Susan Fanetti's Blog

Well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve made a post. That’s not laziness on my part, not intentional neglect, but a consequence of the chaos I’m currently navigating. 2026 stormed in roaring, and life got a swipe with its massive paw.

After almost 20 years living in the Sacramento area, we’re leaving California and returning to our Midwestern roots.

I’ve written before about my plan to retire from my career as an English professor at the end of this semester. That plan is in effect; I will be officially retired in a couple months. I had intended to stay on half-time as an emerita professor, teaching one semester a year, until my husband retires in a few years. But then 2026 roared.

It’s always been our plan to return to our home ground after we retired; we left behind our two oldest sons when we moved west, and they’ve stayed in place, establishing thriving careers and settling down with the loves of their lives. We’d expected to return to them by 2030.

However, recent changes and new uncertainties in our lives and in our family have made it clear that we can’t count on being able to make that move on our own terms, with the best chance for a stable, comfortable retirement, if we wait. So we’re not waiting.

We’re moving at the end of May. Less than two months from now. EEEEEK!

Now let me be clear: no part of this move is about wanting to be out of California. We absolutely adore it here. IMO it’s the best state in the country, and we will miss it terribly. I’ve cried several times over losing things and places I love here, and I’ll cry more. Yosemite is, for me, truly a religious experience every time I’m within its towering walls. I’ve been privileged to be able to spend several days there multiple times each year, and I will feel that loss. Jim is particularly struggling with the loss of weekly photography trips to the myriad, diverse, breathtaking landscapes of this magnificent state. But we do hope to return often to play, not only in Yosemite but in all California’s fantastic cities, amazing National Parks and the glorious Pacific coast.

That said, we’ve missed our older sons terribly for two decades, and they’ve gone through some really tough times—sometimes are still going through them—while we’ve been too far away to do more than lend an ear or Venmo some funds. Though it will hurt to put the Golden State at our backs, we’re excited to get the family back together, as much as we can.

So I’m ending a quarter-century career and leaving a two-decade home. Buying a house without ever being inside it. Having to sell the house we live in now, when we are the only people who ever have lived here. Not to mention other upheavals too private to be discussed here.

To say my focus has been fractured lately would be a masterpiece of understatement.

Even so, I’ve been writing when and where I can. So here’s the part of the update you probably care about:

I set aside my plans to pick up my 1940s noir detective story/romance and give it another go—that story demands a lot of me because I’m writing it, at least the MMC’s chapters, in noir style. It’s not my natural writing voice, so it takes considerably more focus and planning. And existential angst—I doubt myself a lot writing that one. Life needs to chill before I pick it back up.

However, Signal Bend is as familiar to me as my own home. Writing in that world is self-care. So I’m working on the fourth book of the Signal Bend Heritage series, and it’s going well. I’m not able to write with the single-minded frenzy of my first years in this gig, but when I have a few hours available I fall into the world, and the words flow. I’m planning (hoping) to have it ready for readers by this fall. This blog is where I’ll announce the preorder and release when it’s ready.

Meanwhile, as we wind up our California life and embark on the next chapter in our lives, I’ll try to post more regularly. I should have plenty of material to post about!

Sending calm vibes to you all! (And I wouldn’t mind a few sent my way as well!)

xoxo

s—

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Greetings, friends!

2025 was a tough one for a lot of us, and I expect there aren’t many who are sad to see its back. I hope, though, that the year left gently for you and your holiday has been full of joy, peace and love.

Our Christmas was quiet and content, but we got some heartbreaking news the next day (the details of which are private). 2025 gave us a swift, hard kick on the way out the door.

I’m honestly not much in the mood to reflect, but I’ll mark a couple milestones that happened as we slogged through the past year. As for writing, I published Freak, the third book of the Signal Bend Heritage series, as well as two SBH short stories for subscribers here on the blog—“Interview: Eight Ball” (Gia’s interview notes and transcript for her dissertation) and “A Very Mindy Christmas,” in which Thumper and Mindy Jasper have a Christmas encounter.

2025 was my least productive year where writing is concerned, but I’ve stopped stressing about that. I’m writing when I can and when I want, and I’ll publish when I have something to publish. The years of releasing a new novel every 6-8 weeks are well and truly behind me, and I think working at that pace for so long kind of drained my mojo anyway. Now that I’ve worked through the panic of not producing like I had and have reconciled with this new way of approaching writing, I’m getting my mojo back.

