Blog Archives
Remaining True to Oneself
Carnage in D Minor follows an RN from her days as a piano prodigy to a military veteran with PTSD, who goes on a quest to discover a new, and ethically questionable, treatment for mental illness. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The story came to me during a time when my brother, an Army war veteran, was dealing with severe depression—intensified by chronic pain from an injury he received in Iraq. His struggle inspired me to write about determination and perseverance in the face of soul-crushing obstacles. The frustration he experienced attempting to get anyone to listen to him about his chronic health issues—the direct result of his service to this country—was excruciating to listen to. The time it took for him to ultimately get treatment was a burning thread for me. During the long waits between phone calls, referrals, and appointments, he resorted to self-medicating with alcohol and prescription drugs. I was worried that he would become a forgotten statistic. But he persevered, and I’m beyond happy he’s still with us today. After a successful surgery, his pain is manageable, and he has quit drinking. Fun fact: his wife is also a career Army veteran. They are both huge inspirations to me.
Leeza’s story is one that readers can relate to or find pieces of themselves in, making it easier to connect to her character and become invested in her story. Were you able to achieve everything you wanted with Leeza’s character in the novel?
Yes. Carnage in D minor is an adaptation of a screenplay. In the original screenplay, the protagonist was a white male. As a writer, I had an urge to change that character to a Black female for the book because, over the years, I have had so many friends from underrepresented minority cultures, genders, sexual orientations, etc. I jumped in with both feet and wrote her character without holding back. I wanted her successes to rise to the level of a superhero. Judging by many of the reviews I’ve read, I think I came quite close.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
The core themes I explored were the absolute refusal to give in or give up, and remaining true to oneself even when others have given up on you. Self-doubt is a major roadblock for so many.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
The Last Lily of Savannah – a novel. Late Summer, 2026. The story delves into a successful New York businesswoman’s seemingly perfect life. But beneath the carefully cultivated facade, she is tortured by the fact that she was adopted, and that the truth surrounding her biological family’s past has been hidden from her all her life. This story explores the primal need for adopted individuals to understand their origins. Unfortunately for our protagonist, sometimes it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Incidentally, I am also writing a screenplay for a production company in L.A. It is a horror flick set in a war zone. Fingers crossed—it may be in a theater near you soon.
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Leeza followed in her mother’s footsteps as a nurse, relying on Army ROTC for her education. During her early career as an RN and a commissioned officer, she endured a deployment in a war zone that left her with severe PTSD and a battle with addiction.
Twenty years later, Leeza is a married mother of two and a successful neurosurgical nurse practitioner. She is also a passionate activist. Driven by her own mental challenges and a deep desire to help others, she embarks on a desperate, ethically questionable quest to discover a revolutionary treatment for mental illness. Her goal: “mental conflict remission” and a global shift to destigmatize mental illness.
Though the journey is fraught with danger and illegality, Leeza’s passion and strength ultimately carry her though, culminating in a powerful story of global triumph.
Convey Emotion
Tracking Ariana follows a legally documented Afghan immigrant mother torn from her family by ICE, and the desperate race by her husband and unlikely allies to uncover the truth behind her disappearance. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
A common question for many authors is “How do you come up with Ideas to write about?” For this book, it was the topic of news reports that had raised my awareness and ire. Witnessing unfairness triggers emotions in most of us, at least it does me. Those emotions were my motivation for Tracking Ariana.
How did you balance portraying political systems with keeping the emotional core grounded in family and character?
Something I’ve had to learn as an author is to convey emotion to my readers. Writing is not just telling a story, it’s giving the readers a reason to become invested in the story. I’m getting better at it, I hope. In the case of Tracking Ariana, the political aspects were just the vehicle to take them there.
Ariana’s internal fear and self-blame feel especially intimate. What guided your approach to writing her interior life?
I think all parents share a love for their children, and it is this love that makes us question our actions when caring for them—to do better. In Ariana’s case, she realized, too late, that by wearing a hijab in the United States, she had endangered her family. Reflecting on that, she uses prayer to regain her footing.
