When a Side Project Becomes the Main Character (Author Life Chaos, Exhibit A)

So here’s the thing about being a creative person: sometimes the thing you meant to dabble in — like say, just something you’re thinking about while lying under an ice pack recovering from heat exhaustion— decides to kick down the door and take over your whole creative brain.

I was supposed to be doing the cover reveal for Escaping the Omega Bond this week and sewing dragons for a Renaissance faire. That was the plan. I had a marketing calendar and everything But the universe had other ideas. Specifically: a shiny new idea I had zero intention of working on yet… that is now absolutely eating my life.

It’s sequel to Familiar Ground — the companion story to ETOB that follows Layla (a side character from Aura’s story) and explores what happens at Hunter’s Moon after Aura escapes. That book gave me my sapphic slow-burn fix and a taste of the pack’s recovery arc. I finished writing it earlier this summer, and now it’s aging in the story cave- I like to let things sit for at least 6 weeks after finishing them before I pull them out to start edits and re-writes, so they’re fresh to me. Other than trying to decide when I want to launch it and shopping for a cover artist, I haven’t touched it in a couple of weeks.

Enter: a brand new couple. A lone-wolf crisis PR specialist with a back pocket full of secrets and a policy of not caring about pack drama… and a rising fitness influencer who’s built her brand on authenticity, community, and self-empowerment — all while hiding one major thing:

She’s an Omega. And none of her millions of followers know it. Not because she’s pretending to be human, but because she’s done such a good job of hiding it that despite being one of the most famous shifter influencers in the Lunaverse, that no one knows it. She’s hiding her entire dynamic while becoming the face of accessible wellness for a generation of empowered shifter women. And when her carefully curated world collides with a man who knows her secret, who she never thought she’d see again… well.

So while the ETOB cover reveal is (sadly) delayed, I’m pouring all that anticipation into this messy, magnetic, trope-laced follow-up I wasn’t planning to write — but clearly need to.

More on that soon. For now, just know I’m writing secret identities, emotional landmines, and the spiciest second-chance chemistry I’ve ever written in my life. I normally write slow-burn and this ain’t it.