The other big thing I did in 2025 was put in for retirement at my day job. After the spring semester, and 26 years teaching college, I’ll be retired. I’m planning to teach one semester a year for a few years as a professor emerita, but that depends on a few factors beyond my control.

Otherwise, my biggest accomplishment of 2025 is surviving it.

I’m hoping 2026 is kinder, but it’s profiling, at least, like it might be pretty damned busy and not a little chaotic. A lot of the biggest stuff that might happen in the coming year is not for discussion here, but there could be more changes than simply my retirement. Or everything could still be basically the same when next I write one of these end-of-year posts. Who knows?

I am not a fan of uncertainty, but here I am anyway. Wheeee!

As for writing, which I imagine is what you reading this are most interested in, I am planning to write—and, if that is successful, release—Book 4 of the SBH series. Right now I know the broad strokes of what needs to happen in the club story (if you’re reading the series you probably have some ideas about those broad strokes), but I haven’t decided which characters should lead us through that story. I’m playing out a couple of options now.

I also hope to finish a book I wrote 25K words of a few years ago and then bailed because I didn’t feel I was up to the challenge I’d set myself. At the time, I was still writing just about every single day and striving to publish at least four books a year, and when this project challenged me enough to slow me down, I bailed, thinking I couldn’t sustain it. I moved to safer territory and wrote a biker book instead.

I had been inspired to write a romance within a 1940s noir detective story (think Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe), using the style and diction of noir writers like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Right in my wheelhouse as a reader, but WAY out of my comfort zone as a writer.

I read those 25K words a few weeks ago, though, and THEY ARE SO GOOD. I was doing it! I love my detective and the woman he falls for, I had achieved a distinct noir diction for my detective without sounding like I was simply tracing over Hammett or Chandler, and I was even handling the murder mystery part well. So what if I had to write more slowly to get all that right!

I’m going to pick that one up and see if I can’t finish what I’d started. I would LOVE to be able to release this story. And I think now, maybe, when I’m not so stressed about publishing, I can enjoy the experience.

If it works, you’ll be hearing about it in 2026. If it doesn’t, let’s all forget I ever mentioned it.

All in all, my 2026 could either be full of big changes and new things, or it could be pretty much the exact same life rolling along. Not sure which I would prefer, actually.

I wish for you a safe and happy new year, full of exciting adventure, if that’s your thing, or calm predictability, if you’d prefer that. I hope you family and friends are well and safe, too, and you are surrounded by love and care.

Let’s hold up hope as a lantern as we cross this threshold into the new year.

s—

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Happy December, everyone!

Today, I’ve got a little treat for subscribers—a Christmas story set in the world and time of the Signal Bend Heritage series! It’s called “A Very Mindy Christmas,” and subscribers can access it in Subscriber-Exclusives right now!

Not a subscriber? You can fix that right here!

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The inspiration for this story happened while I was writing Freak, the third book in the Signal Bend Heritage series. Just before the big action happens in that story, there’s a little (tiny) moment between Mindy Jasper, a town troublemaker since the original SB series, and Thumper, one of the lesser-known Night Horde patches (though he’s been making himself known more and more). I was surprised when I wrote that little moment, and I wondered what was going on between them.

Inspiration struck while I was puzzling that out, and as I saw a glimmer of story there, I took another bit of inspiration from a scene between Violet and George in the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. The glimmer became a ray of light, and “A Very Mindy Christmas” is the result. It’s my holiday gift to you!

I hope you enjoy!

xoxo
s—

PS: for those who like to know such things, my visual inspiration for Thumper is Jason Kelce, and Mindy has always looked like Gigi Hadid in my head.

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I generally love the holidays and dive head-first into all the happy chores of making the season magical—decorating, cooking and baking, gift shopping and wrapping, the whole sparkly ball of fun. When our sons were kids, I worked hard—and eagerly—to make the holiday as special as I could, even in my single-mom days, when the budget was beyond tight and the only gifts I could afford either came from my own hands or from the dollar store. I carried on important traditions from my own childhood and built new ones with my kids.

