDoo was born. My partner of eighteen years is Vietnamese, deeply logical, and yet somehow equally devoted to RuPaul’s Drag Race, so Tâm emerged. And then there is me—an empathic, slightly overwhelmed middle-aged human trying to make sense of a world that often feels like it is unraveling.
One night, squeezed together on an all-too-small bed, dreaming about a larger Murphy bed, struggling with an Alexa that refused to play the right music, something unexpected happened. We shared a vision of a future that felt more hopeful, more connected, and more playful than the one currently being offered to us.
By morning, we realized we had all experienced something remarkably similar. QuBit and the advanced tech MMMurphyBed were envisioned, the characters followed, and eventually a three body solution emerged.
At its heart, the book asks a simple question: What if we could bottle our best moments of mortality and connection and share them with humanity?
Which came first: the relationship between Chip, Tâm, and TaDoo, or the larger vision of a world in crisis?
The world crisis came first. I’ve been wrestling with existential distress far longer than I’ve been imagining alternative relationship structures.
As Lily Tomlin famously said, “Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.” That line has haunted and inspired me for years.
The more I looked at our political divisions, ecological challenges, and collective loneliness, the more I found myself imagining leaders who approached power differently. What might happen if tenderness, honesty, vulnerability, and cooperation were treated as strengths rather than weaknesses?
The thruple became my laboratory for exploring that question.
The three protagonists are imperfect, messy, occasionally ridiculous, and often in over their heads. Yet they keep choosing each other. In a world increasingly organized around fear, I wanted to imagine people organizing themselves around connection.
Maybe that’s what I mean by “pink magic.” Not perfection. Not ideology. Just the radical belief that love, creativity, humor, and community might still have a role to play in shaping our future. I write with the following mottos in my heart:
#BooksNotBombs
#DreamMoreDreadLess
Were there particular science fiction authors who influenced your work?
Not all of my influences are strictly science fiction, but the writers who stayed with me are the ones who cracked open reality in some way. They each affirmed something that influences how and why I write.
Cixin Lui gets a big gay hug for his daring The Three Body Problem series and for acknowledging character development was not his primary interest.
C. S. Lewis gave me portals to a land with talking animals and a way to observe grief.
Stephen King gave me permission to be strange, sprawling, and a little haunted. Daniel
Quinn’s Ishmael helped me think differently about humans, animals, and culture. Octavia
Butler showed me how speculative fiction can be prophetic, political, and deeply embodied.
Ocean Vuong may not be sci-fi, but his prose reminds me that language can wash over you without having to comprehend every word. And David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas* helped me appreciate stories that move across time, bodies, and identities.
Also, full confession: I may be one of the rare unicorns who loved the Wachowskis’ film adaptation of Cloud Atlas even more than the book. Queer cinematic heresy, perhaps, but I stand by it.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing such an ambitious and genre-blending novel?
Believing I had permission to write it.
The book blends queer romance, science fiction, grief work, neuroscience, primatology, psychedelics, spirituality, and political commentary. Conventional publishing wisdom would probably suggest picking one lane. Instead, I decided to create a traffic jam.
I also relied on a great deal of support along the way: the encouragement of my partner, insights from psychedelic experiences, and AI tools that occasionally helped untangle my famously long-winded sentences.
The deeper challenge wasn’t writing 600-plus pages. It was trusting that the story deserved to exist.
I know some readers may use the book as a bedtime companion, while others may discover it works equally well as a yoga block or doorstop. I’m genuinely okay with either outcome.
At some point, every creator faces the same question: “Just because I can, should I?” For this book, my answer was yes.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
Runner-Up – Alternative Future
Honorable Mention – Unconventional Romance
Welcome to the world of a three body solution-a daringly subversive and juicy tale that reimagines what it means to save humanity.
