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Empower Readers
Exit Signs follows an eighteen-year-old girl with plans to graduate early and attend Stanford, who has it all ripped away when her mom throws her out with nothing, leaving her homeless and vulnerable to coercion disguised as love. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Thank you for that question. For years, I kept this close to my chest due to the lingering shame, but the truth is: my own life was the inspiration. This actually happened to me. The story began years ago as a cathartic exercise titled Abandoned, which sat on my computer for a long time. However, after losing my eldest son to cancer, I felt a profound need to tell his story—and he had such a beautiful life. To tell his story properly, I realized I had to start from the very beginning. Stella’s journey is the result of that, and readers can expect her narrative to unfold across three books in this series.
The book emphasizes the practical realities of homelessness—money, hygiene, parking, paperwork. Why was that level of detail important?
I wanted the reader to truly inhabit Stella’s world. Those specific, gritty details aren’t just creative choices—they are drawn directly from lived experience. To write about such a sensitive topic with precision and impact, I felt it was a necessity to include the small, often overlooked realities that define a person’s survival from day to day.
The novel explores how control can disguise itself as generosity. What drew you to that theme?
That question actually makes me laugh a little because it hits so close to home. In my own life, generosity has often been the “front door” of my relationships, while control was the way they ultimately went wrong. I wanted to explore that theme to empower readers. My goal is for them to realize that they ultimately hold the power over their own lives and destiny. I hope Stella’s story serves as a reminder: do not let someone else’s “generosity” become your cage.
Can you tell us what the second book will be about and when it will be available for fans to purchase?
The second book is currently living in my head, and the characters—especially Stella—are screaming to be unleashed! While I am juggling a few other projects at the moment, fans can expect the sequel to arrive sometime in 2027. Of course, if the writing process goes particularly well and I stay “in control” of my schedule, perhaps we’ll see it as early as the end of this year!
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When you have nowhere to go, any door looks like open arms.
Some doors don’t close; they slam. At eighteen, Stella Hart had a plan: early graduation, a Stanford acceptance letter, and a future she’d built from scratch. Then her mother threw her out with nothing but a pile of clothes and a slammed door, and everything Stella thought she’d earned disappeared overnight.
Homeless, broke, and alone in the SF Bay Area, Stella finds shelter in the arms of a man who seems like salvation. Jim offers safety, stability, and love. But safety, she will learn, can be a cage, and love can be a leash dressed up as loyalty.
As Jim’s generosity quietly hardens into control, Stella begins to see what she almost missed: the exits were always there. She just had to choose one. Exit Signs is a raw, unflinching story of a young woman who did everything right and still had to fight her way back to herself, through homelessness, coercive control, and an unplanned pregnancy, armed with nothing but her intelligence, her instincts, and the stubborn belief that her future still belonged to her.
For readers who know what it means to survive the people who were supposed to love you.