Seventeen years ago, when my husband, our youngest son, and I moved from Missouri to California while the older, freshly grown boys stayed back, holidays changed for us quite a bit—we’ve been all together to celebrate only a handful of times in these years, and it’s harder to get excited to cook a big dinner for such a small holiday. Also, though I absolutely adore California, it doesn’t snow or even get particularly cold here in the Sacramento area, and it took several years to learn to feel Christmasy in hoodie weather. Even so, I’ve tried to hold the key traditions as much as possible.

Despite the general lack of weather that could support Frosty the Snowman, if our older boys could or would move to California (they can’t and won’t; they’re well established back home), we would never leave. The main reason we’re planning to return to the Midwest in a couple years (after we’re both fully retired) is to reunite the family—which means I get those big, magical holidays back at last.

I think maybe this is why the holidays come up in many of my stories—if I can’t have the huge family gathering myself, I can invent one for characters and have myself a little vicarious cheer.

To be honest, sometimes being so far away from half our brood hits me hard. There have been a few holidays when I barely bothered—didn’t decorate or bake or do anything but gifts. (The years when the boys only wanted—needed—money, and gift giving was about Venmo, were especially rough.)

This year is an odd one. 2025 has been challenging for many, perhaps most of us in a lot of serious ways. The whole country, the whole planet, is going through it these days. It feels like every single day brings a new thing to make us scared or angry or hopeless. The temptation to think “Christmas schmistmas, let’s call the whole thing off” is strong in me this year.

But I’ve decided not to give into that bleak bullshit, even though our family won’t be together.

Instead, I’m going full OPERATION KLAUS, pulling out ALL the decorations on Saturday and filling this house with so much light and sparkle it’ll look like a North Pole disco. I’m baking ALL the cookies. I’m gonna blast Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole Christmas standards in the car and get the bass going like they’re Kendrick. We’re watching a full month’s worth of holiday specials and movies. We’re even gonna do Christmas crafts, dammit!

This year, I’m not handing the holiday over to cynicism and despair, nor depression and overwhelm. This year, I’m throwing glitter in their faces.

Call it Radical Joy.

Whether your life is going well now or you’re in deep struggle, I wish you peace and love during this holiday season and always. If you are going through it, I hope you find ease and comfort soon.

I hope you’re able to find some radical joy of your own.

s—

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Thoughts on The (Dreaded) Miscommunication Trope

Several weeks ago, I got a message from a reader challenging me (nicely) about what she argued was a misalignment between my stated aversion to the miscommunication trope and the occurrence of miscommunication in several of my stories. In responding to that reader’s message, I ended up thinking pretty deeply about this and falling into bit of a rabbit hole about it. So I thought I’d share an expanded version of my explanation/clarification as October’s first post.

The tl;dr is that it’s not miscommunication I dislike in romance, it’s the miscommunication trope. Also, I want to quibble with the word “miscommunication,” as used here.

I am 100% down with characters who are traumatized, neurodivergent, or just bad at peopling behaving traumatized, neurodivergent, or just bad at peopling. Characters (and people) who suck at being brave enough to Say the Thing, or who have histories of having their words twisted or being treated badly by people, who thus hold back their truths for safekeeping even when they’re not actually threatened, those are characters behaving appropriately, consistent with who they are.

Poor communication skills, or deep reticence and reluctance to connect, those aren’t the miscommunication trope. A traumatized, self-protecting character learning to love and be open with another person? I am riding that wave all the way to the shore with them, no matter how choppy the sea. A friends-to-lovers story where they are both in love but afraid to say it and “Ruin the Friendship” (and yes, I’m nodding to Taylor’s new album there)? That also makes perfect sense, and I will hang with them until they work it out.

The thing that will get me to throw my Kindle out the window is none of those things.

What I hate, what will ALWAYS break my connection with a story and virtually always lead to an instant DNF: lack of communication inserted inorganically to create trouble for the couple to overcome.

When a couple is supposed to have gotten through the awkward self-protection phase and is established as being in love and then one of the couple sees something, overhears something, is told something by a third party and then ACTS on that, as if it were verifiably true—that drives me absolutely bananas. How am I supposed to believe in a real bond when a character is willing to blow the whole thing up without ever going to the person who is SUPPOSED TO BE THEIR ONE TRUE LOVE and saying, “Hey, I overheard you on the phone. Did you mean [insert mistaken assumption here]? Or, “Hey, I saw you hugging [person not me]. Looked pretty intimate. What was that about?”

