I’m moving my home base from Substack to my own website, harlomalone.com.

The short version

Everything I’ve been writing here, the process updates, the Jolene sightings, the occasional overshare about my thrifting habits, is moving to a site I actually own. Same me. Same nonsense. New address.

The slightly longer version

I like Substack. I like the community here, and I like that it made starting a newsletter feel possible when the idea of “building a website” sounded like a whole second job I didn’t have time for on top of the one where I invent vampires for a living. But the longer I’ve done this, the more I’ve wanted a space that’s fully mine, one where I control the shape of things instead of working inside someone else’s format.

harlomalone.com is that space. It’s where my books already live, so now the writing about the books gets to live there too. One address instead of three. One home instead of a scattered little archipelago of links.

What happens to you, the subscriber

This is the part I actually want you to read carefully, because I know newsletter migrations can feel like a threat to your inbox peace.

If you’re subscribed to this Substack right now, you don’t need to do anything. Substack has a feature that lets me bring the whole subscriber list over with me, so you’ll keep getting posts delivered the same way you do today. No re-subscribing, no new sign-up form, no risk of falling through the cracks. You’re coming with me whether you lift a finger or not.

What might get weird for a bit

I’d love to tell you this transition will be seamless, but I’ve built enough of my own systems by now to know better. There may be a stretch where formatting looks a little off, or a link points somewhere it shouldn’t, or a post shows up twice because two platforms briefly forgot they were supposed to be talking to each other. If that happens, please just laugh at it with me rather than at me, and know it’s temporary.

I’m asking for a little grace here. Not forever, just for the length of one slightly bumpy move.

Where to find me going forward

harlomalone.com. That’s it, that’s the whole instruction. Bookmark it, or don’t, since your subscription should follow you there automatically anyway.

Thank you for reading this newsletter, for sticking around through however many storage units, ghosts, and vampires I’ve thrown at you, and for being patient with me while I figure out how to be a person with a website instead of just a person with a Substack. Jolene sends her regards, mostly in the form of walking across my keyboard while I wrote this.

More soon, from the new place.

Harlo

Everything Must Go

The bidding on unit 214 started at ten dollars, and Sam was already doing the math on resale before the auctioneer finished his sentence. Her math was always bad. It never once slowed her down. Wren stood a half step behind her, phone already out, pulling up comps out of pure habit.

“Junk,” Wren said, not quietly. “Look at the door seal. Water’s been getting in for years.”

“You said that about the piano unit.”

“The piano unit had a piano in it that we sold for four hundred dollars.”

“See, and yet here we are, still doing this every Saturday.”

Sam leaned in to squint at the door seal herself, and Gary from three units down called out, not bothering to lower his voice, “You two gonna bid or just stand there measuring each other’s pupils again.”

“Bid,” Wren said, too fast, and stepped back like the heat had gotten to her.

The regulars stood in the shade sizing up the units three rows over that still had furniture visible under the gap, because nobody serious wasted a Saturday on something as small as 214. Wren knew most of them by name now, three years into a business that had started as a way to pay off Sam’s car and survived by taking the chances the guys with box trucks wouldn’t bother with. The small units went for the price of a tank of gas, if they went at all. Most weekends that meant mildew. Once or twice a year it meant the piano unit. Nobody so much as glanced at 214, except a woman near the back Wren didn’t recognize, gloves on despite the ninety-four degree heat, watching it like it owed her money.

The auctioneer cracked the padlock and threw the door up. Two seconds of flashlight sweep. Boxes stacked chest-high, a couple of trunks, something that might have been a rolled-up rug wedged in the back. Standard nothing.

“Twenty,” Gary said, mostly out of habit, already glancing back toward the row with the box springs visible under the door.

“Twenty-five,” said Sam, glancing sideways at Wren before she committed, an old reflex she’d never dropped, needing the nod even though she never waited for it.

The gloved woman’s hand twitched, like she was about to raise it, and then she didn’t. She stepped back into the shade instead, like she’d changed her mind.

“Twenty-five going once.”

Nobody else bid. Wren caught the gloved woman’s face for a second before she turned away, and it wasn’t disappointment. It was relief.

“Sold, to the ladies up front, for twenty-five dollars.”

“See,” Sam said, already walking toward the door with the bolt cutters, close enough that her shoulder bumped Wren’s. “This is why you let me talk.”

They hauled it all back to Wren’s garage in two trips, the back seats of Sam’s Outback folded flat and still not quite big enough. Pluff Mud Pickers operated out of that garage: string lights over a folding table, a whiteboard where Wren tracked inventory in handwriting so tidy it made Sam’s look like a ransom note, and an unspoken Friday ritual of pizza and inventory prep that always ended with both of them asleep on opposite ends of the same couch, which was, Wren’s sister kept pointing out, an awful lot of couple behavior for two people who insisted they weren’t.

The first trunk was ordinary. Winter coats, a broken lamp, a coffee can full of loose change that Sam immediately claimed as tip money and dropped into the pocket of Wren’s overalls. The second trunk was heavier than it had any right to be, and when Wren got the latch open, both their hands landed on the lid at the same time and stayed there a beat longer than the moment required.

“Okay,” Wren said, pulling hers back first. “That’s not a rug.”

It was a long wooden case, built to hold a rifle by the look of the hinges, and when Sam popped it open there wasn’t a rifle inside. There was a row of stakes, hand-carved, labeled in careful block letters. ASH. HAWTHORN. WHITE OAK, DO NOT SUBSTITUTE. Next to them, nested in cut foam, a straight razor with a blade so bright it looked wet, and a card that read SILVER PLATE, DO NOT USE ON SKIN CONTACT SUBJECTS.

“This is a costume thing,” Wren said, in the voice of someone trying very hard to make that true.

“There’s a revolver in here, Wren.”

“Is it loaded?”

“It’s loaded with bullets that are the wrong color to be bullets.”

Sam’s hands weren’t quite steady around it. It wasn’t excitement making them shake, not the good version of nerves that came with a solid find. This was smaller and more real: actual fear. Wren clocked it before Sam could hide it, reached over without a word, and took the revolver out of her hands. She thumbed the cylinder open and knocked the cartridges into her palm in one motion, fast and unthinking, a leftover reflex from a childhood spent in the mountains around guns long before she’d ever spent one around a folding table. She set the empty revolver down at the far end of the table as if putting it in time-out. Sam let her. They didn’t talk about it.

They spread it all out across the folding table until it stopped looking like salvage and started looking like evidence. Vials of something clear with Latin written on masking tape. A coil of wire, tagged consecrated silver, 90%, do not touch bare-handed, which Sam picked up anyway before Wren smacked her hand.

“Ow.”

“You’re welcome.”

A Charleston street map, decades old, with red pins and no legend. And at the bottom of the second trunk, wrapped in oilskin like it mattered more than anything else in the unit, a leather ledger.

Wren opened it while Sam eyed the revolver from across the table like a dog that had already bitten someone once. The handwriting was cramped, practical, a man writing fast because he had somewhere to be. Names. Dates. Addresses, some crossed out, some circled twice. Next to each one, a short note in shorthand that took Wren a minute to work out, and then didn’t want to be worked out anymore once she had it.

Ratcliffe, J. Confirmed, 4/12. No incident.

Boone twins. Relocated before contact, flag for spring.

