The Feral Art of Starting Over

Phil and I were talking about publishing.

Self-publishing is like starting a small business—and I’d know, I’ve started a few since I was 22. It takes money, time, patience, persistence, hard work. It’s frickin’ hard. And disappointing. And exhausting. Frustrating. But damn, it’s also incredible, beautiful, fabulous.

I told Phil that in another life, I was an author. Indie and traditional. I may not have written a book in over a decade, but according to my husband, I never stopped being one.

“You are an author. A best-selling author. Period.”

Even though I’m starting over. Under a different name. Building everything again from the ground up. I’m once again starting a small business.

I am all the titles.

This isn’t my first time starting over, and it won’t be my last. It’s what I do.

Pivot.

This trip around the author sun is different, though. I’m in it for different reasons now. I’m a midlife Midwestern Scandinavian menopausal woman with a multitude of health issues who survived a stroke and watched her dad take his last breaths.

I’m in it for the dark humor, the raw grief, the death and dying, and all the weird, feral stuff that comes with it. The tears. The rage. The love. The new beginnings. The unknown. The loneliness. The in-between.

The grey.

I’m about to release the words that spun, twisted, threaded, evolved, exposed themselves onto the page—out into a world I’m meeting with an already fragile nervous system. And if even one person reads them and says they felt seen, felt heard, through loss and grief and midlife chaos, then those words—the ones I promised my dad I would write on some of my darkest days—were a success.

And I’ll keep writing. Because I have a lot to say.

Oh, and by the way…

Here’s my cover.

This beautiful cover was created by the incredibly talented Staci Hart of Quirky Bird Covers. Not only is she an amazing designer and artist, but she’s also a brilliant author.

And that little butterfly on Edgar’s nose? That’s my dad.

My dad loved butterflies, and when Staci added that tiny detail, it got me. I knew immediately how much he would have loved it. Somehow, it feels like a little piece of him found his way onto the cover of the book he inspired me to write.

And I can’t imagine anything more perfect.

Preorder will be available soon!

Happily Ever Afterlife is a midlife paranormal romantic comedy about Nora Robertson, a forty-five-year-old plant shop owner who’s been seeing dead people her entire life. Her relationship with the dearly departed is… complicated. She sees them, they see her, and boundaries are apparently just as difficult to enforce with dead people as they are with the living.

Then the afterlife recruits her as a rookie Grim Reaper.

Now she’s got a scythe, a ninety-day trial period she definitely didn’t apply for, and enough afterlife bureaucracy to prove that not even death can save you from paperwork.

Meanwhile, she’s falling for Aric, the local comic book shop owner, who has no idea the woman he’s dating guides souls on the side.

It’s dark, funny, romantic, and a little weird, but underneath it all, Happily Ever Afterlife is about grief, love, and learning to let go. Because after spending her entire life surrounded by death, Nora discovers that death might be the very thing that finally teaches her how to live.