Also, “Hey, when we were first together, you said [something important about what you want]. I thought I wanted that, too, but I’ve changed my mind. Do you still feel the same way?”

Or how about when a third party tries to cause trouble, but nobody bothers to say, “Hey, so-and-so told me you did such-and-such. Did you?”

[Sidebar: that last one is the absolute worst. I pretty much hate any love story where a third party can do damage to a couple when no real damage actually occurred. If you don’t trust your true love, what the fuck are you doing? And if you can’t trust your true love, what the fuck are you doing?]

What I HATE in romance is the plot device of—not miscommunication (because in none of these scenarios does ANY communication take place)—making assumptions/jumping to conclusions and torpedoing a whole relationship without ever confirming what’s true. Even though they eventually get to that conversation (if it’s a romance), the fact that they blew it up in the first place kills it for me.

I cannot believe in that love any longer. If you don’t trust your partner, that’s not love. If you don’t respect your partner enough to talk things over, that’s not love. If I’m reading a romance, and the main couple aren’t being loving, that romance has failed (at least for me).

If, on the other hand, a relationship is new, and the couple is navigating the rocky terrain of getting to know someone and letting them really know you, I’m very comfortable with poor communication slowing them down. Because that’s real. It’s what happens. Real love grows when couples open up enough to let the sun in, but sometimes the clouds are dense.

I’m going to take a light swipe at a very popular author whose work I generally adore to make my point about this. Emily Henry totally rocks, I have all her (recent) books, most in every possible format. But there’s one I have only on Kindle, likely will never buy any other edition (unless my autism demands a complete set lol) or read it again, and this is why.

Beach Read, People We Meet on Vacation, Book Lovers, Funny Story, Great Big, Beautiful Life—all amazing, 5-star reads for me. Hilarious, heartfelt, and deeply fulfilling. I’ve read them all multiple times. Henry writes living, breathing characters with chemistry that pops like popcorn.

Happy Place is also hilarious, with richly drawn characters. But the central relationship is a second-chance romance where the lovers broke up over assumptions they made about each other AFTER YEARS AS A COUPLE.

They were together like EIGHT years, I think (I’m not going to look it up, but that’s the number in my head, and it feels right). Come on. If you break up over incorrect assumptions at that point, you weren’t meant to be.

I didn’t DNF Happy Place—that’s how much I love Henry’s work. The friend relationships were amazing, and I liked both main characters. But I did not believe in their relationship. They freaking lived together, man, and let these assumptions fester until their relationship fell apart. Nope.

On the other hand, I love Funny Story, which also has a lack-of-communication situation that breaks the couple apart (in fact, several of Henry’s novels do). But there, the trouble happens at the beginning of the relationship, like literally right as they are tipping toward couplehood, and the reasons for each character’s behavior that get them into trouble are fully established, essential to who they are, and thus make perfect sense.

I know plenty of readers love the miscommunication trope, and that’s great. If it works for you, good for you! But to me it feels both inauthentic and, frankly, kinda lazy. There are lots of authentic reasons an established, loving and trusting couple might undergo a crisis. Lots of external forces can press hard enough to make even the strongest metal crack.

But if a relationship buckles under a lack of trust or respect, it wasn’t made of strong stuff. And (if it happens in a story) neither was the writing.

Couples who truly love each other trust and respect each other. In fiction and in life. Full stop.

And there you have it. My explanation for my aversion to “the miscommunication trope” and my clarification for why and when I’m comfortable both writing and reading poor communication in a romantic relationship. FWIW.

I’ll be back in a couple weeks with some thoughts about the horror genre and my love if it, seeing as it’s that time of year.

Speaking of, if you’re currently feeling witchy, I have a spooky story of my own: The House on Bitternut Street is a quirky, witchy, lightly creepy haunted house story.

xoxo

s—

As this blog is the only place I’m talking about or promoting my work online, and I’m occasionally releasing subscriber-exclusive content (including something coming up soon) here as well, it’s a good idea to subscribe, if you’re interested in such things:

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In virtually my entire life, I have never enjoyed sports in any way. As a participant? HAHAHAHAHA. Though I work out regularly and have for years, I am possibly the least athletic person on the planet. I have virtually no spatial awareness. I’m clumsy. I’m slow. I’d rather be in a comfy chair beside the fire with a book, thank you very much.

