Blog Archives
Shared Sense of Excitement
Detective Lucian follows a stubborn detective on Haven Island who makes it his personal mission to protect a sassy realtor who was attacked by a client, but falling in love was not part of his plan. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I dedicate a significant amount of my time volunteering for our local sheriff’s office, where I contribute to realistic role-playing scenarios for recruits and participate in numerous ride-alongs. Our sheriff’s department is deeply committed to its community, and I aimed to reflect that strong bond in my writing. Also, with several realtor friends, I’ve learned how careful they are when they show a house. I put a lot of my experiences into my writing.
Josie and Lucian clash almost immediately. How did you balance Lucian’s protective instincts without letting him overshadow Josie’s independence?
My goal was for Josie to come off as a capable, independent woman who wasn’t afraid to ask for help, but could also go it alone. Josie needed to have a hard and soft side to her personality. It was crucial to demonstrate Lucian’s unwavering support for her, without infringing on her independence.
The novel leans into emotion without hesitation. Do you think romantic suspense works best when feelings are close to the surface?
I do. By allowing their emotions to surface, the characters create a stronger connection with the reader. Then, not only does the character’s adrenaline begin to surge, but the reader’s does too, creating a shared sense of excitement.
I hope the series continues in other books. If so, where will the story take readers?
The focus of this series is the Haven Island Police Department, detailing their work on diverse cases as they strive to ‘protect and serve’ their community. Book 1 acted as my transition from my initial series, “Path Series,” to the setting of Haven Island. It introduced Deputy Sean, who relocates to a new town and finds himself falling for the diner’s waitress, who is unfortunately being stalked. Book 2 delved into Chief Alejandro’s past, revealing his heroic rescue of Sammie’s daughter from an unhinged ex-husband. The fourth book, releasing soon, focuses on Hudson, a Patrol Officer tasked with locating a missing child.
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Josie
I’ve worked two jobs for as long as I can remember—realtor in the afternoon, hotel host before sunrise. Exhausting? Absolutely. But after years of grinding, my nest egg is almost full, and my dream is finally within reach.
Then one client crosses a line.
And everything spirals.
Someone is watching me. Waiting. And the infuriatingly intense Detective Lucian Warrick—the man who drives me crazy on a good day—is suddenly the only shield between me and the darkness closing in.
He swears he’ll protect me.
He swears he won’t let anything happen to me.
I pray he gets to me in time.
Lucian
Josie Hale crashed into my life with a smart mouth, a stubborn streak, and a smile I can’t shake. She gets under my skin in all the wrong ways… and all the right ones.
But when a predator sets his sights on her, the lines blur fast. And keeping her safe means ignoring the heat between us, the one that could burn down every rule I’ve lived by.
I’ll tear apart this island to stop him.
I’ll put my life on the line without hesitation.
Because somewhere between the chaos, the danger, and her damn irresistible sass… I realized Josie Hale isn’t just another case.
She’s mine.
And I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her with me… forever.
Detective Lucian is a first-person, dual POV, slow burn, police protection, suspenseful romance. HEA guaranteed.
Preorder your copy today!
Organization and Discipline
A Symphony of Spies follows a brilliant but indiscreet physicist who leaks classified secrets to his inner circle, leaving a sharp-minded analyst to trace the fallout. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
A Symphony of Spies is informed by my undergraduate career at Amherst College and the camaraderie shared among my circle of friends. Each of my classmates was individually brilliant, but not one of them had the expertise in subatomic physics of fictional freshman, Drew Reid.
Drew is compelling precisely because he can’t keep secrets. What interested you about that kind of character?
I am an introvert. The seeming effortlessness of others to percolate through society fascinates me, as do the strategies to communicate that we are less so inclined to use. Drew Reid is desperate to connect with others and mistakes the disclosure of classified secrets for intimacy.
The musical world feels lived-in and specific. How does musicianship mirror espionage in your view, and do you see performance and intelligence work as forms of exposure?
Musicianship and spycraft are forms of art. They both require mammoth amounts of self-discipline in order to yield success. It has long been said that engineers make great musicians because of their sense of organization and discipline. I don’t know that secret agents have ever been subject to a similar survey, but I suspect they would score well with the tools required for musicianship (and I think musicians make great spies).
Will this novel be the start of a series, or are you working on a different story?
I am considering a sequel to Symphony, but I am currently working on sequels to my first novel, BookMarck, and a new epic set in Greece.
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When he confides his classified research to his college roommates, including an accomplished Russian cellist, he exposes them to the threats of espionage.