Ferris account closed. Handled personally.

Wren closed the ledger slowly, like it might notice.

“Sam,” she said, and something in her voice made Sam look up from the street map for the first time all night. “I don’t think this was a costume thing.”

They tried to be responsible about it: Wren photographed everything for the spreadsheet before either of them decided what to do with it, because that was the rule, inventory first, panic later. Wren had a category in that spreadsheet for weird, and she’d sworn, more than once, that she’d never need a subcategory. Tonight was not going well for that vow. She posted three photos to the regional pickers’ group with the caption estate find, help ID? looks like movie prop stuff, any collectors interested, because weird stuff always sold, and weird stuff with a story sold even better.

By midnight the post had forty comments, most of them jokes. Bro found the Blade starter kit. Somebody’s dad was really committed to the LARP. And one private message, sent at 12:41 a.m., from an account with no photo and no post history: Take those photos down. Do not post anything else from that unit. I can meet you tomorrow.

Wren texted Sam, both of them somehow still awake at one in the morning instead of just going to sleep, because that would have been the normal thing to do and they had never once done the normal thing.

already deleted the post, Wren texted after. meet at the garage tomorrow? 11? bringing the bat.

obviously

The woman who came in at eleven on the dot was not the gloved woman from the auction. She couldn’t have been older than thirty by the look of her, gorgeous enough that it felt a little insulting, dressed for a much colder climate than a Charleston July. No sweat, either, not one bead of it, though Wren wouldn’t think twice about that until much later. Sam sat up a fraction straighter. Wren noticed, and decided, privately, that she hated that.

“My name is Augusta,” she said. “I run an estate service. A specialized one.” Her eyes moved from Wren to Sam and back, taking in the standing-too-close, the matching worried expressions, and filed it away without comment. “For Dale Pruitt. Who I’m guessing is the man whose unit you won on Saturday.”

“We didn’t know his name,” Wren said. “The auction doesn’t tell you names.”

“No. It wouldn’t.” Augusta sat in the chair Sam offered and folded her hands on the table. They were very still hands, the stillness of someone who’d stopped needing to fidget a long time ago and never really started again. “Dale worked for an organization that doesn’t use a name in front of outsiders. Internally we call it the Vigil. Dale’s job, and I’ll say this plainly because you’ve clearly worked out this wasn’t a costume thing, was hunting.”

“Hunting what,” Sam said, even though the stakes on the table had already answered that.

“Vampires. Occasionally other things, but mostly vampires.” Augusta said it flat and administrative, the same tone you’d use for actuarial work. “It’s legal. That’s the part that usually takes people the longest to sit with. We have no legal standing. Not as citizens, not as persons, not even as protected wildlife. There’s no permit required and no body to report to, because as far as the law is concerned, there’s no body at all. Dale kept very good records because his employer required it. That ledger is a log of his work over eleven years.”

Wren looked down at Ferris account closed. Handled personally, and felt something cold move through her that had nothing to do with the AC.

“You’re one of them,” she said. It wasn’t really a question.

“I am.” Augusta didn’t flinch, didn’t perform reassurance, just let the fact sit there. “I’d like to buy the ledger back. Not the tools, you’re welcome to those. The ledger has names in it. Some are closed accounts, which is a term I’d rather not translate over coffee. Some aren’t. Some are people still alive because Dale never got to them, and I’d very much like them to stay that way before that book ends up photographed online again.”

Sam and Wren looked at each other, a look they’d been perfecting since college: the couch they didn’t flip because the seller was crying, the wedding ring they spent three weeks reuniting with a stranger’s daughter instead of listing, both of them a little too invested in other people’s happy endings for two people who’d never quite managed the conversation about their own.

“How much were you going to offer,” Sam asked.

“Whatever you’d have gotten from a collector. More, if it makes the guilt easier.”

Wren elbowed her before she could look too pleased about that. “We don’t want your money,” she said. “We want to know what happens to the names in that book if we hand it to you instead of, I don’t know, burning it.”

Augusta looked at her for a second like she hadn’t expected the question, and something in her very still face loosened, just enough. “Then I suppose we should discuss that over something stronger than coffee.”

“Stay,” Wren said. “We’ve got more to talk about, and there’s bourbon.” Sam was already up, pulling the bottle down from the shelf where she kept it for emergencies, setting out three glasses instead of coffee mugs. Augusta stayed past midnight, patient in a way that made Wren start to suspect immortality was mostly just a lot of practice. They worked down the list together: a name, a quick check against Dale’s notes, then closed or flagged depending on whether whoever it belonged to might still be in danger.

“How long have you two been together,” Augusta asked, somewhere around the fourth name, not looking up.

“We’re not,” Wren said.

“Together,” Sam said, at the exact same time, a half second slower and a beat too loud.

Augusta looked between them, unbothered, like a woman confirming something she’d already worked out an hour ago, and went back to the ledger.

When Sam got up to refill the bourbon, Augusta turned the full weight of her attention on Wren. “You could save yourself a great deal of time,” she said, “if you just told her.”

Wren’s whole face went hot. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t.” Something amused and ancient moved through Augusta’s expression. “You’ve spent the entire evening a half step from touching her and calling it professional caution. It’s sweet. It’s also a waste of a Saturday you’ll never get back.”

Sam came back before Wren could decide whether to be annoyed or grateful, and the moment folded itself back into the ledger.

An hour later, when Wren went inside for a blanket against the AC, Augusta turned that same attention on Sam.

“You sat up a little straighter when I walked in.”

Sam’s ears went red. “I did not.”

“You did. Don’t worry, I’m flattered. I’m also not the one you should be sitting up straighter for.” Augusta topped off her glass. “You’ve had a good while of practice not knowing that. That’s a long time to keep a secret from someone who already knows it too. For what it’s worth, you should tell her. Whatever it is you keep deciding not to say. Some of us don’t have centuries to waste getting to it, and neither, notably, do you.”

Wren came back with the blanket, and Sam said nothing, and the three of them went back to the ledger like the garage hadn’t just gotten a great deal more honest without either of them noticing.

By the time Augusta stood to leave, blazer still somehow unwrinkled, she’d gone from unreadable stranger to something closer to a terrifying, useful aunt, the type who’d rearrange your spice rack without asking and turn out to be right about it. She left a card on the table on her way out. No name, just a phone number and, underneath, handwriting so neat it looked printed: Call if the book gets heavy. Some weight isn’t meant for two people.

At the door, she paused. “Lock the garage tonight. Not everyone in this business is as polite as I am.”

The door shut behind her before either of them could ask what she meant.

They didn’t sell the revolver, or the stakes, not yet, though Augusta had mentioned a whole undocumented economy for retired hunting gear that made Wren’s collector network look like a lemonade stand. What they kept was the ledger, waiting on the open accounts they’d flagged to work through in daylight, once the adrenaline and the gas station coffee had worn off.

Wren updated the spreadsheet out of habit, typing Unit 214 - Miscellaneous into the category column before she deleted it and left the cell blank. There wasn’t a category for this yet.

Sam sat on the edge of the table next to her, close enough that their knees touched, and this time neither of them bothered pretending they were about to move apart.

“So,” Sam said. “Same time next week? See what else the county’s got going up?”

“After today?”

“Wren. We just found out vampires are real and it’s legal to hunt them. You think I’m skipping the next auction now?”