Even as an observer, sports left me cold. My father was an avid sportsman/outdoorsman and sports fan, and an athletic-ish person (he played middling softball in an array of work leagues, played a decent golf game while he brokered deals on the links, and he bowled well in amateur club leagues), and he was a devoted, season-ticket fan of every 60s-70s St. Louis sports team, but WOW did he not have the patience to share that love with his daughter—or, frankly, even to think I should be interested. So I grew up mainly frustrated at how he hogged the TV room all weekend every weekend (except those he spent on his own sitting in deer blinds and jon boats). The man would watch any sports show. Even the fishing ones. AND THERE WERE CARTOONS ON THE OTHER CHANNELS. GAH!

Kids, in the olden days, families had only one television in the WHOLE HOUSE. It was an actual piece of furniture. Can you imagine?

So I grew up both excluded from and (consequently) disdainful of sports. That didn’t change as I grew up. My first husband was a sports fan, too, and watched a lot, but he had no patience to explain anything, either. I spent a lot of time finding other things to do so I wouldn’t bother him while he watched—or in the kitchen, prepping snacks when he had friends over to watch with him.

Now my husband of nearly 30 years and our youngest son are both avid fans of the Big 4 sports, but by the time we got together, I was somebody who called it “sportsball” and rolled my eyes at how excited grown men got at other grown men playing silly games for millions of dollars. I did my own thing while they watched games—and honestly, that was fantastic when I was writing 6-8 full-length novels a year. Lots and lots of time to myself, lol!

Through research for my writing, I got quite into MMA for a while, but I really can’t stand the UFC as an organization, so I gave up on that a while ago and considered my slight peek into the world of sports over.

But then a strange thing happened … I became a Swiftie.

I say “strange,” because pretty much everybody who knows me goes bug-eyed when they learn that I’m a Swiftie (I’m about Level 8; iykyk). I’m a punk/grunge girly, with a strong foundation of 60s protest folk (the gap between those genres is actually tiny) that became a general fondness for singer-songwriters. I’ve always enjoyed some pop music—I’m a big P!nk fan, for example—but I don’t have patience for bubblegum. On the radio, to me, Taylor seemed soft, bright pink, and sweet as candy. I know a lot of musicians, and a LOT of them really love her. I used to give them shit about it. I didn’t have any bad feelings about Taylor’s music; just did not get the appeal.

The stuff with Kanye was on my radar (I first learned of the VMAs thing from P!nk’s tweet about it):

Because I’m pretty plugged into pop culture in general, I sort of followed the Snake thing when it unfolded, feeling some feminist rage on her behalf, but otherwise, I devoted very little of my brain to Taylor Swift.

Then, on a sleepless night during the pandemic, I watched Miss Americana on Netflix, and she impressed the hell out of me. I’m of the “eat the rich” persuasion, I don’t think the world should have even a single billionaire anywhere, but I’m also of the “don’t fucking hold women to a standard you don’t even show men” persuasion. And since we live in a world where billionaires are so common plain old millionaires are barely edible, I’d say Swift is doing the billionaire thing better than most of ‘em. More than that, though, I discovered that her music is miles deeper than the bubblegum (or, in Swiftie parlance, the “glitter gel pen”) hits.

I decided to check out her albums. I started at the beginning and bounced off the first two, written when she was a teenager—and to this 60yo grunge fan, she sounds way too young in voice and theme. So I started at the back instead, with (at the time) Folklore, and that was it. The first time I heard “this is me trying,” I became a Swiftie.

Now I love her whole catalog, even the early stuff, which gains a lot of depth in the context of her whole body of work.

That’s the background to explain why I was right there in the thick of it when a certain tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs tried to give her a friendship bracelet with his number on it.

If you’re reading this, you probably know I’m a hardcore romantic. I was invested in that story from the go. When Taylor attended her first Chiefs game, I told my husband and son that I wanted to watch the game. They both stared at me like I’d grown several new heads—then my son laughed and said, “Taylor’s gonna be there, isn’t she.”

We’re from St. Louis, so, since Kroenke absconded with the Rams (and Bidwell with the Cardinals before that), the Chiefs are our closest thing to a hometown team, but nobody in the fam had ever been a Chiefs fan. In fact, after the Rams left, my husband turned from football entirely. He was pissed and decided he’d given his last bit of loyalty to a football team. But my guys love me, so they watched that game with me.