What do you most hope readers carry with them after finishing Tracking Ariana?
I’d hope they find empathy for those having their human rights taken away from them. As Mia said in the book, “You know, we’re all orbiting the sun together on this tiny blue ball. We should be trying to get along, not hating one another.”
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When Ariana Wilkinson—a lawful U.S. resident and Afghan-born wife of an Air Force Colonel—is wrongfully detained by ICE during a religious festival in Westchester County, her disappearance sets off a desperate search that exposes the darkest corners of American immigration enforcement.
Returning home from deployment, Colonel Joseph Wilkinson finds his house empty and his wife and children missing. When he learns that Ariana has been taken into custody, he turns to attorney Seth Bodner for help. Together, they fight to get his children back—but Ariana vanishes before her immigration hearing ever takes place.
Enter Dan Burnett, a seasoned private investigator with NYPD roots. As Dan and Seth track Ariana through a labyrinth of detention centers from New York to Florida, they uncover a covert federal program of deportation—erasing them from the system before anyone can intervene.
Meanwhile, Ariana must survive the terror and uncertainty of detention, clinging to faith, memory, and the love of her family. But as her captors move her closer to deportation, time is running out—and the truth threatens to ignite a national scandal.
Told from multiple perspectives, Tracking Ariana is a gripping legal and investigative thriller about one woman’s fight for freedom and a family’s battle against a corrupt system. Fans of John Grisham, Scott Turow, and Lisa Scottoline will be riveted by this story of courage, justice, and the power of love in a nation divided.
Moral Imperatives
I, Robot Soldier follows a war-damaged robot soldier who wakes in the ruins of a world shattered by conflict and encounters a traumatized young girl, becoming her protector and companion. I find the world you created in this novel brimming with possibilities. Where did the inspiration for the setting come from, and how did it change as you were writing?
This novel was based on a short story I wrote many decades ago. The premise of a robot soldier awakening to the aftermath of war never left me. When I rewrote the story as a submission to my writing platform—Medium—it received such positive reader responses and encouragement to turn it into a novel, I decided to do just that. Other than that introductory premise, which became the novel’s prologue, the book was not pre-plotted but evolved as it unfolded.
What were some of the emotional and moral guidelines you followed when developing your characters?
The only “guidelines,” emotional or moral, for the characters were that they be credible and consistent. Specifically for the robot narrator, One Shot, the open question was whether he experienced feelings and had moral imperatives beyond those programmed into him. It was never my intention to answer that question definitively.
Where does the story go in the next book, and where do you see it going in the future?
The story is a standalone novel. The Robot Series is not a set of sequels, but rather a series of separate novels told from the viewpoints of unique robots. The second book (also reviewed by Literary Titan) is about a robot alien who comes to prevent humanity from a second devolution. The third book is about a female robot of the future.
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In a world shattered by war, a lone robot soldier awakens with one mission: to protect the last surviving human – a little girl named Amy.
Together, they form an unbreakable bond in a world where hope is scarce.
But danger lurks in the form of robotic mutations known as wolfhounds.
One Shot’s prime directive is clear: protect Amy at all costs.
On a perilous journey through a devastated world, the bond between a girl and a robot might be the key to humanity’s future. If they can survive.
The Secret of Spirit Lake
In The Secret of Spirit Lake, a young adult mystery with a gentle paranormal twist, we follow fourteen-year-old Amy, yanked away from her old life and dropped into a big yellow Victorian on a quiet Virginia lake. She ends up in the tower bedroom, where strange things start happening that point to a girl named Sally who used to live there. The story moves back and forth between Amy’s present-day summer of swim practices, new friends, and family tension, and the late 1930s life of a farm girl named Penny whose path slowly, uneasily, begins to overlap with the lake and the house Amy now calls home. The mystery sits in the space between those timelines, asking what really happened at Spirit Lake and what it means for the people still living there.
