In the prequel to Enemy Closer, Anna Bowman escapes her boring hometown and joins the FBI. After a few years as a quiet but efficient cog in the machine, she tries to achieve her childhood dream of becoming an FBI Agent, only to be rejected and bewildered. Ensnared instead in the intrigues of Agent James Camposanto, Anna will embark on an unexpected assignment in Houston, Texas with her protégé, Thomas Holladay.
What really happened on February 15, 2020, in Houston, and how in the world did a divorced art historian from Manchester, Texas end up there?
If you’ve already read your free copy, I would really appreciate a quick review. And if you’ve read The Institute or Enemy Closer and haven’t had a chance to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, please do. You can bet the people who hated it are leaving their two cents, so every decent review helps more than you know!
It wasn’t as much fun as writing, but I was pretty good. Here’s something I’m quite proud of:
I drew it to illustrate a chapter in one of my stories, foolishly thinking I could make ~25 more. This scene didn’t even make it into the final story, but I love this picture.
If you miss your connecting flight, does your checked bag miss it, too?
Surely not. It wouldn’t make any sense to take the time to find the checked bag deep in the underbelly of the plane and drag it out after a passenger failed to get to the gate before they locked The Door.
Still, the pessimist in me just couldn’t believe I was going to find my suitcase at the Bozeman airport at the end of this spontaneous road trip from Salt Lake City. That would be too easy. Airlines don’t make anything too easy.
Somehow I believed getting to Bozeman sooner would increase my odds of being reunited with my luggage, so I ignored my desperate need for sleep even as it began to cut my brain out of the equation and go straight for the eyes. My lids began to droop, briefly at first, always a bit longer each time, until with a jolt that almost ejected my soul from my body I realized I’d been driving with my eyes closed for two full seconds.
Two seconds is a long time even if you’re not navigating Yellowstone National Park in the dead of night, alone, with snow whirling all around you and nothing but bears and moose for miles.
I had to pull over. I couldn’t pick up my suitcase if I was dead.
The ten or so minutes between deciding to rest and finding a place to rest were hell. Suddenly the shoulder shrank to nothing, and the state highway became an endless tunnel without intersection or exit.
Finally, half asleep, I saw an exit with a sign declaring “Food [nothing]; Gas [nothing]; Lodging [nothing].” I needed none of those things.
I navigated the icy exit ramp and pulled my rented SUV over next to a stop sign at the ghostly intersection of two unpaved roads. Dark shapes directly across the road hinted at some sort of warehouse or hangar. There were no lights, certainly no humans. Perfect.
Crawling into the back seat with a moan of anticipation, I stuffed my spare jacket under my head and knew I’d be deeply asleep in seconds. I didn’t care how long I slept, assuming some rural LEO working the graveyard shift would come along to roust me in due time.
The silence was incredible. The snow still fell to mute out any errant nighttime noise. My car’s engine clicked and sighed as it cooled. A pair of headlights washed over me and disappeared, leaving me momentarily surprised that anyone else was awake at this hour, let alone driving.
Slipping away, cold and cramped but gloriously happy, I heard one last annoyed click from the engine before the silence returned.
I was unaware of time passing. Either I was asleep already and dreaming, or my mandatory rest wasn’t going to turn into a nap after all. That was fine, as long as I could close my eyes.
When the silence was broken again, I at first took it as evidence I was dreaming. It wasn’t tires on sludge or a clicking engine or the mild wind driving the snow. It was a coyote.
Judging by the sound, it was right outside the front passenger door. Made sense, really, that in this deserted backwater the critters would be curious about this interloper.
My feeble efforts to dismiss the sound as nothing even close to a threat vanished in a heartbeat as the sound reached my ears again and something struck me.
It wasn’t a coyote. It was a person making coyote sounds.
It took me probably three full seconds to climb back into the front seat, turn on the car, and drive away. I never glanced toward the source of the noise, never saw anything, and was grateful for it. As wide awake as though I’d slept nine hours and woken to a warm sunrise, I made great time for the rest of the trip and got to Bozeman just as the airline’s service counter opened. My suitcase was there waiting for me.
It may not be the last time I miss a connecting flight from Salt Lake to Bozeman, but you can bet it’s the last time I drive alone through Yellowstone National Park on a snowy night.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. For the seventeenth time.
The problem is that I just don’t read very much. It’s shameful how seldom I read, and even more shameful what I read (and don’t read). There are about two dozen novels and a couple works of non-fiction that I crack open on the rare occasions when I feel like reading. I read something new when/if a novel by a fellow self-published author is in need of an honest review, and even that isn’t done nearly as often as it should be.
I’m working on it, endeavoring to read and review at least one new, self-published novel every month. Don’t laugh, that’s a lot for me!
I’m also pretty comfortable with my laziness. I’ve read reviews written by people who clearly don’t enjoy reading, and in my infinite wisdom, I’ve diagnosed them with novel fatigue. (Like oxymorons? Me too.)
There are some people who seem to derive little to no pleasure from reading a book. You know who I’m talking about. By the end of page one, they want to know who the bad guy is, who the good guy is, and why the fuck they should care. They want a conclusion in 50,000 or fewer words. They don’t want to waste their time reading about Tom Bombadil’s beautiful wife, or Frank Bryce’s trouble with the law, or Monica Figuerola’s workout routine.
But reading is a waste of time. I don’t mean it’s pointless. I mean it’s something you should do because you want to, because you either have the time or make the time. Not because you feel extrinsically obligated to read 1,000 books this year.
If reading is your job, I’m genuinely sorry. That must suck.
When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, I was working part time and in college full time. I read at least one chapter while driving to work. When I say I couldn’t put it down, I mean I risked my very life to read it. That was horribly irresponsible, but it also illustrates the kind of reader for whom I write.
You take your time. You pause and go back if you sense you’ve missed something. You dog-ear pages. You want to see maps. You re-read books. Chores are chores, and reading is reading.
So, in my limited spare time, I have chosen to go back through the Millennium Trilogy (done!) and now the Harry Potter books. I’ll shoehorn in new, self-published books, too; but I’m willing to fail in my quest to review one per month if it starts feeling even a little bit like cleaning out the kitty litter box, because my fellow authors deserve better.
I’ve been writing since middle school, but June 2022 is when I became a published author. More to the point, I never even considered publishing until 2020. That’s a lot of years of churning out fiction under the blissful assumption that it could be good, bad, or terrible and no one would ever know. They were very productive years. Don’t worry about how many years it was. A lot.
So I can’t sit here with a straight face, writing my very first blog post after making almost enough royalties to by everyone in my office something from the Taco Bell value menu, and start dispensing wisdom about writing and publishing.
This is more of a time capsule thing. Someday when I’m either successful, or have given up, or am exactly the same just older, I’ll read this first ever blog post and laugh, cry, and criticize my own writing. I like to think I’ll keep getting better at writing, that future me will read this and feel about it the way present me feels about the drivel I wrote in middle school: bemused, grateful, and nauseated.