As CIA analyst Elizabeth Orr races to follow a trail of illicit foreign monies directed to tap loose Drew’s secrets, the lives of all careen towards an inevitable collision.
Illusion of Control
Be Wary of Wishes Gone Awry is a collection of horror and dark fantasy stories where ordinary desires like love, relief, and progress are granted in twisted forms. From ships to suburbs to labs, your settings feel grounded before they unravel. Why start from the ordinary?
I often begin with the ordinary because that’s where trust lives. A quiet suburb, a research lab, a ship at sea. These are places we believe we understand, and they give the reader something solid to stand on. Once that foundation is set, the unraveling feels closer and more invasive.
To me, horror works best when it grows out of the familiar rather than arriving from something distant or unknown. The ordinary holds its own vulnerabilities in routine, comfort, and assumption. Those become the fault lines where something darker can take hold. By the time the world begins to warp, it is already too late to step away cleanly.
Many characters believe they’re making rational, even loving choices. Why was that illusion of control important?
Because it’s one of the most human illusions we have. People rarely see themselves as reckless or destructive in the moment. They see themselves as justified, careful, or acting out of necessity or love.
That illusion of control creates a kind of tragic tension. The reader often senses the danger before the character does, which makes each decision feel heavier. The characters are not foolish. They are navigating incomplete truths, emotional blind spots, or quiet desperation.
In many ways, the horror doesn’t come from losing control. It comes from realizing you never had it in the way you believed you did.
Many stories use guilt, grief, and shame as part of the fear. Why lean into those emotions? Do you see horror as a way to process those feelings or to expose them?
I believe it is both. Guilt, grief, and shame are already haunting emotions; they linger, they distort memory, they reshape how we see ourselves and others. Horror gives those feelings a kind of narrative body. It lets them move, speak, and sometimes retaliate.
I’m interested in how these emotions refuse to stay buried. Horror becomes a space where what’s been avoided or suppressed is forced into the open, often in exaggerated or symbolic ways. Yet, there is also a quieter side to it. Writing through those emotions can be a form of understanding them, tracing their edges, seeing how they grow, and what they demand.
In this sense, horror is both exposure and exploration. It reveals, but it also listens.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
My upcoming novella, Patchwork: An Ozian Tale of Dark Fantasy, is set to release at the end of May. It reimagines Oz as a haunted, decaying fairyland, a place where creation and decay exist side by side, and every act of transformation leaves its mark.
I also have several other projects in the works, but after Patchwork, my focus will shift to a dark fantasy novel titled The Dreamer. The story follows Maddie, a young woman struggling with a prophetic bloodline she can no longer keep locked away. Standing on the edge of revealing her curse, Maddie must decide whether to confront the fate it foretells or be consumed by it.
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Junk Man & the Chronicler
Junk Man and the Chronicler by M. A. Farrell is a science fiction novel with the feel of a framed story collection. Bremmer, a space-debris worker nicknamed Junk Man, encounters a mysterious floating Box called the Chronicler, an entity that records, removes, and replaces memories. As Bremmer fights to keep hold of himself, the book opens into a chain of strange, often unsettling stories about AI, simulations, violence, identity, ethics, and what makes human experience worth preserving.
The story doesn’t tiptoe into its ideas. It grabs the reader by the collar and throws them into danger, sarcasm, fear, and argument. The dialogue has a rough, talky energy, especially between Bremmer and GAIL, and that banter gives the larger science fiction machinery a human pulse. The bluntness can feel direct, particularly when characters explain the rules of a world or spell out the moral stakes. Still, there is momentum here. The book keeps moving. It wants to entertain, provoke, and unsettle all at once.
Farrell’s strongest choice is the frame itself. The Chronicler is not just a plot device. It becomes a question: are our stories still ours if someone else can take them, store them, and use them? That idea stayed with me. The book’s genre is science fiction, but it often leans into psychological thriller and speculative morality tale. The tech is flashy, with neurolinks, simulations, robots, memory transfer, and AI ethics, but the real subject is more intimate. Memory. Pain. Curiosity. The strange way one smell, like peach cobbler, can carry love and grief in the same breath. That is where the book feels most alive to me.
I would recommend Junk Man and the Chronicler to readers who enjoy idea-driven science fiction with a pulpy edge, shifting stories, and big questions about artificial intelligence and human identity. It will especially appeal to readers who like their sci-fi fast, strange, and morally uneasy. For someone who wants a book that treats memory as treasure, weapon, and evidence of the soul, this one is worth picking up.