I really liked how the book uses that alternating structure. At first I was more invested in Amy, mostly because her voice feels so familiar: grumpy about her parents, irritated by younger siblings, convinced no one understands her, then slowly softening as she gets pulled into swim team life and real friendship. But Penny’s chapters crept up on me. Her world is harder and narrower, full of chores and exhaustion, and then that terrible fire that takes her parents hits with real emotional weight. The mystery works because those two stories start to rhyme. Amy is lonely and displaced; Penny is lonely and trapped. Sally is caught between them as a literal ghost, but also as this symbol of what happens when adults fail kids. The writing itself is clean and straightforward, the kind of YA prose that trusts younger readers to keep up while still feeling approachable. Short chapters keep things moving, and the ghost scenes are eerie without ever turning into nightmare fuel. There is a soft, almost cozy feel to a lot of the pages, even when the subject matter is dark.
What stood out to me most was the way the author chose to center safety and care instead of just creepiness. The ghost is sad more than scary, and the book keeps circling back to the question of who looks out for children when their parents can’t or won’t. You see it in Penny’s encounters with the state worker at the hospital, who is doing her best inside a rigid system, and in how Lucy and Henry neglect and emotionally abuse Hal and Millie behind the façade of a beautiful lake house. You see it again in Amy’s realization that her “annoying” little siblings are actually kind of adorable when she lets herself pay attention, and that her parents, while imperfect, are trying very hard to give their family a better life. As a YA mystery, the book leans more emotional than plot-twist-heavy, and sometimes the coincidences that help the girls solve the decades-old case feel a little convenient, but the emotional payoffs mostly earned my trust. I cared more about Millie hugging her long-lost brother on a sunny balcony than about every logistical detail lining up perfectly.
By the end, I felt like I’d spent a summer at the lake myself, watching Amy grow into her own skin, cheering through swim meets, and then sitting up way too late trying to fit together scraps of diaries and old letters with her and her friends. The paranormal element stays light, but the feelings underneath are not. The Secret of Spirit Lake is the kind of YA mystery I’d hand to a thoughtful middle schooler or young teen who likes ghost stories that are more about healing than horror, or to adults who enjoy warm, character-driven young adult fiction with a bit of intrigue. It would fit well in school and library book clubs, especially with readers who are ready to talk about grief, neglect, and found family in a safe way.
Pages: 335 | ASIN : B0FLM38VSC
Steamy Distraction
Sydney and Heather are both interesting characters trying to move past their last bad relationships. What character did you enjoy writing for? Was there one that was more challenging to write for?
The Unwritten Rule’s two main characters were both a pleasure to write about. I loved discovering their slow-burn relationship and the sizzling chemistry that ignited amidst global travel, high-stakes sports events, and Formula One’s glamour.
Heather’s experience as a writer definitely made her an easier character to write. I connected with her motivation of wanting a career that her entourage could understand, but she was also keen to write about people falling in love. I wanted her to be a heroine readers could identify with, a character who, like newcomers to the Formula One romance genre, was also unfamiliar with the world of motorsport. But as I wrote more about Heather, she became much more than that—she had her own dreams and insecurities, which made her so endearing.
Sydney was more challenging because he’s more guarded—the sting of his past relationship still raw. But throughout the writing process, he revealed himself to be also sweet and considerate towards Heather and others. Everything a reader would expect and more from a modern and sexy Highlander. I loved seeing him open up to Heather during their interview questions for his biography. Writing about him falling in love again was satisfying after months of having to pull answers from Sydney—much like Heather did during the course of the story!
What scene in the book did you have the most fun writing?
There were many scenes I had fun writing for The Unwritten Rule, from the meet-cute in the Canadian Rockies to the action on track across the racing season, so it’s hard to find just one! Especially since I wrote it with dual points of view, as I wanted to create an immersive reading experience. I enjoyed writing about Heather’s first meeting with Sydney, and how it parallels the romance book she’s writing in the story. For fans of romantic comedy, I think they’ll laugh as hard as I did when I was writing it!