Wren laughed, the first real laugh of the day, and closed the spreadsheet. “Twenty-five dollars. That’s what this cost us.”

“Best flip we ever made,” Sam said, not looking away this time, “and we haven’t even sold anything yet.”

“Augusta got you alone earlier,” Wren said. Not a question.

Sam’s jaw did the thing it did when she was deciding whether to lie about something. “She said I should stop deciding not to say something. Presumptuous, for a woman I’ve known four hours.”

“She said the same thing to me. Nearly word for word.”

“Efficient. I respect that in a woman who’s probably older than the state of South Carolina.” A beat. “Are you going to make me go first?”

Wren thought about the revolver, about the fear that had been on Sam’s face right before she’d taken it from her, and about how she hadn’t had to think for even a second before reaching for it. “I took that gun from you earlier because you were scared, and I couldn’t just sit there and watch that. And when I actually think about it, that’s not new. I’ve been doing that for a long time and calling it friendship.” She made herself keep looking at Sam instead of the table. “I’m in love with you. That’s the thing Augusta meant.”

“I know,” Sam said, quiet now, no jokes left in it. “I’m in love with you too. Have been for about three years, if we’re doing full honesty tonight.”

“Three years.” Wren dropped her head into her hands. “We’re idiots. We are actual, certified idiots.”

“Complete idiots,” Sam agreed, sounding delighted about it. “I’ve got a whole timeline. It starts with the piano unit.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s a little funny.” Sam’s knee stayed right where it was, against hers. “Gary’s going to be insufferable about this.”

“Gary doesn’t need to know anything.”

“Gary’s going to know within the hour. Gary always knows.” Sam reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind Wren’s ear, unhurried, like she’d already done it a thousand times in a life they just hadn’t gotten around to living yet. “For the record, I wasn’t measuring your pupils back there. I know exactly what I was doing.”

“What were you doing.”

“This,” Sam said, and kissed her.

It was not, Wren would think later, an elegant kiss, both of them half perched on a folding table surrounded by consecrated silver and a dead man’s ledger, laughing into it because three years of not doing this had built up a pressure that finally had somewhere to go. Somewhere in there Sam’s elbow caught one of the stakes and sent it rolling off the table, and Wren caught it out of the air without even looking, which was either a very good sign or a very concerning one. Neither of them examined that too closely either.

Outside, past the string lights, something shifted along the hedge at the edge of the driveway. Gloved, maybe. Too still to be nothing, too quick to be sure of. Gone before either of them could have looked up, if either of them had been inclined to look up at all.

They clung to each other instead, holding on like letting go might undo the last five minutes. When they finally broke apart, Sam kept her forehead against Wren’s like she wasn’t in any hurry to put the distance back.

“For what it’s worth,” Wren said, a little breathless, “the piano unit was two and a half years ago. Not three.”

“I’m rounding up. I’ve earned it.”

Wren laughed, low, and took Sam’s hand, already walking backward toward the door that led into the house, pulling Sam with her, a look on her face that made her intentions extremely clear.

“The ledger,” Sam said, laughing, letting herself be pulled anyway. “We should probably lock the safe.”

Wren groaned, doubled back, and shoved the ledger into the safe two-handed, spinning the dial without really looking at it, faster than either of them had moved all night for anything that wasn’t each other. “Locked. Happy? Inside. Now.”

Sam didn’t wait to be told twice. She caught Wren’s hand and pulled her the rest of the way through the door before either of them could find one more thing to double back for.

Gary’s text about Thursday’s auction went unread, forgotten somewhere between the table and the door. There would be other auctions, more of the Vigil probably, more names in ledgers, and maybe, if that shape by the hedge meant anything, more reasons to lock the door behind them. That was a problem for the morning. Tonight there was only the garage, going dark behind them, and three years of a joke that had finally stopped being one.

If you want more of Pluff Mud Pickers, the Vigil, these two idiots who finally said it out loud, and whoever was watching them do it, let me know. This one’s got legs.

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The witch is still in the attic. I’m still writing.

That’s the short version. Here’s the slightly longer one.

Since the last post, I’ve stopped circling the map and actually started walking it. Obviously is in draft. Real chapters, real prose, nine of them plus two shorter chapters from a different point of view, which belongs to the witch in the attic, who has opinions and a very precise handwriting and has been documenting the entire romance from above the floorboards in what I can only describe as real-time field notes.

The archivist is Colette. She reads objects by touching them, which means she spends her days at a government desk processing other people’s confiscated magical history, and her evenings increasingly in a storage room full of things past residents left behind, working a side job she technically didn’t have to take. She runs hot as a side effect of her power. This becomes relevant.

The vampire is Margot. She runs the safe haven out of a house that has been loved long enough to have opinions about who comes through its door, and she shows up to most scenes with paint on her hands because she copes by fixing things, which is extremely her. She has been alive long enough to have stopped wanting things for herself, which is a problem that the book is in the process of solving whether she consents to it or not.

The house has already decided. Everyone else is catching up.

The thing about the two of them is that they are both extremely observant people who have somehow failed to observe the most obvious thing in the room, which is that they are falling for each other in real time, in front of six witnesses, one of whom is keeping records. The house figured it out by week two. Callum figured it out by the time he made the second cup of tea. Nadia is timing it. The witch in the attic has a whole section.

Colette and Margot are the last to know. This is, if you’ll forgive me, very on-brand for both of them.

What I can tell you is that the warm-funny-ensemble-cast shape I described last time is holding. Better than holding, actually. The characters are showing up more fully than I expected once I started writing them in sequence rather than just describing them to myself in outline form. Callum in particular. Callum is quietly one of my favorite people I’ve ever put in a book and he says almost nothing and I’m choosing not to examine why that is.

The other thing I can tell you is that I’ve been less present here than usual because I’ve had my hands full elsewhere. Some of you may already know what I mean by that, and if so, no comment, no confirmation, none of your business, moving on. What I will say is that the other project has kept me busy in a way that is good for the work even when it’s bad for my sleep schedule, and I’m not sorry about it, and I’ll be back here more regularly now that a certain draft is done and out of my hair.

Obviously is where I live right now. Twenty-one chapters, every beat already mapped, the actual writing is the part where I find out which beats I was wrong about. So far I’ve been wrong about one thing and right about everything else, which is a better ratio than I usually manage.

The witch in the attic wants me to be more specific about my progress. I’ve told her she doesn’t get editorial input until she comes downstairs. She remains unmoved by this.

More soon. Actually soon this time.

Harlo

I solved a three-week creative crisis by inventing a woman who fakes her own death and then just... doesn’t leave. She moves into the attic. She stays there. Nobody tells her to. It is, weirdly, the most well-adjusted decision anyone in this book makes.

Anyway. Let me back up.

Last week I wrote you a post about a story I couldn’t place. An archivist who can read the history of objects, a vampire who runs a safe haven out of a house that has opinions, a murder, a ring, a slow burn romance across twenty-one chapters. I had the whole thing mapped and I still didn’t know what kind of book it was.

I said it was too serious for one shelf and too warm for another. I said I couldn’t make the murder funny enough to outrun the grief of it, and I couldn’t take the murder out without losing the reason Colette earns her place in the house. I told you I didn’t have a resolution. I said I’d keep sitting with it.