I was there for Taylor and Travis, but as we were watching the game, I asked a question about what was happening on the field and had my first-ever experience of getting an answer. Without snark! I asked another question, and you know what? They answered me. With sincere enthusiasm for helping me learn.

Now, to give my dad (and, I suppose, my ex) some grace, I’d tried to ask them questions in the time before DVR, so they couldn’t pause games to explain things to me. They had to miss a piece of the game to answer any question I tried to ask. Jim and Stefan, on the other hand, could push a button and give me a full class, with acted-out scenarios, to answer every question I had.

Once freed to ask questions, I had a lifetime’s worth. That first game took us about 6 hours to get through because we paused it so often. Same the following week. And the week after that. For that whole 2023 season, they gave me a master class. Not once did they make me feel like I was being a pain in the ass—in fact, they loved teaching me.

And I discovered I LOVE football. Like, how the fuck did I go almost 60 years on this planet thinking the guys in the helmets were mostly not very bright? How did I think they were just thoughtlessly crashing themselves into each other? This game is complex as hell!

I’ve done my autistic thing and dived deep, I’m still fixated and will watch basically ANY football thing, I’m on Year 3 of Susan’s Football Madness, and I’m still learning new things all the time. Holy crap, this game is awesome!

Now our Sundays are entirely devoted to football, from the beginning of The Red Zone all the way through Sunday Night Football. I love so many players across the whole league.

I’m not entirely sure I’m a devoted Chiefs fan. I’m there for Travis, but I feel some conflicts about other players and the team itself. When Trav retires, I’ll decide where my deepest love lies. Maybe I’ll be sufficiently settled in the Kingdom and remain a Chiefs fan? Maybe the Niners (the home team here, with cutie George Kittle)? Maybe the Bears or Colts? (the next closest to our hometown)? Maybe another team? We’ll have to see. But now that I’m here in NFL-land, I don’t see me heading for the exit.

As it turns out, starting to love football opened a door in my head—and heart.

You know what else is awesome? The WNBA. Taylor got me into football, and Caitlin Clark (a Swiftie herself) got me into basketball, but now those connections are only important to my origin story as a sports fan. They are no longer why I’m invested in the sports. The Fever is my W team, but Caitlin is not my favorite player. She’s in the top ten, but she might not crack the top five. I discovered a whole league chock full of powerful women I adore. Aliyah Boston’s is the jersey I wear, and I would give up an organ for Kelsey Mitchell.

I also caught the rugby bug during the Olympics and adore Ilona Maher (on the pitch and off), but watching rugby in the States is not easy. We had the streaming app for a while, but it turns out, to be able to make sense of a game you’re watching on TV, you need more than somebody with a camera on the sidelines doing their best to follow the ball. You need actual production professionals, and we’re not getting that in the US except for the Olympics.

So now I’m a rabid sports fan, watching podcasts analyses, playing in fantasy leagues, devoting whole days of my week to watching games like I’ve got money on the outcome (I don’t—I don’t gamble, ever), and people who knew me in the before times would be shocked.

My disdain for sports was rooted in the strongly gendered soil of my 60s-80s upbringing, the entrenched idea that things like football and basketball were only for boys and men to play or even enjoy. And those roots were thick and lasting, even as I shed most other such limiting ideas. But it’s women who brought me to sports—and the wonderful, evolved men in my life who have embraced this new love with me.

Just something I’m thinking about as football season gets underway—and Ms. Swift has herself a One True Love and a big ol’ diamond ring, not a paper one, on the finger they put wedding rings on. Love stories all around.

Especially in these times, we have to cling to the things that bring us the respite of delight.

I hope you’re having a great weekend—and if you, too, are a sports fan, I hope your team wins (unless they’re playing the Chiefs or the Fever haha)!

I’ll be back in a couple weeks with more bookish content.

xoxo
s—

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Hey there!

Today is the day! Freak, Book 3 of the Signal Bend Heritage series is NOW AVAILABLE. You can find it at Amazon and most other vendors.

Freak features Abigail Freeman as the FMC. Abigail is a new character to this series, introduced in Book 1 (Virago) and featured in a significant subplot of Book 2 (Snake). The title of Book 3 is a reference to what happens in Book 2, and to the fact that Abigail is a bit of a town outsider and why.

