Cover!

I’m excited to show you the cover for Deep Down:

What do you think?  I love the colors. I love the way it echoes back to the Wide Open cover, but is pretty clearly different.  And I like that it’s a girl and a dog and the prairie.

What’s Deep Down about?

Hallie’s looking for a job, but those are few and far between in Taylor County, South Dakota.  She’s not even sure she wants to stay, except there’s Boyd.  And her dad.  Meanwhile, Boyd’s dealing with a ghost from his past.  He won’t involve Hallie; it’s his problem and he’ll deal with it.  Turns out, Hallie has other ideas. And everything that happened at the end of Wide Open?  Well, once you let something like blood magic into the world, it’s not that easy to shove it back down.

Okay, so maybe I’m not the person to go to when you’re writing your back cover copy, but I hope it gives you a hint of what’s coming.

Deep Down will be published in March, 2013 and is already available for pre-order at Amazon and Powell’s and BooksAMillion and possibly other places if, you know, you desperately need to order it right now.

What Writers Do

Great quote from Eloisa James’s memoir, Paris in Love:

I have a lot to do.  Revisions for an academic article are due back at the end of this month.  I have a column due to the Barnes & Noble Review website address five novels.  I’ve promised my editor the first hundred pages of my “Beauty and the Beast” romance, and told my university that I would finish my academic book by June.  So I spent the day working on a novella for which I have no contract, no publisher, and no deadline.  Alessandro rolled his eyes.

Wide Open

In Wide Open, a near-death experience has left Hallie Michaels, a soldier serving in Afghanistan, able to see ghosts.  While she’s trying to adjust to this new reality, she receives word that her sister, Dell, has died mysteriously back in western South Dakota.  Home on ten days compassionate leave, Hallie’s determined to discover how her sister died.  The sheriff has said that it’s suicide, but Hallie doesn’t believe it.

Her sister’s ghost is following her, strange things are happening all over the county, and there’s a young deputy sheriff who keeps turning up where he’s most not wanted.  And someone is working overtime to make sure Hallie never figures out what it all means.

Following Wide Open, there will be two more novels set in the same fictitious western South Dakota county involving many of the same characters.  Deep Down is scheduled to published in 2013, followed by a third novel in 2014.