I sat with it for a few days, on and off, the way you do when something is more interesting to think about than to commit to. And then I finally just sat down and built the comedy version all the way through, beat by beat, all twenty-one chapters, to see if it would hold.

It held.

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect:

There’s a witch in this house whose whole power is witnessing. Someone who sees what actually happened and can’t be lied to about it, can’t be talked out of what she knows. Everyone believes she died early on. She didn’t. She’s been in the attic the whole time, hiding, because the man who came looking for the ring thinks he already got what he needed and left her alone after that. The house has known the entire time and has just never mentioned it to anyone, because the house is a building and buildings don’t have to testify. I have not yet figured out what she’s been eating up there for several chapters and at some point I am going to have to commit to an answer.

She’s up there writing field notes. About everyone. About the entire romance happening two floors down, in real time, increasingly smug about being right.

That one character changed everything for me. The serious version of this book doesn’t have room for a woman in the rafters narrating a romance she’s not supposed to know is happening. The serious version is tight and careful and the grief means exactly what it means and there’s no air pocket in it for that kind of joke. But the comedy version does have room, and once I let her in, the whole thing loosened up enough to breathe.

And weirdly the romance hits harder in the comedy version. Not less. I wasn’t expecting that. I think it’s because you spend so much time laughing that when the real moment comes, the almost-kiss, the heat finally finding somewhere to go, it catches you a little off guard. It costs more because you weren’t braced for it.

So. I know what this one is now, mostly because I stopped trying to force it into being something else and just looked at what was actually in front of me. Warm, funny, ensemble cast, house with opinions, murder as the engine but the found family as the actual point. That’s the shape of pretty much everything I write, apparently, and I fought it for weeks before admitting it.

The title is Obviously.

It came out of asking what the story is actually about underneath everything else, which is two people falling for each other while literally everyone around them can see it happening, including a sentient building, and the two people it’s happening to are the last to know. The witch in the attic probably wrote that exact word in her notes by day three. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to let the reader see her notes directly or just hear about them secondhand. Still working that out.

The serious version isn’t gone. I don’t know what to do with it yet, and that’s genuinely a separate problem I’m not ready to solve today.

I don’t have a draft of this one. What I have is a map I trust, which after the last few weeks of going in circles feels like a real win. Twenty-one chapters, every beat, the fern, the ring, the attic, the ending where someone finally reads the field notes out loud.

Now I just have to write it. The witch in the attic would like me to note, for the record, that she has been ready this whole time and the rest of us are the bottleneck.

More soon.

Harlo

And I still don’t know what it is.

Here’s the premise:

Colette is a government archivist with a rare kind of magic that lets her read the history of objects, feel who touched them and what they carried and what they meant. She’s organized, warm, runs hot from her power, hasn’t taken a day off in years. She processes confiscated magical items for the government and she’s slightly bored and she doesn’t know yet that she’s capable of more than she was taught.

Valentyne is a vampire. She owns a supernatural safe haven, a registered legally recognized building that houses people who needed somewhere safe to land. The building is alive in the way old buildings get when they’ve been loved for a long time. It has opinions. It keeps track of things. It likes certain people immediately and Valentyne has learned to pay attention to that.

Valentyne loses her journal on a bus. It ends up in Colette’s archive. Colette reads two pages before she catches herself. Not with her power, just with her eyes, because the handwriting is interesting and the person writing it is clearly someone who cares deeply about a house full of people and is held together with stubbornness and very little sleep. A citizenship card falls out from between the pages, being used as a bookmark. Of course it is.

Colette brings it back. The house notices her the moment she steps inside.

Valentyne, who has paint on her hands and a toolbox on the hallway table because she’s been fixing things all day to cope with being stuck inside, is relieved in a way that’s slightly more than the situation warrants. She gives Colette a brief tour. She’s apologetic about the state of things. The house, which is opinionated about people, keeps adjusting. A door that was slightly ajar settles open a little further. A light steadies. Colette clocks it professionally and says nothing.

Before Colette leaves Valentyne mentions, impulsively, that she has boxes of things left behind by past residents. Some of it is magical and she doesn’t know whether to lock it up or get rid of it. If Colette ever wanted to make some side money she’d be glad to have someone who actually knew what they were looking at go through it. It’s a practical offer made because Colette mentioned her job and Valentyne thought useful before she thought anything else.

Colette says yes. She tells herself it’s a reasonable side project.

She comes back on Saturday with her kit. Valentyne sets her up in the storage room, moves things without being asked, finds a better table, positions it near the window because the light is better there, disappears and comes back with a more comfortable chair. She’s slightly apologetic about the state of it. The residents drift past in the way of people who share hallways. Each one finds a reason to glance into the storage room. By the afternoon Colette has found a luck charm that’s been quietly affecting the mood of anyone who walks past it for approximately four years. She tells Valentyne, who stares at it and says that explains a great deal about the third floor hallway. It’s the first time Colette laughs in the house.

Valentyne keeps coming back into the storage room. She needs the hammer, then the paint, then something else. It’s also where the tools are. These two things are related.

That evening the house’s resident hedge witch and self-appointed cook is making dinner and Colette gets absorbed into the kitchen entirely by accident. She’s one of five siblings. She grew up cooking for crowds. They fall into an easy rhythm within ten minutes and by the time dinner is ready they have an understanding.

At the table Valentyne’s hand brushes Colette’s arm. The heat that Colette has been quietly managing all day, the residue of hours of archival work and her power running warm the way it always does, pulls toward Valentyne like it found somewhere to go. Valentyne goes very still. Colette picks up her fork. Neither of them says anything about it for the rest of the meal.

The next morning there’s a brunch. Colette and the cook have already been texting. Valentyne finds out when one of the residents mentions it over coffee, which is how she finds out most things that happen in her own house. The table is full in a way it hasn’t been in a long time. Valentyne sits at the head of it with her glass. Blood, room temperature, regular cup, no ceremony. Because the table is where everyone is. Colette notices, passes her the salt without being asked, moves on. Valentyne watches her do this and files it away.

There’s a walk home one evening. It gets dark, Valentyne offers, they walk. Two people on a quiet street with no professional pretext and nothing that needs doing. When they reach Colette’s building they both pause a beat too long before saying goodnight.

There are back steps, late, Colette overheating from frustration and stress and a day’s worth of unburned power, Valentyne following her out with a cool drink and sitting above her on the step. Hands on shoulders. The particular geometry of sitting too close. An almost-kiss that gets interrupted by a half-translucent resident who couldn’t sleep and comes to sit on the bottom step because the garden is quiet, and the moment just — dissolves. They go inside. Neither of them talks about it.

One of the residents — one of the residents — a documentation witch who writes truth compulsively and can’t falsify in writing — is killed. Her room is locked from the inside. The police come, find nothing actionable in a building full of supernaturals, and leave a card nobody will call. Colette, who has weeks of leave banked and nowhere to be, stays.

The killer is a charming, legally sophisticated supernatural who used the house’s own wards against it to get to her. She had something of his, a ring that holds the encoded truth of a crime he committed, and he came to take it back. He can’t find it because Colette already has it. He knows what Colette is. His power reads other supernaturals on sight and when he looks at her he knows exactly what she can do and exactly why she can’t stop him with it.

