Romance

Skate Cute

Contemporary Sweet Romance

Astronomy PhD student Kriss finds an escape from her dissertation work in artistic skating at the neighborhood rink in her old hometown. But she can’t escape the attention of two familiar admirers from the nearby fire station.

Status: Available now!
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Ever After, Etc

Contemporary Sweet Romance

Romance author Angie knows that happiness doesn’t come in ever after doses. But when her favorite bookstore is threatened by redevelopment, she launches a daring writing project to help save the shop… and the cute shop owner. 

Status: Off to beta readers

Photo credit: Lucas George Wendt

Bare Bones

Contemporary Sweet Romance

A paleontology PhD student finds out you can dig up more than dinosaur bones on a ranch in the Southwest.

Status: Concept Development

Photo credit: Ángel Méndez

That Space Romance

Just For Fun

A spy is tracking down a spy… IN SPACE. Romance happens… IN SPACE. Because I promised my husband I would write one of these romance novels…
IN SPACE.

Status: Someday…

Photo credit: Alek Kalinowski

YA Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Ellie Goes to Prom

YA Paranormal

Senior prom is a big deal. Ellie’s dad said “you can’t go, it’s too dangerous,” but what he really meant was “use the forbidden magic stuff stashed in the basement to dredge up a magical bodyguard to bring along.” Obviously.

Status: Plotting

Photo credit: Janko Ferlič

Fugitive Star

YA Sci-Fi

Aylin Starr is weird, and so is her starship. She’s also fleeing for her life. The only hope for her and her ship is to pretend to be as normal as possible, at an old-fashioned military training school that’s bad at keeping secrets.

Status: Re-writing someday…

Photo credit: Alek Kalinowski

Fighting Blind

YA Sci-Fi

The jungle has it in for Meia, and the rest of the planet’s new colony too. Jungle spores stole Meia’s vision years ago, and now a new threat is targeting the tech she uses to see. And the tech that the rest of the colony uses to exist.

Status: Completed but shelved for re-working

Photo credit: Vista Wei

A Sister Story

YA Fantasy

This one is so new, it’s not ready to even be summarized yet, but so far so cool…

Status: Humming around in my brain

Photo credit: Pierre-Axel Cotteret

*Or maybe that’s me. I ruin their lives a lot too.

A Skate Cute excerpt

“What have we got up there tonight?” Chase let his shoulders flop back onto the blanket and pulled his arms up to fold his hands behind his head. Usually not a bad pose for emphasizing… certain physical byproducts of certain physical hobbies of his. 

“Everything, wanna see?” Kriss shifted, and suddenly the binoculars headed his way. “Planets, stars of course, but there’s star clusters too, and galaxies, and if we stay out here late enough you can see a pretty good nebula.”

“How late?”

“Well… probably midnight. Or winter.” She giggled. “But the rest of it is up there now.”

“I see a sideways M,” Chase commented on the first star pattern he saw as he took the binoculars.

“That’s Cassiopeia. She’s a queen. She’s not very nice, though.”

“Good to know.” Chase slid the binoculars over his eyes, adjusting the width a little as the stars jumped and bounced in the magnified view. “What am I looking for?”

“Anything. I usually just wander binoculars all over the sky and see what looks blobby or interesting.”

“Blobby and interesting, got it.” Chase couldn’t help a smile at the adorable phrase. “Which particular interesting blobs are your favorite?”

“My favorite—!” Her voice sparked to life, and Chase pulled the lenses away to watch the moonlight dance in her eyes again. “Well, you don’t actually need binoculars to see my favorite thing up there. It’s easier to find it without them anyway.”

Chase obediently set down the binoculars on his chest and folded his hands over them. “Show me.”

“Okay… See that big square there? Kinda right overhead.” The dark shadow of her arm stretched in the general direction.

“I think so.” Chase scooched his shoulders an inch or two closer to her on the blanket. To help get the angle right. 

“Okay, now find the star on the bottom left, and go down and you find three stars in a row… now go down again and there are three more stars in a row—you with me?”

Totally. “Yeah, I think so.” He caught a whiff of that same cotton candy bubble smell, definitely a shampoo or something. Stars, he reminded his runaway pulse. 

“Alright, well. If you follow those bottom three stars to the left, there’s a little blob right above and to the left of the last one.”

“Little blob…”

“It helps if you look a little to the side of it sometimes.”

“Got it. I think. What am I looking at?”

“That…” she paused dramatically, “is the Andromeda Galaxy.”

“Galaxy? No shit,” Chase breathed in awe. “Oops, sorry. Probably shouldn’t swear at a galaxy.”