At its heart is Chip, Tâm, and TaDoo-a queer thruple-turned-global leaders united by love and an uncanny knack for tackling the impossible. In a world teetering on the edge of collapse, these unlikely heroes rise to power as the self-proclaimed MMMperors: Men of Mind and Magic. With humor as sharp as their strategies and compassion as boundless as their dreams, they embark on humanity’s most daunting challenge yet: saving Earth herself.
Chip, the globe-trotting empathic healer, struggles to reconcile kin’s enlightened wisdom with the absurdities of leadership. Tâm, the silver fox scientist and reluctant leader, balances their razor-sharp mind with an unexpected flair for drag, channeling their alter-ego, Dr. Phở-nomenal, to inspire a world hungry for hope. And then there’s TaDoo, the dreamer and cosmic envoy who believes salvation might just arrive aboard a celestial mothership. Together, they weave through a chaotic mosaic of love, resilience, and otherworldly ambition.
This is a story of resilience, connection, and the beauty of trying-even when the outcome seems uncertain. A wild ride that will make you laugh, cry, and reconsider the very fabric of what it means to be human.
The 12 Bad Dates Before Christmas
The 12 (Bad) Dates Before Christmas, by N.L. DiDeo, follows Evie Holliday, a hardworking architect whose quiet single life is upended when her mother issues a holiday ultimatum: go on twelve dates before Christmas or surrender her romantic future to the “Church Cupids.” What begins as a parade of dating-app calamities becomes something warmer and more surprising when Evie repeatedly crosses paths with Ryan, a charming police officer and single father whose presence feels less like a rescue and more like a well-timed miracle. Set against the festive sparkle of St. Augustine, this clean holiday romance turns bad dates, meddling family, and emotional-support donuts into the scaffolding for a sweet love story.
I had fun with this book because it understands the comic misery of dating without becoming sour about love. Evie’s voice is chatty, self-protective, and genuinely funny, especially when she is cataloging each romantic disaster like evidence at a crime scene. The book’s humor works best when it lets ordinary humiliations swell into operatic little catastrophes: garlic rolls withheld like sacred relics, a karaoke ambush, a mother treating a dating profile like a surveillance operation. There is a buoyant absurdity to the premise, but the story stays grounded through Evie’s affection for her family, her friendship with Lanie, and her growing recognition that being busy is not the same as being fulfilled.
Ryan gives the romance its steadier pulse. I appreciated that he is not written as a flawless fantasy dropped into Evie’s life to solve everything; he comes with responsibilities, a daughter he adores, and enough patience to meet Evie’s chaos with warmth rather than swagger. The relationship develops with a light touch, and the closed-door approach keeps the focus on banter, trust, family integration, and the small rituals that make two lives begin to rhyme. Some of the setups are broad, and the bad dates lean deliberately cartoonish, but that theatrical quality feels baked into the charm. The book is not trying to be austere. It is a frosted sugar cookie with a surprisingly sturdy center.
The target audience is readers who enjoy clean romance, holiday romance, small-town romance, romantic comedy, and Christmas fiction. Fans of Debbie Macomber’s cozy seasonal stories or Jenny Hale’s Christmas romances will likely feel at home here, though N.L. DiDeo brings a more antic, sitcom-bright dating-app energy to the familiar holiday-love framework. This is a cheerful, low-angst read for anyone who wants family meddling, festive settings, sweet chemistry, and a love story that believes embarrassment can be a doorway. The 12 (Bad) Dates Before Christmas is a merry reminder that the road to forever may begin with one truly terrible first date.
Pages: 295 | ASIN : B0GX2YLJJQ
Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet
Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet, by James P. Rochester Jr. III, is a satirical spy comedy about Herbert Bigglesby, an 84-year-old former superspy who has been officially declared dead, tucked away in a senior living facility, and expected to fade quietly into the background. Herbert, naturally, has other plans. What begins as a comic portrait of a retired agent refusing to accept retirement turns into a wild genre-bending romp involving old enemies, senior scams, family complications, cruise-ship chaos, and one last chance for Herbert to prove he is still useful, even if his body, his colleagues, and common sense keep suggesting otherwise.