The romance is a slow burn between two people who keep ending up in the same room and don’t examine why. Valentyne is clumsy in the way of someone with too many things on her mind, always fixing something, gravitates toward Colette physically without understanding what she’s doing. Colette is organized and warm and the kind of person who shows up. She’s one of five siblings, she grew up cooking for crowds, she plans dinners and assigns everyone a task and just assumes people will stay. She’s instantly struck by Valentyne and she waits patiently for Valentyne to figure out what she already knows.

There’s a temperature dynamic. Colette runs hot from her power and Valentyne, being a vampire, is literally cool. Skin contact draws the heat off. Neither of them has language for this for most of the book.

The house has an ensemble of residents who become a found family. One of them is a fae who carries the same fern through every moment of crisis and it always helps, inexplicably. The house cook sets one extra place at the table at the celebration dinner and nobody mentions it. A half-ghost who flickers when she’s stressed stops flickering when it’s finally over and stands in the hallway looking at her own hands.

I like this book. I don’t know if it’s good but I can’t stop thinking about it.

I have no idea where it lives.

Ack!

Here’s the problem. I write under two names. Harlo Malone handles cozy paranormal mystery: warm, ensemble-driven, a little funny, safe. Ruby Devereau handles darker paranormal romance: spicier, more gothic, real edges. The split works. It’s clean. I know which stories go where.

This one doesn’t go anywhere cleanly.

It’s too serious for Harlo. The murder isn’t a puzzle, it’s a grief. the killer isn’t surprising, he’s genuinely threatening. The legal world these characters live in isn’t background texture, it’s actively hostile in ways that create real stakes. The romance isn’t just warm. It costs both of them something. Valentyne hasn’t let herself want anything for herself in a very long time. Centuries, actually. The kiss at the end of Chapter 20 is described in the outline as the most deliberate thing she’s ever done, which for a woman who has been alive for several hundred years is saying something.

But it’s not Ruby either. Colette and Valentyne are too warm for Ruby’s register. The brunch scene, the cook’s coffee, a fae and their fern, the good mugs. That’s not gothic. The house having opinions about who gets to belong to it is not dark paranormal romance. It’s something else.

I spent a long time trying to make it fit. I pulled at the edges. I thought about lightening the antagonist, making the murder less personal, adjusting the tone. Every time I did that I felt something go wrong. The book knows what it is. It just doesn’t fit my shelves.

And then I thought: what if it’s a comedy? Because it could be. The bones are there. Valentyne showing up to a dinner she was specifically briefed on with the completely wrong thing and nobody being able to explain how. A fae named a fae who carries the same fern through every moment of crisis and it always helps, inexplicably. A luck charm that’s been quietly ruining the third floor hallway for four years. A vampire who keeps coming back into the storage room for tools she may or may not actually need. There’s a version of this book that leans into all of that and becomes something lighter and funnier and I could probably write it.

But every time I try to see it that way the ring whispers here, look, here and she is dead and the house is grieving and I can’t make it funny enough to outrun that.

So then I think: what if it’s just a romance? Strip the mystery back, let the found family be the engine, let Colette and Valentyne be the whole point. No murder, no antagonist, just two women and a house with opinions and a slow burn that takes twenty-one chapters to resolve. That’s a book. That’s probably a good book.

But something goes wrong there too. The ring needs to mean something. She needs to matter. The investigation is how Colette earns her place in the house — not just as a guest who stayed, but as someone the house reached for in the night when something went wrong. Take the mystery out and she’s just a woman who moved in because her apartment flooded.

So. Four options. None of them feel complete. The book just sits there being all of them at once, waiting for me to figure out what to do about it.

So here’s where I am: I have a story about a woman who runs hot and a vampire who runs cold and a house that decides things and a murder that matters and a romance that takes the whole book to arrive at and when it does it’s worth every chapter. And I don’t know what to do with it.

I’m writing this partly to think out loud and partly because I suspect some of you have been here — with a story that outgrows the container you built for it, that refuses to be what you needed it to be, that just sits there being itself at you until you figure out what to do about it.

I don’t have a resolution yet. I’m going to keep sitting with it.

But I wanted to tell you about the fern.

Here is something I have learned about myself recently: I contain multitudes. Specifically, I contain two very different writers who apparently share a brain and a coffee habit but not much else.

Let me back up.

The pause on book three

Inconveniently Haunted was always going to be a trilogy. A Haunting Before I Do, The Static, and one more book to close it out properly. I know that. I believe that. I am just not ready to write it yet. Book three deserves to be the ending, and right now I do not have the ending. So I am putting it down gently and trusting that it will be there when I do.

This is not giving up. This is not losing the thread. This is me being honest that forcing it would make it worse, and these characters deserve better than that.

The shiny thing

In the meantime, something new has pulled at me. A Harlo Malone story called Blood Ledger, though I will be honest with you: that name probably will not survive. The story I originally tried to write went somewhere too dark, too heavy, and I followed it right off the edge before I realized it was not a Harlo story anymore. So I am starting fresh. Same bones, different register. Lighter. Warmer. More like itself.

Is this shiny object syndrome? Maybe a little. But it feels like more than that today, and I have learned to trust that feeling.

The other writer

Here is where it gets interesting. While I have been sorting through what is ready to edit, I have noticed something: the other manuscripts do not belong to Harlo. They are darker. Spicier. They have storylines that go places Harlo does not go. Apparently I have a whole other creative register that has been quietly writing its own things this whole time.

That writer is Ruby Devereau.

I am still figuring out what this means for how I show up here and what I share and when. Two voices, two vibes, two audiences that might overlap a little or might not at all. I do not have it sorted yet, but I am sitting with it.

If Ruby is your vibe

If the darker, spicier side of things sounds more like what you are looking for, Ruby has a Substack and an Instagram. I will not be keeping them updated as frequently, but they are there:

rubydevereau.substack.com AND instagram.com/rubydevereau

Go find her if she sounds like your kind of trouble.

For now I will be here, figuring out who Harlo is next, and apparently rewriting a book that finally knows what it wants to be.

More soon.

Harlo

Hey folks.

So I got my ketamine infusion this week, which means I spent Friday being chemically reorganized in a medical setting. The experience was: approximately as disorienting as advertised, and also clarifying in the way that things are clarifying when your brain chemistry gets properly adjusted. I don’t recommend the process casually. I also don’t recommend not doing it when you need to. Not sure there’s a middle ground, but I’m not looking for one.

By midday I was functional enough to have an opinion again, which is when the book situation became its own particular kind of problem.

Book Update

The Museum of Ephemeral Arts is live as an ebook right now. You can have it immediately. The paperback is coming—72 hours, maybe less if I stop breaking KDP’s formatting in small specific ways. There’s a whole situation with the cover design and which software needs which file type and whose job it is to care about the discrepancy. I’ve learned a lot about stuff I didn’t need to know. The book itself is finished. The book is genuinely finished. It’s the apparatus around the book that apparently requires an advanced degree in technical specifications.

The book is worth it though. I’ve known this for days but it’s different when you see it actually exist in the world, when someone can just... acquire it.

What I’m Actually Doing Right Now

Beyond fixing cover files, I’m rebuilding my social media entirely. Not from scratch, that’s hyperbolic. But I’ve realized I’ve been invisible in places I should be visible. So I’m writing more, posting more, using Instagram in a way that requires actually opening Instagram regularly, which is its own adjustment. If you follow me there, you’re going to see more of me. That’s intentional.

