Next week, Crazy Joe will be released, so I thought we’d have us a little peek at Jonas and Abe.

I wrote this, quite quickly and carelessly. I’d been working on Black Bird for what felt like forever, and I just wanted to finish something – fast and painlessly. Write what you know, they say, so I made the characters teachers, and I wrote. I wrote, manically, and when I was done, I sent it to my beta readers.

They liked it, a lot, but... maybe it could be a little longer, maybe there could be a little more depth. At first, I wasn’t keen on doing the job needed to be done, but I didn’t want to publish it either if it didn’t feel complete. So I took a few days off, and then I dove back in.

I’m so glad I listened to my girls, and actually did the work, instead of just hurrying to get something completed.

Crazy Joe is a story about how a run-in with your past can upset your present, how maybe old crushes never die, and how to move past some of your regrets. It’s a 17k, contemporary, M/M romance and the main characters are Abe Cooper and Jonas Raghnall.

You can pre-order Crazy Joe at JMS-Books and get 20% off.

books2read.com/CrazyJoe

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Abe Cooper is starting over. For fifteen years he’s lived the life that was expected of him, but not anymore. He’s packed up his things, bought himself a cabin in Northfield, and managed to secure a job at the local high school teaching gym and coaching the football team. But his new beginning didn’t include running into Crazy Joe on his first trip to the grocery store.

Jonas Raghnall has everything he needs—good friends and a job he loves. He’s worked hard to get over what happened sixteen years ago, but one run-in with his past and all the memories come flooding back. Seeing Abe Cooper, The Abe Cooper, sets everything out of balance.

Abe had pictured a fresh start with no ties to his past, but now that Jonas is there, he wants nothing more than to be close to the man who had butterflies filling his belly when he was in high school. Jonas doesn’t want to come face to face with his past, but if he sees Abe every day, it’s not really meeting up with your past, is it? It’s more like a date with your future.

There is a lot going on this month, I have two releases (yay!), but before we focus on them, I’d like to look back half a year or so. Back in December, Turning Wood was released. I didn’t have any great plans for it, just wanted to write a Christmas story, and I’d written several paranormal stories in a row so I longed for some contemporary.

Turning Wood takes place in Snowmelt, which is situated a little bit from Northfield. Now, there are a few Northfields around the world, but my Northfield doesn’t exist…and yet it’s existed for years. The first time anyone went to Northfield in one of my stories was back in early 2016.

Nortown, my series of lumberjacks, is close to Northfield so it’s been mentioned in several of those books. I love Nortown, it’s like a second home to me, but I wanted to write a series where not everyone was a lumberjack LOL.

So Up North came to be.

Up North is just that – up north. You know, that very specific area around Nortown, Northfield, Snowmelt, Whiteport and thereabout. And I have a couple of Up North stories coming out this summer so I wanted to re-introduce the characters in Turning Wood before we move on Crazy Joe and When Skies are Gray.

I want to make it clear that all these stories are standalone. The only thing linking them is that they take place in my make-believe small towns of the north. The characters don’t know each other, they don’t live in the same towns, and they don’t work with the same thing.

So, to refresh your memory. In Turning Wood, we meet Otho and Mason. Mason has just broken up with his boyfriend and gets drunk in a bar at a winter resort. After one too many whiskeys, he thinks going for a walk might be a good idea. But, it’s not. Mason walks out on the ice of the river and falls through.

It’s Otho’s day off, and he’s out turning wood outside his house when he sees a man walk out on the ice. He tries to get his attention, but the ice opens up and swallows the man whole. Otho rushes to the rescue, and then there is a lot of icy cold mixed with Christmas warmth.

Turning Wood is a 14k, contemporary, Christmas gay romance story.

books2read.com/TurningWood

Turning Wood at JMS-Books

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For Otho Newcomer, the small village of Snowmelt is a haven from his old life. If he’s not exactly a changed man, he at least hopes to keep his distance from all those easy romances, and the inevitable heartache and disappointment that have always followed.

Mason Dager is an idiot. His ex has cleared out his bank account, sold his car and gotten him thrown out of his apartment. And he has no one to blame but himself. But what better way to celebrate a new chapter in his life—one that includes homelessness and the humiliation of telling his family they were right all along—than to spend Christmas at a swanky winter resort like River Cove? It’s already paid for after all.

When a very drunk Mason makes yet another dumb decision, Otho comes to the rescue, throwing the two men together during the most magical time of the year.

What should be the wrong choice for both of them, might be exactly what they need. They’ll just have to survive a nosy best friend, an asshole of an ex, and the scars of their pasts.