What struck me first was how committed the book is to its own absurdity. Rochester writes with a restless comic energy, piling jokes on top of references, misunderstandings, wordplay, and physical mishaps until the story feels almost like a spy movie being performed in a nursing home after someone misplaced the script. Sometimes that works beautifully. The opening scenes at Sunset View are sharp, funny, and oddly vivid, with all the fluorescent lighting, bad smells, institutional blandness, and bruised pride of old age turned into the setting for espionage. I liked that the humor is not gentle. It pokes. It elbows. It’s often ridiculous, but it also has a clear target: the way society files people away once they are no longer convenient.
The author’s biggest choice is also the book’s biggest risk. Herbert is not always easy to like. He’s vain, inappropriate, stubborn, and trapped in an old version of himself that the world has mostly outgrown. Still, I found myself curious about him because the book does not treat aging as a soft-focus lesson in wisdom. It treats it as a collision. Herbert’s mind is full of old missions, old habits, old desires, and old wounds, while the present keeps interrupting him with pills, liability forms, family demands, and people who do not remember why he mattered. That tension gives the comedy more weight than I expected. Beneath the jokes about spycraft and senior living, there is a real question here: what happens to a person when the role that gave them meaning is taken away?
As a work of comic spy satire, Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet will appeal most to readers who enjoy humor, parody, and stories that move fast even when their hero doesn’t. Readers who enjoy messy, loud, self-aware comedy with a surprising amount of heart should have a good time. I would recommend it to fans of spy spoofs, aging antiheroes, and books that are willing to be silly while still asking what dignity, purpose, and usefulness look like near the end of life.
Pages: 310 | ASIN : B0GSPKG78M
Disgruntled Entitlement
Debt centers around two lawyers whose lives are becoming defined by the debt they bear as they face the aftermath and lessons learned following a colleague’s tragic suicide. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The novel is a retelling of Crime and Punishment in the same way The Stranger probably was. The contention being that the moral architecture of the age has started dictating different moral conclusions. The book uses the arcs of murder and prostitution almost allegorically, and I think it was this general theme that drove the plot more than anything else. I saw Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice a couple months after finishing Debt, and that film sort of corroborated the emergence of this new archetype for me. Someone who transgresses a moral boundary and not only feels no direct remorse but whose life gets immeasurably better as a result, and who suffers no consequences. That’s sort of the meditation here. I’m also a corporate attorney.
The voice is frantic, funny, disgusted, and intensely precise. How did you develop that tone?
I wrote another novel, – -, where the narrator of Debt is the main character. The world of that novel is more straightforwardly absurd, so when Wade is situated in a world that’s ostensibly “normal,” it’s like he’s still suspended in that absurdity. He approaches the world of Debt as if it were its own Invisible City, and I think that’s where the tone comes from. This place is pretty absurd if you think you’re only visiting.
How did you balance empathy for Bill and K with the satire directed at their choices and ambitions?
That’s a good question. It’s very true that Bill and K are representatives of one of the least sympathetic classes in our society, the HENRYs. It’s also true that their situation is almost entirely self-inflicted. What do they have to complain about, really? The book leans into this some. On another level, their problems and their misery are kind of a way of saying that it doesn’t get better for anybody. Like that Malvina Reynolds song, “and there’s doctors, and there’s lawyers and business executives,” but even they can’t get a little box anymore. There’s a disgruntled entitlement and a pessimism that make the book possible. We forget to pray for the HENRYs, and so the HENRYs forget to pray for us.
If readers finish the novel haunted by one thing beyond the satire — the romance, the exhaustion, the fear, or the compromises — what do you hope lingers most?