I also joined a private message group specifically for sapphic writers. It’s new. A few people. Everyone’s either working on something or recently finished something or thinking very hard about starting something. The energy is right—supportive without being saccharine, honest about the work without being cruel about it. I’m hopeful. Finding your actual writing community is harder than people talk about. Most of my life I thought maybe I just wasn’t supposed to have one.

I still don’t know if that’s true. But I’m not stopping looking.

The Other Thing

I’ve been working on Shadow Pine Lodge while managing the actual book releases. This book is not like my other books. It’s dark and it’s spicy and it has gratuitous violence that serves the narrative. It has a happy ending but it’s not a gentle happy ending. It lives in a different genre category and it knows it, so it’s going under a pen name: Ruby Devereau.

I created three extra chapters today. This was not planned. I was editing and the story just wanted more. So now I have more. This is the kind of editing where you’re not fixing things so much as you’re letting the thing be what it actually wants to be, which takes longer than fixing and is usually worth it.

I’m hoping to have Ruby’s book ready within the month.

The Thing I Keep Meaning To Say

Thank you for being here. For reading whatever I’m writing that week, whether it’s this newsletter or a book or a post on social media. The feedback matters. The fact that something I made found you and was worth your time—that actually matters.

I’m trying to be more visible. I’m trying to find my people. I’m trying to remember that the work is worth doing even when the apparatus around it is frustrating.

All of that is easier when someone’s paying attention.

Alright. Back to the editing.

Harlo

The Museum of Ephemeral Arts: A Mel Jones Mystery is live on Amazon.

I need a moment with that sentence because I have been working toward it for a long time and it still doesn’t feel entirely real.

Here is what I can tell you about the book:

It is a paranormal cozy mystery about a woman named Mel Jones who has been aware of the dead since she was nine years old. When she takes a job as a tour guide at the Museum of Ephemeral Arts, a building dedicated to preserving the last of things, she immediately knows the east corridor is trying to tell her something. What she finds buried behind a wall built to hide it changes everything. A lost WPA mural. A Romani artist named Bette Heron who died in 1938 under circumstances nobody looked at too closely. And a love story that has been waiting eighty-six years for someone to find it.

It has a slow burn romance. A found family of museum staff who become the people Mel didn’t know she needed. A cat named Jolene who has opinions about everything and shares them selectively. And a ghost who has been waiting long enough.

I drew the cover myself. It is a cafe style pen and ink sketch of the museum and when I look at it I still get a little excited, which I think means it’s right.

The paperback is coming soon.

If you read it, I would love to know what you think. A review on Amazon, however short, makes an enormous difference for an indie author and I will be grateful for every single one.

If you know someone who loves paranormal cozy mysteries, ghost stories, slow burn romance, or museums, please send them this way.

And if you have been here since the beginning, or if you just arrived today, thank you. Genuinely. You showing up here matters more than you know.

The museum is open. Mel is waiting.

Find it on Amazon here: https://a.co/d/0gYibtMk

I mean I actually finished it. Edited it, formatted it, wrote the copyright page and the dedication and the about the author and the book description and figured out KDP categories and keywords and royalty percentages. I did all of it. The book is done and it is sitting there waiting for me to hit a button and let it exist in the world.

And I am scared out of my mind.

Here is the cover.

I drew it myself.

I want to say that plainly because I think it matters. I couldn’t afford a cover artist. I have been sick for a long time and money has been tight and the list of things I couldn’t afford was longer than I wanted it to be. But the book needed a cover and I needed the book to exist, so I sat down and I drew it. It is a cafe style pen and ink sketch of the museum in the book, the Museum of Ephemeral Arts, a converted Victorian townhouse attached to a mismatched seventies annex that collects the last of things.

I am not a great artist. I will tell you that upfront. But when I look at this cover I get excited, and it feels real in a way nothing else about this process has made it feel real, and I think that counts for something.

The book is called The Museum of Ephemeral Arts: A Mel Jones Mystery.

Mel Jones has been aware of the dead since she was nine years old. When she takes a job as a tour guide at the Museum of Ephemeral Arts she immediately knows the east corridor is trying to tell her something. What she finds buried behind a wall built to hide it changes everything. A lost WPA mural. A Romani artist who died in 1938 under circumstances nobody looked at too closely. And a love story that has been waiting eighty-six years for someone to find it.

It is a paranormal cozy mystery. It has a slow burn romance. It has a found family of museum staff who become the people Mel didn’t know she needed. It has a cat named Jolene who has opinions. And it has a ghost who has been waiting long enough.

I have been working on this book for a while. Longer than I planned. I have been sick and I have been scared and there have been days when finishing felt impossible and days when it felt like the only thing keeping me functional. My wife has been beside me through all of it, which is the part of this I am most grateful for and the hardest part to put into words.

I am neurodivergent in several directions at once, which means I feel everything about this very loudly and all at the same time. The excitement and the terror and the pride and the doubt are not taking turns. They are all just here, simultaneously, at full volume.

But I am ready.

I am scared and I am ready and those two things are apparently not mutually exclusive, which is something I am choosing to believe today.

The book goes live soon. I will post the link the moment it does.

If you have been here since the beginning, thank you. If you just arrived, welcome. Either way, I am glad you are here for this part.

The museum is waiting.

Find the book and everything else at harlomalone.com

Come find me on Substack at harlowrites.substack.com

I have a confession to make.

I have been writing a cozy mystery and telling almost no one.

Not because I’m ashamed of it. Not because I don’t think it’s good. But because telling people means it’s real, and real things can fail, and I have enough going on in my head without adding that particular anxiety to the pile. I am neurodivergent in several directions at once, which is a polite way of saying my brain is a lot. I am, as I like to say, a real party. The party is sometimes on fire, but it’s a party.

What I’m less good at is finishing things without the world knowing I started them. So here we are. You know now. All thirty-two of you, and whoever stumbled in from somewhere else, hello, welcome, I’m sorry, it’s a bit chaotic in here, there’s coffee somewhere if you can find it.

The Book

The book is called The Museum of Ephemeral Arts: A Mel Tate Mystery.

It is a paranormal cozy mystery set in a museum dedicated to preserving the last of things, vanishing trades, forgotten sounds, dying crafts, the objects nobody else thought worth keeping. The museum has been collecting things for over a century. It turns out it has also been collecting people.

Mel Tate is the museum’s new tour guide. She is tall, pale, freckled, and in possession of a grey streak at her left temple that appeared at thirty-five and which she decided, after approximately four days of consideration, suited her. She has brown hair that catches amber in the right light, eyes that shift between brown and almost green depending on the day, laugh lines she earned the hard way, and forty-four composition books filled with a notation system she invented when she was nine years old.

She has been aware of the dead since she was nine years old.

She doesn’t call herself a medium. She dislikes the word. If you pressed her, really pressed her, the way almost nobody does because she has spent thirty-two years being professionally warm and personally careful, she would tell you she is a witness. She finds the ones who need finding. She is present for things that happened without anyone present. She makes sure someone knows.

In the east corridor of the Museum of Ephemeral Arts, something has been waiting to be found for eighty-six years.

Mel is going to find it.

The Romance (Or The Possibility Of It)

I want to mention Harper Voss, because I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t.

