Dearest Squad, Yeah. I had to write this chapter. Sorry-not-sorry. I was crying so hard when started writing, and it was at the end of a chapter that was already over 3000 words. ALL these last chapters have clocked in at around 3000 words. [Edit: this essay was written before I broke them all up for…
Dearest Squad, Back when I started this book, I didn’t know any Korean, Portuguese, German, Croatian, or Arabic, and I knew way less Mandarin. I hadn’t yet been to Asia or Africa. My primary language is English. Technically, it’s still the only language I’m fluent in. I studied Spanish in high school until they ran out of classes, and…
Dearest Squad, This chapter is dedicated to my paternal grandfather, Sotos Kontis. I never met him—he died before I was born—but he was an engineer. Specifically, he was an engineer on ships that sailed around the world. After my family fled the Ottoman Empire (Great Fire of Smyrna, Turkey) in 1922, the East Asian ship they escaped on dropped…
Dearest Squad, I have no idea how to introduce this chapter. So instead, I will give you a completely fun fact about me that I bet you never knew: I have always been fascinated by just how many words and phrases in common vernacular (US and UK specifically, though I’m learning that Korean has a few as well) are…
Preorder THIEFTESS here! I think I summed up most of my gratitude for the 2024 editions of the first three Woodcutter Sisters books in the back of Enchanted. But I feel the need to give an extra shout out here to the gracious and wonderful people of Audible. And, of course, my dearest Katy Kellgren. When Brilliance first approached…
Preorder THIEFTESS Today! PS – There are at least 2 reports of folks having Amazon tell them they have already ordered the book, or that the file is saying DEAREST. This is an Amazon glitch. All the metadata on my end is 100% clean. If this happens to you, please restart your computer, clear your browser cache, and/or report…
Dearest Squad, I got home from my travels up north right before my birthday in January, and thanks to some pretty crushing anxiety and depression about my career (and Piper, and the state of the world in general) it took me over a month to get sleep and food and medicine and exercise and everything else back on a…
Dearest Squad, A new chapter is now live! Chapter 40: The Lucky Thief Before Scrivener, I used to keep Excel spreadsheets of my daily word counts. So I know what day I first started writing this novel: June 23, 2015. Eleven years is a long time. Because of that, I don’t always remember the exact order in which certain…
Joan Wilder was always my hero. I was 8 years old when Romancing the Stone released (my family owns movie theatres, remember, so I saw just about everything on the Big Screen). The day I met Joan Wilder I knew: I was going to be a writer. (You know, if the whole acting thing didn’t pan out.) Once upon a time, whenever I finished a…
Dearest Squad, What with one thing or another, 11 chapters happened. Okay, not really. What happened was that I uploaded a bunch of chapters to Tapas (hello, new Tapas family!). Tapas is an app/platform that I began researching in 2024 as a possible place on which to release my super fun mainstream-reality-show-idol-romance-drama set in Korea…but then last year Carter…
Dearest Squad, Yeah. I had to…
Dearest Squad, Back when I started this book, I…
Dearest Squad, This chapter is dedicated to my paternal…