Debt is a tax imposed by the capital class on the cost of social mobility. If you feel like you’ve been disappointed for so long that you’ve forgotten an alternative, at least you’re not alone. It’s not a hallucination. Things have gotten worse. They are getting worse. There are intractable logics at the core of our systems that we both suffer and enforce. And if you can find a way to fall in love and get married, then you should.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Website | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
The Sweet Season
The Sweet Season, by James B. Farmer, follows a group of overlooked girls in a struggling Midwestern town who become the Sweets, a softball team built from “leftovers” and shaped by an aging coach with grief, regrets, and a stubborn belief in effort. At the center are Jessee, a gifted but emotionally bruised athlete, and Cat, a Somali refugee whose quiet courage changes not only the team but the town around them. What begins as a sports story gradually becomes a novel about friendship, discipline, community repair, and the long echo of one incandescent life.
I was most drawn to the way Farmer treats softball not as decoration but as a moral language. Practice matters here. Repetition matters. Failure isn’t glamorous, but it’s useful. The games have tension, yet the deeper victories happen in the smaller moments: a girl learning to trust a teammate, an old coach learning he still has something to give, a neglected town beginning to remember its young people. The novel has an old-fashioned largeness of heart, but it’s not soft. It keeps returning to hard subjects, poverty, prejudice, violence, grief, civic neglect, and asks what people owe one another when the scoreboard is not enough.
Cat is the book’s emotional lodestar, and Jessee’s arc gives the story much of its ache. Their friendship feels unlikely at first, then necessary, then almost mythic in its power to reorder lives. I appreciated that the novel lets love show itself through action rather than sentiment alone: tutoring, training, showing up, refusing to quit. At times, the book’s earnestness is big enough to fill a stadium, but I found that part of its charm. It wants readers to believe that character can be coached, that broken towns can be mended, and that a team can become a kind of chosen family.
This book will appeal to readers who enjoy coming-of-age fiction, sports fiction, inspirational fiction, and character-driven literary fiction with strong themes of resilience and community. Fans of A League of Their Own may recognize the fierce joy of women proving themselves on the field, while readers who admire Fredrik Backman’s blend of humor, heartbreak, and communal healing may feel at home in Farmer’s Centerville. The Sweet Season is a warm, bruising, deeply earnest novel about the people who teach us how to win without letting winning become the point.
Pages: 401 | ASIN : B0GWRXSHF4
Mean Cuisine
Mean Cuisine, by Wendy W. Webb, is a comic cozy mystery with a messy kitchen, a dead chef, a psychic investigator, and a black cat who seems to understand danger before everyone else does. Beluga Stein signs up for culinary school, looking for a change of pace, which is funny from the start because her first big food disaster involves exploding eggs. She tells herself the school will mean “Murder-free, safe cooking. No doubt about it.” Naturally, that hope lasts about five minutes.
The book’s real charm is Beluga herself. She’s nosy, dramatic, smart, food-obsessed, and usually aware that her life has become ridiculous. Her friendship with Tanya gives the story a lot of its bounce, since their conversations feel like those of two longtime friends who know exactly how to annoy and rescue each other. Planchette the cat and Emerson the goat add another layer of chaos, and the animal comedy never feels separate from the mystery. It’s part of Beluga’s world.
The mystery is built around the culinary school, where strict chefs, competitive students, strange accidents, and supernatural hints all share the same space. The murder investigation brings in poison, jealousy, hidden motives, and a cluricaun with a taste for wine. Webb keeps the pace lively by mixing classroom mishaps with clues, diary entries, and scenes that turn ordinary kitchen tools into potential hazards.
What stands out most is the voice. The humor is constant, but it comes from character more than punch lines. Beluga’s narration has a casual, sideways logic that makes even danger feel oddly cozy. By the end, when she writes, “All’s well that ends well. At least for some,” it fits the whole mood of the book: cheerful, suspicious, and perfectly aware that peace is probably temporary.