Pages: 221 | ASIN : B0FW8VDH6S
Letters: Our American Story
Letters: Our American Story is a tender, faith-soaked family history built around letters, postcards, memoir fragments, and remembered voices that stretch across more than a century. Ann Brubaker Greenleaf Wirtz uses private correspondence to braid together genealogy, American history, Christian conviction, and intimate memory, moving from Susan B. Anthony’s 1903 suffrage letter to wartime testimony, Peace Corps recollections from Brazil, Greenleaf family letters, Elisabeth Elliot’s postcard, and a granddaughter’s Christmas poem. What could have been merely an archive becomes something warmer and more searching: a meditation on how ordinary lives brush against national history, and how written words can keep love alive long after the moment that produced them has passed.
I was most moved by the book’s insistence that history doesn’t only belong to monuments, presidents, and battlefield dates. It lives in a father writing to his son about purpose, in Arie trying to understand grief after Sandy’s death, in Mary Vandivert’s vision for women’s learning, and in the quiet astonishment of discovering how one family thread touches Susan B. Anthony, Benjamin Franklin, the Space Race, World War II, and the Kennedy years. The writing has a devotional cadence, sometimes almost prayerful, and at its best, it feels like sitting beside someone who has opened an old cedar chest and is lifting out each letter with reverence. There is a lot of genealogical detail, especially when the lineages multiply. That density is part of the book’s character. It reflects the author’s awe before connection itself, the almost dizzying sense that every life is a convergence of accidents, choices, inheritances, and grace.
Susan B. Anthony’s letter carries political hope sharpened by age and disappointment. Kenneth Brubaker’s World War II account stands near horror without losing decency. Gail Crosson’s Peace Corps memory in Brazil has a startling humility to it, especially in its admission that goodwill sometimes arrived before skill. Elisabeth Elliot’s postcard, with its plea to be faithful when nobody’s looking, felt like one of the book’s spiritual keystones. I appreciated the author’s openness about faith, even when the theological framing is so central that readers outside that tradition may feel more like guests than natives. For me, that sincerity gave the book its emotional weight.
Letters: Our American Story was less a conventional narrative than a family chapel built from paper, memory, and gratitude. Its strongest passages are those where personal loss and national history touch hands, where the grand sweep of America is brought down to ink, a mailbox, a kitchen table, a folded page saved for decades. I’d recommend it especially to readers who love genealogy, Christian memoir, women’s history, family archives, epistolary writing, and reflective Americana. It’s a good book for anyone who has ever kept an old letter because throwing it away felt like losing a voice.
Pages: 247 | ASIN : B0G35SLGBC
Miss Penny Saves the Heir (Miss Penny and the Ghost series, Book 1)
In Miss Penny Saves the Heir, Cathy Quintilla introduces Miss Penelope “Miss Penny” Treblecleft, a beloved schoolmistress and medium in Asterton whose orderly life turns deliciously strange when a public scandal, a duel, and Lord Blackwood’s suspicious death place Anthony Blackwood in danger of ruin. With help from the genial Rector Sinclair, her telepathic black cat Onyx, and the ghostly Lady Caroline, Miss Penny follows clues that include a secret drawer, a spectral memory, and a very incriminating silver-wolf cane. The result is a Regency-flavored paranormal mystery with romance tucked into its folds like a letter in a writing desk.
I enjoyed the book most when it leaned into its odd little household of investigators. Miss Penny isn’t a hard-boiled detective in borrowed muslin; she is gentler, more domestic, and more devotional than that, but her softness never feels useless. Her séances, piano-playing, and conversations with Onyx give the mystery a warm eccentricity. The supernatural elements are not there merely to decorate the plot with ectoplasm; they are part of the book’s moral engine, allowing the dead to clarify what the living have muddled through vanity, greed, pride, and fear.
What I also liked was the book’s fondness for texture: cucumber ices, foxglove bushes, fussy butlers, handwritten letters, church gossip, and the dramatic social weather of who danced with whom. The pacing can be leisurely, and some emotions are expressed broadly. Still, I found that part of the charm. The novel has the air of a parlor fire: a little ornate, sometimes smoky, but persistently inviting. Its villainy is satisfyingly wolfish, its romance sweet without being brittle, and its cat has enough acerbic intelligence to steal every room he pads into.
The ideal audience is readers who like cozy mysteries, Regency romance, historical fiction, and amateur sleuth fiction, especially when the sleuth’s best allies are a clergyman, a ghost, and a judgmental cat. Fans of Deanna Raybourn or Darcie Wilde may enjoy the period setting and investigative heroine, though Quintilla’s book is gentler and more whimsical, closer in spirit to a cozy ghost tale than a razor-edged historical thriller. Miss Penny Saves the Heir is a tender, eccentric mystery where justice arrives wearing gloves, carrying a candle, and listening carefully to the dead.
