Good News and Bad News

Good news first!!

STRONGER, BETTER, FASTER, MORE exists again! YAY!

Cover by Kalen O'Donnell

When he gets super-endurance powers out of nowhere, being a culinary student and kids’ soccer coach isn’t enough for Beau Warren--he has to be a superhero too. A sweet, hardworking trans man from a close knit family, it’s important to Beau to use his new abilities to stand up for people who can’t protect themselves. When he runs into a speedster at a fire rescue, he doesn’t expect it to be his high school crush, Vel Chandrasekhar. Turns out Vel got superspeed when Beau got his endurance, so they decide to make their single supe act into a duo. 

With their immediate attraction and superpowered libidos, it’s not long before Beau and Vel are roommates-with-benefits. That’s the idea, anyhow, if only Beau can keep from falling back into his old crush hard, since Vel’s self-esteem issues have left him skittish about relationships. Just when things are at boiling point between them, though, their search for their own superhero origin story leads them and their families into mortal danger. The only way to survive the truth is to depend on each other--and admit they’re a lot more than friends.

I've missed this book so much, and Carlin and I are so happy to have it back out in the world. It's fast-paced and fun (I hope!), so if that's your thing--and you dig superheroes--give it a try! You can get it at these retailers currently, and there are more coming later in the week.

This is the very last of my originally-Loose-Id titles that needed to go back out into the world!

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... which leads me to the bad news. Less Than Three Press is closing. I've had such wonderful experiences working with them over the years, and in particular in this last year as they worked so hard to bring the Superpowered Love and Kanaan & Tilney series back to life. I'll miss them!

Now I'm going to do something I haven't done in a while, which is wax personal for a second. Feel free to skip to the end to just get the details on how and when my LT3 books will return! 

In late 2017, Loose Id closed. They'd been my publisher for about seven years at that point, and I'd done... a lot of books with them. Not sure about the total amount, but it was well into double digits. I had a one or two scattered around elsewhere, but I was only just getting the confidence as a writer to diversify--and to be honest, I loved working with my LI editor more than life itself. Over the years we developed the ideal writer/editor relationship, the one you dream about as a newbie, and I could never believe my luck she was the one I was handed to first (or who snapped me up first, depending on who you ask).

I was sad, but the LI team did everything in an orderly and fair fashion, as they did everything, and so I tried to prepare myself. I went to Less Than Three immediately--I'd worked with them before and knew my books would fit there better than anywhere else--and they agreed to reprint a lot of my stuff. I felt like I was ready.

Then my books disappeared. The entire Superpowered Love series, Kanaan & Tilney, all the one-shots I'd done... just gone. I still had a few here and there, like I say, but the bulk of everything I'd done over the better part of a decade poofed out of existence, to all intents and purposes. Though I already had plans to remake the books and a publisher behind it, something of an existential crisis ensued. It wasn't super helpful when another author with a name almost exactly like my own appeared in a similar niche. (Yes, it is now a most hilarious coincidence and I consider it proof that my name is the best name. At the time, though, I was already down, so it was hard to see clearly.) I didn't understand at the time why my anxiety--which had been pretty well managed for the last few years--suddenly shot through the roof. It's only thanks to a year and a half of rebuilding, re-printing, and hard work via therapy and yoga that I finally realize what caused me to spiral into Anxiety Town, Population: Me.

[For reference, I've experienced anxiety spirals at other times in my almost-39-years on the planet, some worse than others. This was far from the worst. The pattern seems to be that when the bottom drops out on something I worked really hard for, or seems to, anyhow, I flail a lot. Otherwise my anxiety is garden variety and relatively simply managed with medication and maintenance.]

It sounds grossly egotistical. Wow, Katey, your name/brand disappears from the internet and suddenly you have a crisis of existence? I get it, it's absurd, believe me, most anxiety is when viewed from afar. Here's the thing, though:

"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it." - Samuel Johnson

I've been a reader as long as I've been able to, so that quote means a lot to me. As a writer it means something slightly different but even more powerful: A story that doesn't connect people is incomplete. I've been telling stories since I was a kid, at first just to my family or my best friend, but then I finally pushed through a decade of incredibly hard work and got to the point where I sold books. Actual, entire books that people wanted to read!

The tangible evidence of this was gone, of a sudden. I didn't get how that would affect me til it did, though I'm sure better seasoned authors have been through it a million times and are like, "oh yeah, that gets easier."

It 100% does, but first it got worse. I pulled away from the parts I really liked about being an author: connecting with other authors and fellow readers, allowing myself to explore new stories. I had some incredible life experiences that I barely talked about (I went to France! I became an auntie again!), but that I LOVE when my fave authors share. I got bogged down in the administrative tasks of the endless reprints, feeling a duty to just GET THEM DONE instead of doing new work that was eating away at my brain.

This time is way easier, probably because I finally figured out what I did wrong last time. It doesn't hurt that LT3 has given us not only our covers but also the final formatted versions of our works to make self-publishing a breeze. Even before their announcement, I was getting back on track in terms of my authoring stuff: I finished new stuff (in the pipeline now!) and I started engaging with the world of readers and writers again. It's been making me so happy.

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As my books disappear from the Less Than Three site and other retailers, I'll be over here, working to make sure they reappear again quickly and easily. The idea is that no one but me should even notice--and again, I can't thank LT3 enough for making that possible, seriously. I'm gonna go it alone on the reprints, this time. I'm sure I'll go with other publishers for future works, but I've also got more faith in myself than I did starting out, so I have a few projects lined up that are gonna be all me. More on those soon--very soon!

For now, I can say there will hopefully be very little interruption in service here. And as a treat, I've added "Aelfwear", a story originally printed in the LT3 Enchanted Soles anthology, to my free reads page. LT3 allowed me to do an ebook run for a giveaway at Dayton Pride, so I happened to have it ready to go when the announcement of closure was made. So hey! Freebies for everyone!