Big News: A Free Book and a NEW Book!

Starting Saturday, November 7, 2015, you'll be able to download my middle-grade novel Underground free for Kindle for a limited time. If you haven't read it yet, you should grab it up before next week's unveiling of the second book in the series right here on this blog.

Yep, you heard it here first!

Click Here to Download UNDERGROUND

Serial Saturday kicks off on November 14, 2015. I'll be sharing a chapter of the previously-unseen Skyline each week until the whole book is available here to read online for free.

Interested?

Subscribe via email or RSS feed on the right of this page to be notified as soon as a new chapter is available, or check in on Saturday mornings and look for the tag: SKYLINE.

Please pass this announcement along to any friends, family, kids, school groups, or reading clubs you know who love (or might fall in love with) an action/adventure story with a strong female main character!

- Beth


About Skyline:

Twelve-year old Emily wants nothing more than a "do nothing" summer break with her best friend Sarah. Her plans for watching movies and hanging out at the neighborhood recreation center are destroyed when Sarah is shipped off to stay with her grandmother and Emily is recruited by Lolfus, the king of the trolls who live under the city and who saved her life just a few months earlier, to help investigate an above-ground mystery caused by another frightening race of mythical creatures.

Emily and Lolfus face off against a twisted and cunning opponent and risk everything to keep the balance between old and new, above-ground and underground, good and evil.


This contemporary urban fantasy is the second installment of the River City Secrets series that began with Underground.

Changed, But For the Better

What kind of crazy author takes an indefinite hiatus from her largest audience (Facebook) only 24-hours before her latest book's scheduled release? Oh, yeah--that would be me. There's a very good reason for it. I promise.

Withdrawing from social media may not seem like the wisest thing to do in the midst of a publicity push, but it was something I had to do in order to get over the last few potholes on my journey back from Crazytown. I bet you didn't know that I'd been on a long and arduous trip these past two years, did you?

Believe me, it was no pleasure cruise.

I started my voyage at 10:14 PM on August 8, 2011. That's when I got the phone call that my mother was on the way to the hospital in the back of an ambulance and my brother was under arrest for her attempted murder.

Sparing you the disturbing details, let's just agree that the fallout was graphic. The stuff of horror movies or detective novels--more blood than you can imagine, more police inquiries than there are hours in the day, time spent in the ICU, multiple surgeries, and all of "normal" life put on hold until the pieces could be put back together again.

It took two years.

After The Incident (to which the whole situation is now referred) I felt completely disoriented. I withdrew from social activities, avoided going out of the house, and really just started driving myself crazy. This went on for about a year before I finally saw a therapist--a step that I made because my writing and visual creativity seemed to have dried up.

I was diagnosed with PTSD and subsequent depression. Cleaning up the gory crime scene myself probably wasn't such a good idea, I suppose...

My journey back to being a functioning member of society was difficult, but I did it without medication. I got a part-time job as a tour guide so I would have to get out of the house and talk to people, whether I felt like it or not. I started writing my Morning Pages again (thanks, Julia Cameron.) I set some new goals for myself to act as indicators that I could still create. Finishing Underground was at the top of that list.

Now that the book is officially DONE and has fledged the nest, I'm taking some time to sort my head and my home to celebrate. I've cleaned out cabinets and closets and all sorts of nooks and crannies as a symbolic gesture of purging the mental funk that has dominated my life since that August night two years ago. I've also been casting off lots of negative thoughts and feelings that came along with that funk--a process that would have been slowed or even halted if I'd been distracting myself with Facebook or other marketing and publicity outlets during this surreal time of celebration.

While I certainly feel that completing Underground is an accomplishment in itself, I feel that it's more a symbol of where my life is right now. It's a testament of my return from Crazytown. Do I think that I'm sabotaging my hard work on the book by neglecting this delicate publicity time immediately following its release?

Maybe, but it's totally worth it.

*Note: If you're reading this at Facebook right now, you can thank the magic of RSS feeds!

It's About Time

Five years. FIVE YEARS.

I know that there are plenty of writers out there who work their fingers to the bone for decades to produce a work that they are proud of, but it usually only takes me a year or so to get a book written that I'm happy with. Not this time.

No, my most loved and hated work to date, the book that I can feel in my bones is a "game changer" for my career, the project that nearly gave me an ulcer when I got stuck three quarters of the way through--this book took nearly five years.

Today marks the end of my final revisions. Content edit is done. Line edit is done. The story has been formatted for print and now I'm combing through and checking every little dot and line for mistakes that my nearly-dead brain may have missed earlier.

I thought I'd be relieved, but the feeling is strangely bittersweet. Adding to the surreal mix of emotions is the coincidence that I dreamed last night about hanging out with a famous writer who I look up to greatly, but who died many years ago. Is my subconscious trying to encourage me or scare me to death? I'm still not sure.

The only thing I know for sure right now is that I'm living through the end of a creative cycle and it hurts. When it's done, and in a few weeks I have a book in my hand, I hope that it will all be worth it.

Today, an old project ends. Tomorrow, a new project starts.