Harper is the museum’s IT department, which in a small museum means she is also the person everyone calls when something needs documenting, filming, or fixing, and since she is good with a camera she ends up doing all of those things regularly. She has raven black hair with small braids and wraps and two purple streaks that catch the light when she moves. She wears a raw stone pendant on a silver wire wrap around her neck, dark and shifting between near-black and deep bruised purple depending on the angle. She pairs knit sweaters with combat boots. She has opinions about symmetry that run counter to the general consensus. She paints on Sunday mornings in the corner of her apartment with the right light, three hours, no phone.

She is direct, warm, deliberate, and patient in a way that is clearly a choice rather than a default.

She has been paying a very specific quality of attention to Mel since October.

Mel has been filing this under do not examine since approximately the first conversation they had, which was about cable housing and which Harper made considerably more interesting than cable housing has any right to be.

I’ll leave it there. You’ll have to read the book.

The Part Where I Get Personal

Here is what I didn’t expect about writing Mel Tate.

I expected to write a character. I did not expect to write a character and then spend several months having an ongoing and somewhat unsettling conversation with myself about why she felt so familiar.

Mel has systems. Elaborate, carefully maintained systems for keeping the world around her at a manageable distance. A notation system for the dead. A filing system for her feelings. Boxes within boxes within boxes for the things she is not ready to examine. She has been building these systems since she was nine years old and they work, mostly, until they don’t, and then she has to figure out where she actually stands without the scaffolding.

I have systems too. Mine are less elegant. Mine involve lists that breed other lists, which breed further lists that I may or may not follow or pay attention to, and the deep personal conviction that if I can just organize this one more thing, the inside of my head will become a manageable place to live. It has not yet become a manageable place to live. I remain optimistic.

The thing about being neurodivergent in the specific way that I am is that your brain is simultaneously trying to control everything and unable to control anything. You build systems because the alternative is freefall. And then sometimes the systems become the problem because you’re so busy maintaining the scaffolding that you forget what you were building in the first place.

Writing Mel, watching her slowly run out of room to file things, watching her choose, eventually, to stop filing and just feel, was more personal than I planned for. It messed with my neuroses, to use the technical term. I saw myself in her in ways that were uncomfortable and clarifying and occasionally required me to go and lie in the sun with my cat until I felt like a person again.

Which is also something Mel does, for the record. She and the cat share a philosophical approach to sunlight.

I don’t know if that makes the book better. I think it probably does. I also think it made the writing harder, and I want to say that out loud because I don’t see enough writers talking about the specific difficulty of writing yourself without meaning to.

The Editing Situation (Or: I Killed A Tree)

Here is where we are right now.

The book is written. All twelve chapters and an epilogue. I have a complete manuscript and a character I love and a mystery that resolves properly and a romance that earns itself and a ghost who has been waiting eighty-six years and deserves every page she gets.

I have also printed the entire manuscript.

I killed a tree. I’m sorry about the tree. The tree died in service of something I hope is worth it.

The printed manuscript is sitting on my kitchen table and I am going to take it outside, away from the laptop, away from the screen, away from the seventeen other tabs I have open, and I am going to mark it up like a bad test. Red pen. Margin notes. The whole thing. And then I am going to bring those changes back to the digital document and make them.

My goal is to get through this editing pass this week.

I am saying that here because saying it here means you know, and you knowing means I have to do it.

I also want to be honest that I have two other books sitting in various stages of editing, Shadow Pine Lodge and Last Knight, and they are looking at me from the editing room with the patient, slightly wounded expressions of manuscripts that know they are not the priority right now. I chose the museum. I’m choosing Mel and Harper and Bette and the east corridor and the notation system and forty-four volumes of testimony.

I hope I can stay focused on it. I’m going to try very hard to stay focused on it.

The Publishing Plan (Or: The Part Where I Make A Decision And Hope For The Best)

When this is done, when the red pen has done its work and the digital document has been updated and the manuscript is as good as I can make it, I am going to publish it on Amazon.

Just Amazon, this time. Kindle Unlimited.

I’ve published on Draft2Digital before. The books looked nicer. The distribution was wider. I sold very few copies. I’ve done better on Kindle. Most paranormal cozy mystery readers, in my completely unscientific and anxiety-driven assessment, are probably Kindle readers. Kindle Unlimited is where a lot of cozy readers live. So that’s where I’m going.

Will I regret this? Possibly. I don’t know. I’m doing it anyway, because at some point you have to make a decision and live with it, and I have enough unresolved decisions in my head without adding this one to the permanent rotation.

If it goes badly I’ll tell you about it here. That feels like the honest approach.

The Thing I Want To Say Before I Go

I’m new to doing this publicly. Writing, yes, I’ve been writing forever, in the way that people with obsessive thinking tend to do things forever, completely and without stopping. But talking about writing publicly, building an audience, putting the process somewhere people can see it, that’s new and it makes me feel like I’m showing up to a very organized party wearing the wrong thing.

Other writers on Substack seem to have it together. They have content plans and posting schedules and a clear sense of what their newsletter is. I have thirty-two subscribers, a dead tree on my desk, and a cozy mystery about a woman who witnesses ghosts and is slowly, carefully falling in love.

I think that’s enough to be going on with.

If you’re here, whether you’ve been here since the beginning or you just arrived today, thank you. I’m going to try to show you something real. The writing and the mess and the figuring it out. All of it.

The museum is waiting.

I said more soon and here I am. A gold star for follow-through.

A few things have happened since I last wrote. The tribunal is still deliberating on Last Knight. I am still not obsessively refreshing my messages. (I am still obsessively refreshing my messages.) And somewhere in the background of all of this, while I was busy being distracted and waiting and doing the particular kind of not-working that looks a lot like staring at a document, I sent Shadow Pine Lodge to beta readers.

I say “sent” like it was a planned, intentional act. It was more like: I had done the work, it was as ready as I could get it, and there were people I trusted who had offered, and so I said yes and hit send before I could talk myself out of it. Vera and Avery are in other people’s hands now. My neurodivergent vampire is out there in the world, on other people’s screens, being read by people who are not me, and I am choosing not to think about this too hard.

What I am thinking about instead, what has genuinely been pulling me back in, is The Museum of Ephemeral Arts.

Let me tell you about Mel.

Mel is forty-one, meticulous, and quietly capable in the way of someone who has spent years being the only person taking something seriously. She has been able to see the dead since childhood. Her mother was the first ghost she ever saw whole, she said goodbye to her as a teenager, and that experience is the reason the notebooks exist. Forty-three of them, now nearly forty-four. A system built out of necessity, refined over thirty-two years.

She takes a job as a tour guide at a museum dedicated to vanishing things, forgotten trades, lost sounds, the smell of industries that no longer exist. The museum’s philosophy is simple: the forgotten thing is worth keeping. Mel has believed this her whole life. She just usually believes it about people.

The east corridor has been cold since anyone can remember. The sensor keeps going off. And something in the wall has been waiting a very long time for someone to pay attention.

What Mel finds, slowly and carefully, alongside an archivist with strong opinions about misfiled records and a technology specialist who is brazen and tactile and the exact opposite of Mel’s careful containment, is Bette Heron. Romani muralist, contracted by the WPA Federal Art Project in 1937, painted something extraordinary on the east-facing wall, died there in March 1938, and was subsequently erased. The mural painted over. The records buried. The Aldrich family’s lawyer still turns up, eighty-six years later, to offer money in exchange for calling it all uncertain provenance.

