Wish out of Water is out now!

Fiona Jayde created this cover. Please clap.

The TL;DR bit:

Get the e-book here.

·Amazon US
·Amazon CA
·Amazon UK
·Amazon AU
·Apple Books
·Barnes and Noble
·Google Play
·Kobo

Now, some backstory.

The very first time I got an inkling to write a mermaid series was around 10 (sheesh) years ago when I’d first gotten into digital-first publishing. The house I was with at the time was probing roster authors about what their plans were and what we thought we had coming up. I was itching to do some light paranormal novellas. Those never ended up coming into fruition. Things happened. I moved on from that press, and got preoccupied with writing hotter (and way longer) books.

I kept thinking over the years, “I still want to do something with mermaids. But that project’s not right anymore.” My voice had darkened a bit and my storytelling style developed more layers, so I tossed the idea into my mental storage trunk and closed the lid.

Then, a few things happened. The final heroine in Shrew & Company, while not technically a mermaid, is a creature of water, and I loved being able to play with ideas of someone from a swimming-averse culture having to make peace with the ocean. I also got deep into the Hearth Motel series which has mermaids of a sort in a mostly secondary character capacity. They were sprinkles, not the ice cream itself.

Those led up to a certain movie being announced, and I had one of those, “Well, shit,” moments.” I had to do something then. I didn’t want to be the lady jumping onto trends when I’d been building this story world in my head for longer than any of the series you see in my backlist.

The Hooked series honestly didn’t get a name until I sent the proposal to my editor. I pictured a four-book timeline arced a bit like those angsty hist-rom sibling series. Extremely pragmatic eldest sister in the lead, a couple of disruptive brothers in the middle, and then a bombshell at the end. It was going to be irreverent, it was going to make readers sweat, it was going to make readers confront grief and what “duty” means, and yeah, there are some really snarky fish in it. And a dog. And some royals, but whatever.

House couldn’t acquire it. I chose not to pitch it elsewhere for a few reasons, chief among them being that if I got a certain type of deal for it, the stories would actually become less accessible. But let’s not get into that. Publishing is a complicated business fueled by equal parts metrics, gatekeeping, controversy, prophesy, and luck if you’re a mid-lister.

*cartwheels sardonically*

So. Wish out of Water.

I won’t copy and paste the blurb here. You can read that on the book’s page.

I wanted this story to answer the question of what Ariel would be like if she were a Black woman from Eastern North Carolina who’s had to balance her paranormal strangeness with her human father’s family’s culture and social expectations. Brook Williams is a secret-keeper and the sibling who’s had to develop the most intuition about what what could harm her and her family.

She’s exhausted, but she’s careful.

When she makes choices, she does so knowing the ripple effects will not only wash over her, but everyone related to her.

She’s not the kind of woman who’d run away from home, but for what she wanted for her family, a marriage of convenience to a stranger made sense.

The revelations that occur after she takes the plunge are what throw the Williams into the thick of the intrigue that their mother never wanted them to know about.

So, yeah. This definitely isn’t one of those fluffy mermaid mayhem novellas I thought about writing 10 years ago. WooW is, as River Williams might say (THAT LINK CONTAINS SPOILERS), “A whole-ass mood,” and I hope you’ll enjoy going on this adventure with me.

The next story in this series may even be out this year. Fingers crossed!