I thought I’d take this week’s rainbow snippets to talk a little bit about my upcoming release and share a snippet or two here over the next few coming weeks.

These Haunted Hills has been shared here before but now the book is almost here and I am excited. So why haven’t I been screaming about this from the hilltops? Life is rough at the moment is the answer.

But this is a book born out of my rough times. Shockingly I started it for nanowrimo in 2017 and then life intervened. In camp nano during the pandemic I wrote more and then while hospitalized after destroying my knee in 2021 I took it back to camp to finish it off. 2022 was cleaning this up since it had taken five years to complete (some of which was written under heavy pain killers after they pieced my leg together and taught me to walk again. So here I am at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024 dealing with my cancer diagnosis and now my uncle’s.

That’s where the book came from, out of a lot of pain but here is what it is about, the joy of the things around me. I live just across the river from the Mothman and within 40 miles of the Hocking Hills and their ghosts and cryptids and ditto Athens and their haunts. I’m about 70 miles from Haunted Marietta. I’m about 2 hours south east of the Loveland Frog monster (though he’s not in this).

Josh represents that joy. He’s a wildlife professor at an unnamed university (but given he lives close to Athens OH and Ohio U is right there… feel free to draw conclusions). His steampunk airship is basically the one I belong to out of Athens (they’re excited about it) His website is based on one by people I know, like me paranormal investigators. So He represents, also like me, the intersection of science and the paranormal.

Brendan is the dream in one way, the author hitting it big, the Stephen King, the one that Hollywood imagines every time we see an author on the screen with the million dollar house. His life, however, collapsed with the death of his son from cancer (ironic as I never thought I’d be dealing with cancer as this book comes out) His is the emotional journey. He was one of the hardest characters to write in no small part because I wanted to get the emotions right.

I’ll start the snippet at the beginning, let you get to know Brendan a bit.

He peered out one rain-streaked window. The only thing in view were trees, mostly pines mixed with something covered in blooms, dogwood maybe. Zimmermann had chosen Brendan the perfect cabin. The green isolation he’d chased after surrounded him. The forest suffocated him, the sheer aloneness of it. Those second thoughts skyrocketed. Heather hadn’t wanted him to come. She didn’t trust him alone. Brendan knew his ex had reason to worry. Both of them were mired in grief, and three years hadn’t moved them past it.

Blurb:

Young wildlife conservation professor, Joshua Zimmerman, adores foxes, steampunk, and paranormal investigation. As a geek of the first order, Josh is a collector of nerdy memorabilia and tattoos, and he’s an avid steampunk cosplayer. When his favorite author hires him for some ghost hunting for his new project, Josh can hardly believe his luck.

As an author of the wildly successful urban fantasy series, The Green Tablet, Brendan Halloran should have it all. And he did until his young son, Connor, died of cancer. Heartbroken and drowning in grief, Brendan stops writing, stops living his life. His marriage has disintegrated, leaving Brendan trapped in the moment Connor died.

When Brendan rents a cabin in Ohio’s Hocking Hills, it’s ostensibly to research his next book, an adult paranormal tale. Brendan hires a local professor who is an expert on the paranormal, thinking if he does pull out of his tail spin and makes good on his plan to write a new book, he might as well do it right. And the perfect place to investigate could be the remains of an old hotel constructed to suit the serial killer who built it.

Brendan finds himself swept away, completely unprepared for the joy and enthusiasm Josh brings to everything he does. Step by step, Brendan reenters life. His head might not be convinced he’s ready to love again, but his heart disagrees. Unfortunately for him, the ghost is every bit as vicious as the killer was in life, and he and Joshua have a target on their backs.

Preorder Link: https://ninestarpress.com/product/these-haunted-hills/

If you’re wondering why I don’t have up the lovely cover art, there are a few last minute changes that are all on me and my own scattered thoughts in these last few months. Ninestar is being wonderful about the little changes.

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