Kriss giggled. “In ten million years, I’m sure it’ll be very angry at you.”

“Ten million years?”

The blankets shifted with her shrug. “Something like that. Or maybe it’s less than that many lightyears away, I don’t quite remember. It won’t hear you anyway, sound attenuates too fast. Your mom won’t even hear you inside.”

“That’s probably good,” Chase smirked in the dark.

“But if the aliens have really, really good telescopes, and figure out how to read human lips… yeah, you’re in trouble.” Her voice sounded like it was smirking back. 

“So why is that your favorite thing in the sky?”

The air rustled with her happy sigh. “I don’t know, I was always amazed that just one little blob out there that I can see with my naked eyes contains more stars than I’ve ever seen in the whole sky in my whole life. Maybe that’s why I ended up studying galaxies. There’s whole night skies hidden out there, and maybe someone like me is lying down under a different one and staring up and wondering if I exist.”

“So is that what your dissertation is about? Galaxies? Or aliens?” 

“Ha. Galaxies. And dark matter.”

“Can you tell me about it?” Chase shifted again, propping himself back up on his elbow to face her. Somehow he’d ended up even closer this time.

“Sure. Want the fifty-page version or the three-hundred-fifty-page version?”

“Geez. How about the version that Chase’s small brain can understand?”

Kriss laughed. “Got it. Have you ever heard of dark matter?”

“Sounds like something from an old B-grade sci-fi movie.”

“Nope, it’s real. Sort of. Basically, we know there’s something out there, but we don’t know what it is.”

“That’s totally a movie trailer.”

Kriss giggled, and Chase, emboldened, swept an arm enigmatically across the sky, pitching his voice low to make it as epic as possible. “We know there’s something out there…”

“You’re ridiculous.” But the smooth and dark curve of her lips was still grinning at him.

“We don’t know what it is…”

“Stop it and I’ll explain. Basically, there’s something inside galaxies that makes them hold together more than we’re expecting—don’t you dare,” she waved a warning finger in his face before he could comment further. 

Chase sobered his silly grin and held his silence. 

“We know it’s there because the galaxies’ rotation curves… Well, the galaxies are spinning fast, but they don’t fly apart like we’d expect. Like, you know, if you spin the merry-go-round too fast, all the kids would fly off.”

“I do that all the time.”

“Shush. Galaxies are just the same, they’re all spinning so fast that they should be flying apart, but something inside them is holding them together. We’d expect it to be the gravity of the stars, but when we look at how many stars we can see, there’s not enough matter there to account for the difference. So we call whatever it is we can’t see ‘dark matter,’ invisible stuff that must have mass because it’s got gravity.”

“Ah.” The pieces were coming together. “So… the galaxies you study have this mysterious inner strength to them that goes deeper than their outward beauty?”

“Yeah, basically.”

Chase waited, holding his breath. “And something about curves,” he finished, just as understanding began to dawn on her face. 

Her mouth hung open for a moment, so close. “You did not,” she protested hotly, pushing herself onto her own elbow on the blanket to face him down. Even closer now.

“Not what?”

“Just turn my dissertation into a pickup line.”

Chase swallowed back a chuckle at the look on her face, then gave her a sheepish grin. “That was totally not a pickup line, it was… an observation.”

“Uh huh.” 

“About some similarities…”

“Yes?”

“Between a good friend of mine and her… galactic interests.” 

“Oh my gosh you’re terrible.”

“No I’m not,” Chase protested weakly, trying to keep his laughter out of his voice. “I’m serious. Every word I said was totally true, because you are basically a galaxy: you’re brilliant, you’re strong, you’re gorgeous, you’re super smart… okay, I don’t know if galaxies are smart… and well, I guess you’re not far away in outer space, so maybe you’re not a galaxy after all.” He was rambling like an idiot. An idiot with his heart in his throat, stuck there and pounding away, because seriously she was so damn close, her lips full and glistening in the moonlight…

“Andromeda is actually super close by.” Her voice had lowered a bit, and it sounded more than a little breathy. Maybe he was an idiot, but she was definitely feeling it too. “We’re practically neighbors, Andromeda and the Milky Way. Another four billion years and we’ll collide.”

“Well alright then.” Closer now. Close enough that he could see the dark strands of her eyelashes in the shadowy moonlight. Her eyes glinted as they fixed on his, widening slightly as if only just now noticing there was nothing but charged air between them. Her lips parted around a quick indrawn breath, only a whisper of a thought away. Chase waited for another endless heartbeat, caught on the edge of her gravity well, then he leaned forward ever so gently, so slowly that it seemed to take a billion years…

And they collided.

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