Pages: 339 | ASIN : B0CMDDJ7YD
Alpha-Female
Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts follows a teacher and trauma survivor who comes back to ordinary life after a brutal ordeal called Project Purple, only to find that ordinary life is no longer stable, and maybe never was. What inspired the idea of Project Purple, and how literal is it meant to be?
“Project Purple” is about thirteen Americans who recreate the lives of the early colonials for a worldwide online audience. They don’t know their ordeal has been gradually, brutally altered by their organizers, and a struggle for food, shelter, and survival turns deadly as an Arctic winter approaches.
The nutshell of this idea emerged from a conjoining of two mediums—the first being a PBS TV series called Colonial House back in 2003, and the second being an extraordinary novel about the harrowing saga of the Donner party called The Indifferent Stars Above. Somehow, the ordeals of these people from different centuries fused. I think “Project Purple” seeks to understand what it takes to draw on one’s inner survivor. I just started thinking: What could a writer do to give this story more adversity and more propulsion?
Purple Bleed Naughty Beats follows the three survivors of the ordeal that took place in the first book. The color purple, here, is the blending of red and blue that forms the majority of US political thought.
Henri lives in a constant state of uncertainty. Did you always intend for readers to question her reality?
Henri’s initial uncertainty is due to the medication foisted onto her. Once she kicks the downers, we can see her alpha-female persona reemerges.
The Rot feels physical, social, and spiritual all at once. How did you develop it as a unifying force?
The Rot begins in the first book—the beginning of a new world order with an entirely new language, and with an entirely new taxonomy: a new way of ordering and naming things in life—the Rhizome. It follows a fierce path of human destruction and rebirth in the second book, which is more about the cyclical nature of human history—how we progress to a certain point, only to fall back, destroying ourselves in senseless hatred and warfare. It’s loosely structured on a classic science fiction book called A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. If you remember that story, you can see similar plot devices and characters. And the message is, of course, the same.
The spiritual aspects of the story come from the role of the Catholic Church, which plays a large role in the affairs of state in Canticle. And it’s a monastery of monks that preserves history. Scientific discoveries are also, once again, made in the monastery.
What do you hope readers feel after the final page: clarity, dread, recognition?
When reading Canticle as an eighteen-year-old in a college science fiction class, I recall being stunned by what happens to the protagonist in the story. Killing one’s protagonist halfway through your book is not something anyone would recommend in a writing seminar. In Canticle, no character really picks up the slack to resume the mantle of lead. I’ve structured the story the same way, but Reygil steps up, and we follow him and his journey for answers in a post-apocalyptic world, some thirty years later.
I know a lot of readers don’t like somewhat open-ended messages, but I do them a lot. I hope they’re not disappointed that any stark resolution gives way to a weary kind of acceptance of a new world order—as the cycle continues.
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As the Rot spreads, it dissolves bodies, memories, and entire realities. Henrietta Dobie survives by instinct alone, guided by masked figures who insist she has been chosen for something greater. Each collapsing world forces the same brutal demand: adapt—or die.
Elsewhere, Reygil Buford staggers through the wreckage of civilization, torn between cowardice and grace. He wanders a landscape of false prophets, feral survivors, and absurd wars, where history repeats itself not as tragedy—but as grotesque farce.
Reality fractures. Empires decay. Survival becomes a test of the soul.
Darkly comic, hallucinatory, and unflinchingly violent, Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts is a genre-bending survival thriller where humanity consumes itself—and the only way forward may require becoming something unrecognizable.
What part of you must die so the rest can learn to fly?
Skepticism and Belief
Reflections in the Dark follows a haunted academic and a Chicago homicide detective as they investigate ritualistic murders tied to mirrors, fractured identity, and a terrifying reality pressing in from beyond the known world. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration really came from wanting to merge two types of stories I’ve always loved: surreal, cosmic horror in the vein of Twin Peaks or The X-Files, and grounded noir detective fiction like the work of Raymond Chandler.
Early on, I had a very clear image in my head: it was essentially Fox Mulder paired with Philip Marlowe. I wanted that contrast: a straight-laced, reality-driven investigator encountering cases that gradually become stranger and more unexplainable, eventually drawing in someone who’s open to the paranormal, other dimensions, and the unknown.
