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Out Of the Drawer
Stupid Gravity follows a sharp but disgraced software engineer who is on probation, witnesses the abduction of a girl from a homeless shelter, and has to find a way to save her without breaking her parole. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I created Alex/Liliane as a secondary character in my first attempt at writing a novel. That particular Not Ready for Primetime manuscript went into a drawer and never came back out, but the rocky backstory of the strange little hacker girl with the gray-fendered Mustang stuck with me. A few years later, I brought her back in a NaNoWriMo project that morphed into a full first draft, Shadow Girl. A discussion with Hank Phillipi Ryan at a writer’s conference led me to realize that what I had really written was the second book in the series and that I needed to go back and develop the origin story. The result was Stupid Gravity.
Alex can’t seem to catch a break and just wants to get her life back on track, but the universe seems to have other plans for her. What was your inspiration for their characters’ interactions and backstories?
Back in the Nineties and Aughts, I used to hang out at a carriage house on Capitol Hill where first one and then another of my friends lived and sold weed. I’ve sometimes reflected on the irony of that little business operating comfortably and profitably for over twenty years while hundreds of more technically legitimate Denver businesses came and went. Visitors stopping in for pot or just a cup of coffee and conversation included lawyers, college professors, two dominatrixes who lived next door, one published poet, a former Penthouse pet, numerous players in the local recreational pharmaceuticals scene, a PO stopping in to buy weed from his probationer, and many more unique Capitol Hill specimens. The incidents and people from that carriage house still provide a wealth of inspiration.
Do you think there’s a single moment in everyone’s life, maybe not as traumatic, that is life-changing?
I think many people have dramatic changes in their life path due to some personal or shared tragedy. We certainly hear about individuals driven to careers in medicine, law enforcement, religion, etc., by such events. In recent years, it would be hard to calculate how many lives were drastically altered by 9/11. For most of us, though, I think life is a little more like billiard balls caroming about on a pool table. I know I’ve frequently thought back on the way seemingly innocuous decisions changed my life—a college course taken, a chance encounter in a bar, a job offer accepted or turned down, etc.
Can you tell us what the second book will be about and when it will be available for fans to purchase?
Set two years after the series opener, Shadow Girl is in the final stage of beta reads and should be released in early 2026. Still the employee-from-hell at HappyMart, still rooming with Cici, and still on probation, Alex/Liliane has developed a side gig doing what she likes to call street-level detective work. That knife-edge balance of an existence comes under threat when a stalker threatens to expose her litany of probation violations. His price for keeping quiet is a hacking job as liable to land her in prison as keep her out.
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Disgraced software engineer Liliane Dupuis is genius-level smart, wise in the way of sarcasm, and incurably socially inept. She’s also living in her car, a forty-year-old blue Mustang fastback with one primer gray fender. She’s on probation, having allowed a manipulative ex-boyfriend to drag her into a failed ATM hacking scheme. And she’s unemployed in 2010 when finding a job is tough even for those unburdened with a felony conviction. When Liliane witnesses the abduction of a little girl from a homeless shelter, she doesn’t figure her new bottom-rung reality carries the risk tolerance for getting involved.
With funds dwindling to desperation level, she uses a fake ID to land a job at a convenience store on a seamy stretch of Denver’s Colfax Avenue. Less than a week into her new salesclerk career, Liliane watches as the shelter kidnapper walks into her store. It’s not a coincidence, she knows. Just karma continuing to mess with her. A call to the police might or might not get the abductor locked up, but the exposure of Liliane’s parole violation will absoluely land her on a Sheriff’s bus headed for the state pen. Instead, she must use her resourcefulness, hacking skills, and ruthlessly logical gray matter to track down the kidnapper and rescue the little girl.
Stupid Gravity
Stupid Gravity follows Alexandra Farone, a sharp but battered software engineer who has slipped all the way down to the street level. She is broke, homeless, newly convicted, and trying to survive probation while living out of an aging Mustang and clinging to the last scraps of her old identity. When she spots a little girl who might be in danger, her life tilts again, pulling her into a messy world of shelters, addicts, low-wage jobs, and small-time criminals. The book blends tension, grit, and surprising humor as Alex reinvents herself as Liliane and stumbles into a mystery that keeps pulling her deeper. The story never sits still, and the tone mixes cynicism with heart in a way that sneaks up on you.
The writing has this blunt, unvarnished rhythm that feels like someone is talking to you while the city hums right outside the window. The scenes in the shelter, with stolen shoes and missing pages from library paperbacks, felt real. The author knows how to sketch misery with a weird sort of warmth, and it got to me. I found myself rooting for Alex even when she made choices that made me cringe. Her sarcasm worked as armor and sometimes as a cry for help, and I kept feeling that mix of frustration and sympathy that only an authentic character can pull out of me. I liked how the story showed small humiliations stacking up until they almost crush her. It made the idea of her chasing after a potentially kidnapped little girl feel brave and foolish at the same time.
I also loved the way the book let humor bubble up in the middle of all this roughness. The people Alex meets feel sharp and odd and alive. Cici, especially, stood out for me with her wild honesty and her ability to read people. Those scenes in her apartment, with candles and cheap beer and joints being passed around, had this messy intimacy that made me slow down and sit with the characters. The conversations were simple but loaded, and it reminded me how strangers can sometimes see us more clearly than the people we once loved. The writing made me feel the confusion and the longing and the strange comfort that comes when someone finally calls you out in a way you cannot dodge. It made the book feel less like a mystery and more like a story about being lost and trying to claw back a sense of purpose.
I think this book is for anyone who likes a gritty story with humor that slips in. It is good for readers who enjoy character-driven mysteries or stories where the setting feels like a character itself. If you like flawed leads who get knocked down hard and still keep stumbling forward, this one will hit the spot.
Pages: 336 | ASIN : B0FDBHB5ZM
LITERARY TITAN 