Mean Cuisine is a warm, weird, food-centered mystery about a woman who wants to learn to cook and instead finds herself sorting out murder, friendship, and a supernatural mess. It’s playful without losing the thread of the case, and its best moments come from watching Beluga stumble into trouble with total confidence that she can talk, eat, or investigate her way out of it. Webb’s work is best suited to fans of cozy mysteries and any reader who appreciates humor woven throughout suspenseful plots.
Pages: 224 | ASIN : B0DM2NYQHZ
Story, Education, and Real Recipes
Mimi’s Magic Kitchen: The Great Brownie Bake-Off Disaster follows two children who enter a baking competition where they are challenged to make brownies with some very unexpected ingredients. Where did the concept come from, and why brownies specifically?
Really, the concept came from my love of food and cooking. I’ve always been a foodie. I love food, I love cooking, and I especially love baking. At that point in my life, I decided I wanted to spend more time doing things I genuinely loved, so I started getting back into cooking and baking again and sharing some of it online. That’s when I realized how much I wanted to encourage kids and parents to get back in the kitchen together more often. Some of my favorite memories growing up happened around the kitchen and homemade food, and I felt like that experience was slowly disappearing a little because life has become so fast and convenient.
Once I had the idea to make a children’s book centered around baking, the brownie idea came together pretty quickly because I already had this brownie recipe I’d been making for years that everyone always loves. The brownies are super easy to make, really forgiving, and honestly just really good, which made them perfect for the story.
Then I realized the unusual ingredients in the recipe sounded strange enough to become the actual story itself. That’s where the bake-off disaster idea came from. I thought it would be funny if the “normal” brownie ingredients people usually think of when making brownies disappeared, and the kids had to figure out how to make brownies using all these unexpected replacements instead.
Emma and Archer actually became the two kid characters in the book because they’re my real kids. My son was 9, and my daughter was 6 while I was writing it, which felt like the perfect ages for the world and audience of the story. They also have very different personalities, which made them really fun characters to write and helped bring a lot of personality into the story.
From there, everything else kind of grew naturally: the baking competition, the little educational section about ingredients and kitchen tools, and the real recipes in the back of the book. One thing that was really important to me was making sure the recipes were recipes families would actually want to make again and again, not just recipes meant to keep kids busy for twenty minutes.
The baking tips and ingredient explanations make the book feel interactive and educational without losing its playful tone. How did you balance storytelling with hands-on learning?
From the beginning, I already knew I wanted the book to be a mix of story, education, and real recipes. But honestly, once I wrote the story and really developed Mimi’s character, the rest of it kind of fell into place naturally.
I completely fell in love with her while I was writing. She’s funny, a little chaotic, creative, confident, and somehow always seems to know how to handle things without getting too flustered. She’s the kind of person kids would want to hang out with and the kind of fun, comforting adult I think a lot of us wish we had around growing up. She really became the heart of the whole book.
Once her personality started coming to life in the story, it became really obvious to me how I could make the educational parts and recipes feel fun too. I never wanted kids to feel like the story suddenly stopped, and now it was time for “learning.” I wanted it to feel like they were just continuing along with Mimi into her magical little kitchen world.
So I started writing the educational tips and recipes in her voice, with all her little comments, humor, and personality sprinkled throughout. I still remember testing some of the early recipe drafts on my daughter after I had rewritten them in Mimi’s voice. She was completely entertained by them and genuinely wanted me to keep reading the recipes out loud, which honestly made me laugh because what kid gets excited about hearing a recipe? That was the moment when it really clicked for me that this approach was working.
After that, I leaned into it even more. I wanted the whole experience to feel lighthearted, cozy, creative, and fun for both kids and parents. In my opinion, people do their best cooking when they’re relaxed, using their imagination, making memories together, and ending up with something delicious they can’t wait to make again.
This book feels designed to continue after story time ends, especially with the real brownie recipes included afterward. Why was it important to make the baking experience part of the book itself, and did you hope the story would encourage more family cooking and baking together?
Absolutely. One of the biggest goals of the book was to make the experience continue after the story ended. I didn’t want it to just be something kids read once and put back on a shelf. I wanted it to turn into something families could actually go do together afterward.
