Hey everyone, I wanted to do a special edition of the newsletter here to celebrate the release day of The Ancient Things! It’s been a bit over a year since The Man With No Shadow was published. Hard to believe that we’re now at release day for book three. There’s been a lot of changes over the past year for me, but they’ve been staggered out, so it wasn’t like I woke up one morning and there was an avalanche moment of “I’m an author now.” It’s been more an accumulation of many many steps - moving to copy-edits for the first time, seeing The Man With No Shadow in bookstores, starting work on the next book, getting my next project in the form of Hemlock Hollow, etc, etc. And this morning really feels no different than any other day - I got up, I made coffee, and I spent the morning working on book four because for every milestone, there’s always another one on the horizon.

When I first wrote How to Survive Camping on Reddit, I intended for it to be only three books. But after I wrapped up what became The Lady in Chains, I realized there was enough going on with the storyline of The Ancient Things that it deserved its own book. I’m glad I did that, because I had a lot of fun writing all the monsters contained within it (I’m so excited for you all to see the gummy bears!) and I got to really lean into the Irish folklore around the campground’s resident fairy. Once we’re further out from the release and I don’t have to worry about spoilers as much I’ll talk a bit more about this.

I’m going to keep this newsletter short because you’ll be getting another one near the end of this month with more updates and cat photos. But I just wanted to take a moment to celebrate The Ancient Things being out there in the world. I hope you all have fun with it!

I’m keeping this section in the special release day newsletter because I’d love to see folks at these events! Every book in this series has had something fun to talk about. For The Man With No Shadow it was the journey from Reddit to print. For The Lady in Chains it was spiders. And for The Ancient Things, it’s going to be Irish folklore.

And horses.

September 8th - Book launch event with Prologue Bookshop - Columbus, OH

September 14th - Event with The Twisted Spine - New York City, NY

September 23rd - Author talk at Way Public Library with Gathering Volumes - Perrysburg, OH

September 26th - Book signing at Dublin Sun Center Barnes & Noble - Columbus, OH