I also had fun integrating motorsport elements into the storyline and getting the reader to feel like they are in the car with Sydney. To do so, I rewatched old footage of past Australian and Canadian Grands Prix—among many others—which helped me realistically assess his championship ambitions, along with the difficulties he encountered on track. As an F1 fan, adding those small details from the driver’s point of view is key to writing my Formula One romance novels.
It might not be a scene, but compiling the glossary to help new readers understand all the motorsport terms and Scottish slang peppered throughout the story was a fun exercise. Since my contemporary romance novel is set in a more niche subgenre, I don’t expect all the readers of The Unwritten Rule to be Formula One fans just yet, but maybe by the end of the book, they will be!
When will Book Two be available? Can you give us an idea of where that book will take readers?
The Rival Hearts, the second book in The Racing Line series, is scheduled for publication in Spring 2026. It follows the story of Ethan and Maggie, two side characters from The Unwritten Rule, as they go from being rivals to lovers.
Here’s book two in a few sentences: She’s the first female F1 title contender. He’s the steamy distraction on track. The race weekend plan didn’t include waking up married to the rival rookie driver. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, right?
Readers can expect to see familiar faces, discover new racetracks, as well as plenty of banter and spice. As with all the interconnected stand-alone books in The Racing Line series, they are filled with international travel, irresistible chemistry, and a swoon-worthy hero in a race suit.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Website | Amazon
Sydney
To match his legendary father’s record on the track, Sydney McKinnly needs a third world championship win. But after a dreadful year in and out of the cockpit, the only way he’s keeping his driver’s seat is by agreeing to have his bloody biography written.
It wasn’t supposed to challenge his decision of not getting distracted by love this season. Harder said than done when the biographer is none other than his Rockies holiday fling. And the sparks are still flying high.
Can he keep to their no-strings-attached deal? Or is their chemistry putting everything he’s been working for this season at risk?
Heather
Heather Everett-Fortier is a successful biographer, yet each new book brings her further away from her dream of writing romance novels.
After a bad breakup, travelling the world with the St-Pierre Racing team provides Heather with unparalleled opportunities for gathering romance story-setting inspiration. But it also brings Heather closer to her one-night stand. As strangers, they weren’t supposed to see each other again, let alone work together! And yet, when they meet again, they can’t pull away. Writing Sydney’s biography brings Heather closer to her dreams, but will their steamy attraction steer her off track?
Can Heather and Sydney keep their passion in check long enough for them to finish this biography?
The Unwritten Rule is book #1 in the Racing Line Series. Each book can be read as a stand-alone, but they are interconnected. This is a high-octane contemporary sports romance filled with open-door spice, swoon-worthy moments, and a guaranteed happily ever after.
Mythology or Comparative Religions
Dead and Buried follows a woman learning to manage her Kitsune heritage and magic, who keeps having curveballs hurled at her from psychic attacks, supernatural creatures, and restless spirits. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
If I can quote Aerosmith, “Half my life’s in books written pages. Live and learn from fools and from sages.”
That pretty well sums up my life. Especially my younger years. I was a “surprise” baby, and my siblings were much older than I was. While I was loved, I really didn’t fit in. Then my father died when I was in grade school. By Junior High, my brothers and sister had all married and moved out of the house. So, I learned early to roll with the punches using books as my escape and humor as my armour.
Many of those books were in the Sci Fi/Fantasy realm, and I’ve always had a particular fascination with mythology or comparative religions.
I found Tai’s character to be believable and relatable; her emotions and responses felt real even when dealing with all the paranormal situations she was thrown into. Are there any emotions or memories from your own life that you put into your character’s life?
As I indicated, I had to learn to roll with the punches as a child. I kept Tai as human as she rolled with her punches. She also uses humor as armour, even though she has less of a filter on her mouth than I do.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
It is a lesson that we all need to learn – acceptance, resiliency, and personal growth.
Can you tell us where the book goes and where we’ll see the characters in the next book?