That push and pull between skepticism and belief became the foundation of the story. It’s something The X-Files did so well, and it creates a natural tension that lets the mystery evolve from grounded crime into something much more unsettling and cosmic.
As the story developed, that dynamic evolved into Reed and Maria. I shifted the noir detective role into Maria partly because I wanted a male-female pairing, but also because it strengthened that contrast—two people approaching the same reality from completely different perspectives, forced to confront something neither of them can fully explain.
Reed Ashland and Detective Maria Voss bring different kinds of damage to the story. Which character came to you first?
That’s a tough one, because they really arrived together conceptually. From the beginning, I knew the story needed two leads, two perspectives colliding.
That said, I actually started writing Reed first. The opening chapters came from his point of view, and right away, his voice was very disjointed, surreal, and intentionally unstructured. That was always the goal with him; his experience of reality is fractured, but as I was writing, I realized pretty quickly that if the entire novel lived in that space, it would be difficult to anchor.
That’s when Maria really came into focus.
Her storyline became the grounding force of the book. While Reed drifts further into the strange and otherworldly, Maria operates in a much more linear, procedural way—investigating bodies, following evidence, moving step by step through a case. That structure gave the story a necessary through line and allowed Reed’s more abstract descent to have contrast and context.
So while Reed was technically first on the page, Maria’s side of the story became complete first. She’s the lens that holds everything together, and the balance between the two is what gives the story its shape.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
At the beginning, I honestly just wanted to write a compelling horror-mystery, something that captured the feeling I got personally from works like House of Leaves, The X-Files, and Twin Peaks. That sense of unease, mystery, and something just beyond comprehension.
But as I wrote the book, the thematic core shifted more toward the characters themselves.
What really interested me was exploring how people carry damage: grief, trauma, unresolved questions, and how that shapes who they are. Reed and Maria, on the surface, can feel like familiar archetypes, but I wanted to push beyond that and show that there’s always something deeper underneath. People aren’t as simple as they first appear.
That idea: that we often misjudge others based on surface-level impressions, became really important to me. You meet someone and think you understand them, but the more you learn, the more complicated they become. I wanted the characters to reflect that reality.
So at its core, the book is less about solving a mystery and more about how these characters navigate their own internal fractures. It’s about how we carry our past with us, how it influences our decisions, and how it quietly shapes the paths our lives take.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
Right now, I have a few projects in motion. The closest to release is a novella titled Viscera Varnish, which is essentially finished and just going through final cleanup. It’s a transgressive, art-driven horror story, and the plan is to release it in early summer.
I’m also in the middle of writing another novella, currently titled Panspermia. That’s just a working title and will most likely change, but that one leans more into sci-fi horror, drawing inspiration from shows like The X-Files and the broader ancient-aliens mythology. If everything stays on track, I’m aiming for a late summer or early fall release.
Beyond that, my next major focus will be the sequel to Reflections in the Dark. It’s still early, but my goal is to have Book Two out within about a year, tentatively targeting early 2027.
I also have several short stories appearing in upcoming anthologies this year. One is a suburban horror piece titled Night Whispers, another is a folk horror story called The Keepers, and a third, Ascended Infinity, explores the idea of uncovering hidden truths. Final anthology titles and release dates are still to be announced.
Overall, the goal is to keep a steady stream of work coming and continuing to build out this world while also exploring different corners of horror along the way.
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Across town, Dr. Reed Ashland wakes to fractured memories and impossible visions staring back at him from every mirror he passes. Once a respected philosophy professor, Reed is now a disgraced academic spiraling through grief, alcoholism, and the growing certainty that something is watching from the other side of the glass.
When Voss and Ashland are drawn into an uneasy partnership, their investigation quickly slips beyond logic. Victims appear who should not exist. Reflections behave independently. Messages surface where no human hand could have written them. And the killer they are hunting does not seem bound by the rules of a single reality.
All paths lead to a phenomenon Reed knows too well but fears to name: the Elsewhere Fold, a place that exists between worlds where memory, identity, and consciousness bleed into one another. A place that remembers everyone who enters it and does not always let them leave.
As the boundary between the Fold and the waking world begins to erode, Voss and Ashland must confront the versions of themselves reflected in the dark. Some familiar. Some monstrous. Some terrifyingly true. Because the killer they seek may not be entirely human, and if they fail, the Fold will not remain on the other side of the mirror.
Reflections in the Dark is a gripping blend of crime thriller, psychological horror, and surreal mystery that explores fractured identity, existential dread, and the darkness waiting behind every reflection. Fans of Night Film, True Detective, and the dreamlike terror of David Lynch will feel right at home.