I also really wanted kids to feel more confident in the kitchen. I think a lot of people grow up believing they “can’t cook” just because they had a few bad experiences or messed something up once and got intimidated by it. But honestly, cooking and baking are messy sometimes. I’ve had complete disasters in my own kitchen, and I love cooking. That’s just part of learning.
That’s why the story itself became so important to me. The kids in the book get overwhelmed when everything starts going wrong, and then Mimi comes in with this attitude of, “Okay, so we’ll figure it out.” She teaches them that there’s usually a solution, even if it means thinking outside the box a little.
That’s a huge part of cooking to me. Some of the best things happen in the kitchen when you experiment, get creative, substitute ingredients, or make something your own. I’m notorious for taking recipes and scribbling all over them, changing ingredients and amounts until they become my version of the recipe. I wanted kids and parents to feel like the kitchen could be a place for imagination and creativity instead of pressure and perfection.
I also really wanted families to make memories together through the experience of the book itself. Read the story together, laugh at the chaos, learn a few things without it feeling overly serious, then go make brownies together and maybe make a little mess while you’re at it. Honestly, who cares if flour ends up all over the counter? That’s part of the fun.
My hope was that families would walk away not only feeling entertained but feeling proud of what they made together. Because when kids make something genuinely delicious that other people love too, it gives them confidence. That’s the kind of confidence that makes them want to get back in the kitchen and do it all over again.
Will Emma and Archer return to Mimi’s Magic Kitchen? If so, what other baking disasters might be waiting for them there?
Absolutely. Once I created Mimi, Emma, Archer, and this magical kitchen world, I honestly did not want to leave it behind. I always intended for this to become a series, which is why the book ends with “to be continued.”
The biggest inspirations for me were the kinds of worlds I grew up loving, things like Candy Land, Strawberry Shortcake, and The Magic School Bus. I loved those imaginative, colorful worlds as a kid, so a magical world filled with funny food creations, baking disasters, strange ingredients, and things you don’t totally understand yet just felt like such a fun place for kids to explore.
Once I finished the first story, I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, this could be a whole world.” Not just one story, but an actual Mimi’s Magic Kitchen world with all these different places, food adventures, kitchen experiments, and lessons hidden underneath the fun. That’s something I really want to keep expanding more and more throughout the series.
The next story is actually already in the works, and it’s centered around homemade sodas, which is why the first book ends with “it’s about to get bubbly.” While I was finishing the brownie book, my kids and I started experimenting with homemade sodas and fermentation at home, and we had so much fun with it that I immediately knew it needed to become the next adventure.
We made things like ginger bug sodas, fruit syrups, and homemade versions of drinks that still felt exciting and magical for kids. I loved the idea that something as simple as making soda at home could turn into this big creative kitchen experiment where kids are learning new things almost without realizing it, because they’re too busy having fun making bubbly drinks.
I also love the idea of helping families realize that homemade things can still feel exciting and special. You don’t have to be some hardcore health person to enjoy making things from scratch. I just think there’s something really special about kids getting into the kitchen, experimenting, making a mess, and getting excited because they made something themselves that tastes amazing, and bonus, is so much better for them than anything at the store.
I already have ideas for more adventures after that, too, possibly even something savory after the bubbly adventure. But really, the biggest goal with all of it is just continuing to create experiences that kids and parents can genuinely have fun with together. I want families to get immersed in Mimi’s world, laugh at the stories, learn a few things along the way, and then feel excited and confident enough to go try something new together in the kitchen.
Honestly, I had an absolute blast writing the first story, and I’m having just as much fun working on the second one. I’ll definitely keep everybody posted on when that adventure might be coming next. But in the meantime, I really hope families enjoy stepping into Mimi’s Magic Kitchen world together, and I can’t wait for them to see what adventure is waiting for Emma and Archer next.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Amazon
Mimi’s Magic Kitchen and the Great Brownie Bake-Off Disaster is a highly illustrated kids storybook that turns story time into a real baking experience, complete with six brownie recipes families can make together.