Mel Lind was introduced late in the original Signal Bend series. Until now he hasn’t gotten much page time, but I think you’ll like him a lot. He’s almost a cinnamon roll. IMO, he’s got a little too much edge to really fit that mold, but he’s close.

This is the book that finally broke a long, painful bout of writer’s block.

This book is also the book where the series narrative arc takes off (and where I, as I was writing, discovered that arc). I expect that main elements of the club story in Freak to play out over the rest of the series.

If you’re interested in some of my inspirations for character and setting, you can check out my Pinterest Board for the Signal Bend Heritage series.

I hope you enjoy your visit with Abigail and Mel, the whole Night Horde family, and the special town of Signal Bend, Missouri!

xoxo
s—

This coming Monday is the 105th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which finally enfranchised women of the United States with the power of the vote.

Progress in this country has always traveled a stuttering, circuitous path, making promises and reneging, picking and choosing who gets rights and when they get them or lose them, making it difficult if not impossible to exercise one’s rights when they ostensibly have them.

Thus, 18 August 1920 did not suddenly unlock the vote for every woman of age in the country. First, and for decades after, it was white women who could safely step into a voting booth, and not all white women had access to that safety or that vote. It wasn’t until the 1960s, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, that enfranchisement spread widely to all adult citizens and systems were in place to protect it.

Despite its rocky beginnings, and the obstacles and inconveniences put in place in most states by people seeking to quell the power of the vote in certain demographics, despite the way the VRA has been weakened in recent years, the right to vote has been protected since 1965. For virtually all my life, then, I had the privilege and luxury not to think about the right to vote as anything but a reality in my life and a historical fascination to study. For myself, it was simply something that I could do, a right and a responsibility I’ve always taken seriously.

18 August has been a celebration day for me for most of my life. This year, however, the 19th doesn’t need a birthday party. She needs a war party.

I never considered that someone in the modern world would ever have sufficient power in this country to take my vote, or anyone else’s, away. I honestly never considered that someone who wanted to disenfranchise whole segments of the populace would be widely considered anything more than a crackpot weirdo screaming into the void.

But that void got crowded and grew teeth, and here we are. Women have already lost the right to bodily autonomy. Now people who would have been rightly shunned as cuckoo birds are sitting at the desks of prominent news mainstream shows, and an alarming number of brocasts, suggesting, with minimal pushback if any, that it was a mistake to “give” us the right to vote. And not only women, but anyone in a demographic that gained the right to vote any time after 1776.

I could do a big, messy diatribe here, I want to do a big, messy diatribe here, but I’m tired and seriously swamped with prep work for the fall semester. (I could also do a big, messy diatribe about the absolute FUCKAPALOOZA of trying to teach amidst all the abject horror and infuriating buffoonery taking over the country and the world, but again, I’m too damn busy gearing up for that bloody battle to yell about it.)

So instead of getting my rage on, I’ll use this moment to direct you, if you’re interested, to some content about suffrage and other rights women have fought and died to claim.

First, because this is primarily what my blog is for, some related stuff I’ve written:
Voices, Votes, and Vibrators. An article about suffrage and women’s health for the Dirty Sexy History blog. (Lots of linked sources)

Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven. My historical romance featuring an English suffragette (in which I use a lot of the research linked in the article above).

Some books about the fight for suffrage (US and England):
All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900, by Martha S. Jones

Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women, edited by Joyce Marlow.

My Own Story, by Emmeline Pankhurst

The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, by Sylvia Pankhurst

The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement 1848-1898, by Lisa Tetrault

The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, by Elaine Weiss.

Other books about women’s rights:
The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

The Portable Feminist Reader, edited by Roxane Gay

She Said, by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

Hood Feminism, by Mikki Kendall

Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement, by Katherine M. Marino

by Chanel Miller

Women Who Change the World: Stories from the Fight for Social Justice, edited by Lynn Lewis

Legislation: International Women’s Rights Law and Gender Equality, edited by Ramona Vijeyarasa.

Okay, I’ve got to get back to semester prep. I hope you find something inspiring to read. If you do read any of my suggestions, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so maybe come back and leave a comment!

I’ll be back in a few weeks with more content about my own books and writing—and on that point, I would be remiss not to remind you that I’ve got a new book coming out in three weeks! Freak, Book 3 of the Signal Bend Heritage series, goes live on Saturday, 6 September!

See you then!
love,
s—

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