There are a planned nine books in the series – literally one for each of the nine tails that a Kitsune can have.
Book three has Tai and friends in New Orleans, where she meets distant family and makes new friends. Of course, there is plenty of growth – and it is not all for her. I hope to have the book available on Amazon in February.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Join Tai, Nico, and Magoo as they navigate contractors, heartbreak, and the undead.
All I wanted was a moment to myself. Being back in High School was exhausting. I groaned, contemplating the absurdity of the situation. Having to take summer school classes was lame at the best of times. But taking a High School class when you were eight-plus years out of school was even worse. Especially when it was a class I had technically already passed. Technically. By the skin of my teeth. Which, if I am to understand correctly, is a trait of certain gnomes. Not sure which ones, though.
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.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
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.
Etched Into the Magic User’s Flesh
Bathed in Ink and Blood follows two threads: the Butcher of Greenlake’s desire for revenge, and twin siblings, as they undergo the Test that reveals their signamantic abilities. What was the inspiration that drove the development of the world the characters live in?
A large inspiration for me was Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn and its magic system. I had an idea for a hard magic system built around symbols etched into the magic user’s flesh and took that idea into Dave Wolverton’s Advanced Story Puzzle course, and Bathed in Ink and Blood was born. A caste system grew around the magic system, one that would lend itself well to the darker world I was attempting to craft. Then, I dove into how this magic system would impact the world as whole, and found myself asking a variety of questions. How could the magic users be used for benefit or detriment? How would technological advancement be different with the presence of this magic? This basically a long way of saying, Signamancy was born and the world grew around it.
I felt that your novel delivers the drama so well that it flirts with the grimdark genre. Was it your intention to give the story a darker tone?
I always planned for Bathed in Ink and Blood to be darker. I wanted to explore if a character was pushed too far, what they would do in response. You can call it a spectrum, each of the characters, Brist, Dacre, and Raya, are at different spots at the start of the novel, and move across that spectrum throughout it. For example, with Brist, easily the most morally gray character in the story, he’s on the far side of the spectrum. His objective is all that matters, no action too brutal if it takes him a step closer to his goal. Having a character like that, the darker tone seemed the only choice. Then you are provided the opportunity to push your other characters and explore questions like “What is too far?” or “What will I lose if I do this?”.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
The main themes I explored were revenge, coming of age, found family, and belonging/acceptance. Of course, there are other themes, but there were the big four, each one mainly applied to one of the three POV characters. Brist’s main theme was revenge and that is what he becomes, it is his singular focus and he blocks everything else out. With Dacre it is coming of age and found family; we have a teenager with a new found power that destroys his family. He has to navigate a new power and finds himself with Brist and his team. What starts as a need, turns into a family. For Raya it is belonging/acceptance. She wants her father’s approval, but to him, her only use is to form a relationship with a former king through a marriage, a marriage she does not want.
What will your next novel be about, and what will the whole series encompass?
My next novel will be the sequel to Bathed in Ink and Blood and will start directly after the events of the first novel. Readers will find certain characters on a similar path they were previously on, while other characters start new ones. The main theme that will be explored in the sequel will be “war”. The series, Ink, Brand, and Knife, is a planned trilogy and will include at least two novellas, one of which I’m actively working on, before I move to the sequel.
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Signamancy opens a world of possibilities for a low-born teen. However, a power that gives can also take away. Dacre Caeinn finds himself in the company of the Butcher of Greenlake. Will the most wanted man in Camoria help Dacre save the one he loves most or will he be another victim buried in the Butcher’s trail of revenge?
The life of the standard noblewoman was one Raya Adan never wanted despite her father’s insistence. Now, she finds herself betrothed and the idea of being shipped across the sea as little more than a commodity does not sit well with her. To gain her father’s approval and show her worth as more than a bargaining chip, she dives into the investigation of recent attacks on the family’s ventures. However, not all is as it seems and Raya slowly unravels truths that will upend the world she knows.
LITERARY TITAN 