Step into Mimi’s Magic Kitchen for a brownie bake-off gone wrong. Archer and Emma are left with a pantry full of things like pickled turnips, almond butter, and Essence of Mystery, with no idea how to turn any of it into brownies. What could possibly go right?
After the story ends, the fun continues with simple baking tips, ingredient explanations, and real recipes inspired by the book, because reading about brownies without making them would just be mean.
Hardcover and paperback editions coming Summer 2026!
Perfect for:
• Kids who love baking
• Family baking nights
• Cozy screen-free activities
• Parents looking for hands-on fun together
Includes:
• Six real brownie recipes
• Four gluten-free options
• Kid-friendly baking basics
• Highly illustrated full-color pages
Journey Into Romance
A Is for Amy follows a widowed mother of three who stumbles back into romance, desire, and selfhood through a chaotic alphabet of flirtation, exhaustion, and second chances, discovering that opening your heart again is both ridiculous and necessary. What was the inspiration for your story?
I wrote this novella when my two youngest children were under 3. Though I loved being a parent, I felt my prior self was completely submerged in the care of my kids. So, I decided to write something quick with a big heart, something for grown-ups to explore. A journey into romance grounded in the real-world of parenting young kids. I wanted to capture the economy and directness of short fiction with the ability to follow the significant development of a main character that comes with the novel.
The novella never treats motherhood as separate from desire. Why was it important to keep those parts of Amy’s identity intertwined?
She is a whole person. Her sexuality is a part of this wholeness. Her loss and suffering have affected how she perceives herself and her life. Her negativity at the beginning can be reductive and limiting. Sexuality is one way we can awaken to our true spirit. Amy is awakening in this novella.
The idea of Amy naming her life one piece at a time: Attraction, Baby Bartlette, Freedom, and Nutella, gives the structure emotional meaning. Did those specific entries arrive early, or did they accumulate through drafting?
Those are names that I choose, not Amy. Amy would see them as part of the ebb and flow of her life. They are details, not necessarily stages. They are on the cover to engage the reader. I see the cover as the beginning of the book, the beginning of the adventure for the reader. These words are welcome, mystery, and invitation. A tease if you like.
The alphabet format also makes the book look like a children’s picture book from the outside. Was that visual misdirection intentional — and what do you want a reader to feel when they open it and discover what’s actually inside?
Yes, the cover is deliberately deceptive. So parents, grandparents, and any caregivers can read the book incognito as they care for the children. The deception is clearly stated on the back cover. The inside design is quite different, too. It is for grownups. Like the story. I wanted the reading experience to be a refuge for the reader. A world grounded in the reality of parenting, but free from it at the same time. This is a book for the person every parent was before they were a parent. A place to laugh and cry and engage with a compelling character – to celebrate and suffer with her. To read not for a child, but for themselves. I hope the readers feel at their ease as they journey. My goal is to delight them.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Website | Amazon
Amy Dellaconta Franklin is an independent mother of 3 kids under 5. Her life is often exhausting and isolating. Then, one day, love comes knocking at her front door.
Amy is a sassy, charming, yet lonely young widow who unexpectedly finds herself on the path of finding love again. Surprises overturn expectations at nearly every turn in this novella, which tells the story of how a life that seemed trapped in the too-hard basket became a voyage of romantic discovery.
A is for Amy tells it fast, straight and funny. From negativity to bliss. With no fluff and no wasted words.
Do you like reading but never seem to have enough space to start (or finish) a book? Each chapter in this romancecan be enjoyed in the time it takes to drink a good cup of coffee.
This is a great gift for parents or parents-to-be. It looks like an alphabet book for children. But inside, it’s a romantic adventure for grown-ups with a surprise ending that will touch your heart.