The museum declines. Files the evidence. Uncovers the mural intact beneath a wall.

But Bette’s urgency turns out to be about more than justice.

In the east garden, just outside, softer and harder to read than anything inside the building, there’s something else. Something Mel can barely make out at first, formless and patient, attached to the memory of this place more than to any unfinished business. It’s Caroline. A young Aldrich woman, removed by her family in February 1938, who lived out her full life and came back, after all of it, because she couldn’t let go of the time she’d spent here. Bette doesn’t know she’s there. Caroline doesn’t know Bette is inside. They have been thirty feet apart, and alone, for eighty-six years.

Mel finds them both. Tells them both. Holds the door open and watches them cross the garden to each other.

I wrote that scene and had to go lie down for a while.

This book is quieter than Last Knight in almost every way. More meticulous. Tender in a way I didn’t know I was going to let myself be. It is, at its core, about the work of being heard, and the people rare enough to know how to listen.

It’s also now officially titled The Museum of Ephemeral Arts: A Mel Jones Mystery, which means I have committed to a series identifier, which means Mel is going to need more cases, which is a problem I am delighted to have.

More soon.

Harlo

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Here is a thing I know about myself: I do not recover from writing sprints gracefully.

I crawl out the other side, blinking, slightly feral, having made a mess of my sleep schedule and my kitchen — usually in equal measure. The 24-hour sprint is behind me now, and I’m sitting in that particular aftermath where everything I wrote feels both brilliant and suspect, and I am not yet prepared to look at it closely enough to find out which.

What I can tell you is where things stand. Or at least where I think they stand. Reality may vary.

Last Knight

This one is done.

I think.

Last Knight is the story I did not see coming, which is the kindest thing I can say about it and also the truest. If you’ve been here a while, you know my wheelhouse: found family, fight the power, queer people protecting each other with their whole chests and occasionally their fists. Warmth. Chosen kin. The stubborn insistence that love is a form of resistance.

Last Knight is... different. It lives somewhere darker and wetter, down in the bayou mud, in the gothic South, where grief has a pulse and the air is thick enough to chew. Detective Nicola Knight comes home the way ghosts do: quiet, uninvited, carrying three years of unfinished business in a single duffel bag. It is a story about haunting and being haunted. About the violence you do to yourself by running from the thing that broke you.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Some of you have watched this story try on different outfits.

It started here on Substack as The Collective — an underground system of knowledge, ancient and protected, kept alive by supernatural beings who had been guarding it longer than most civilizations had been keeping records. There was something in that version I loved. The mythology of it. The idea that some information is too dangerous to live in the open and so it gets handed down through creatures who don’t die in the normal way.

Then it became Knights of Menaera, which took a different direction entirely — one where two characters who had absolutely no narrative business being romantically interested in each other became very romantically interested in each other. Long story. It didn’t feel right. The heart of it was pulling somewhere else and I kept trying to make it stay put, which is the fastest way to kill a story’s momentum. So I let it go.

What survived all of that — the mythology, the weight of it, the characters who kept insisting on their own shape — became Last Knight. Nicola Knight came home. The bayou came with her. The rest sorted itself out.

It is also — and this is where I get nervous — spicier than anything I have written before. Considerably spicier. We are talking a different category of heat. My usual work has warmth and tenderness and some romantic tension, but Last Knight has chapters I wrote with my door closed.

So naturally, I sent it to the two people most likely to have completely opposite reactions to it.

The Tribunal

My wife and my best friend/editor are reading it right now. Together? No. Simultaneously? Probably not. In parallel? Yes, and I think about this constantly.

Here is what you need to understand about these two people:

My wife is a librarian — which means she approaches everything she reads with genuine curiosity, care, and a particular kind of expertise in knowing what a story is trying to do. She is also relentlessly, constitutionally, magnificently positive. Not in an empty way. In the way of someone who has read enough books to know that effort and intention matter, and who will find what is working even when other things are not. She was largely off the hook for reading my work. She offered herself up for this one. That terrifies me, actually. That means she meant it.

My best friend, who is also my editor, is a different creature entirely. She is the kind of reader who loves something by making it bleed first. Cynical in the best sense — she does not tell you what you want to hear, she tells you what the story needs. She has talked me off ledges and pushed me off different ones. She is invaluable and occasionally infuriating and exactly who this manuscript needs to survive.

If it gets through both of them — her skepticism and her scrutiny — then maybe it’s ready.

The problem is that “maybe” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I am not great at waiting.

Shadow Pine Lodge (Or: What I Am Supposed to Be Working On)

While the tribunal deliberates, I’m supposed to be working on Shadow Pine Lodge.

I am, technically, working on it. I open the document. I read what I wrote last. I stare at it with the focused intensity of someone who is absolutely not thinking about what is happening in my wife’s and my editor’s reading queues right now.

The Lodge has my attention in the way a thing has your attention when something else has your actual attention. It deserves better. I know this. We’ll get there.

I have created a neurodivergent vampire who I genuinely enjoy putting in uncomfortable situations. That alone should be enough to pull me back in. And it is, a little. But then I remember I’m supposed to be editing, and editing is the part where you have to reckon with every decision you made when you were having fun, and the fun drains right out of the room.

The Real Problem

I have too many open projects, and I’m not built to leave things unfinished.

There’s Last Knight, waiting on its verdict. There’s Shadow Pine Lodge, half-built and patient. There are other things — drafts and outlines and the document titled “THIS ONE” that I haven’t opened in three weeks. All of them sitting in various stages of undress, none of them quite ready to leave the house.

My instinct is always to start something new. Creation is the part I love most — that first reckless chapter where nothing has to be consistent yet, where the characters are still surprising me. Revision is necessary and important and, if I am being honest, a little bit like returning to a crime scene. I see every choice I made. I see the ones that didn’t work. I understand why I made them, and I still have to reckon with them.

I know myself well enough to know that if I abandon these projects for the thrill of something new, I will be furious at myself later. I will have three almost-books where I could have had three actual ones. So I’m staying the course. Revision. Patience. Waiting for feedback from the world’s most opposite readers.

My mental health does not need another war. I have enough of those already.

What I Keep Coming Back To

I never feel like a story is finished. Every draft has seams where you can still see the original idea trying to escape. There are always places for improvement. Sentences that are almost right. Paragraphs I would rewrite if I looked at them one more time, and one more time after that.

At some point you have to let other people hold it.

So I did. I sent Last Knight to two people who care enough to be honest with me, in their very different ways, and now I wait. I work on Shadow Pine Lodge. I do not obsessively refresh my messages.

(I obsessively refresh my messages.)

More soon.

In my last post I mentioned, somewhat casually, that I had a manuscript I was thinking about publishing under a different name so that “certain people in my life” couldn’t find it. I called it “the spicy one.” I made a little joke. I moved on.

Several of you asked follow-up questions. Hi. This is your fault.

First, some context that makes this funnier: Harlo Malone is already a pen name. People know that. It’s not a secret so much as a separation, a writing self I’ve built deliberately, one that has its own Substack and its own Threads and its own readers who found me specifically because they wanted to read what I write. I like Harlo. Harlo is doing okay.

The Last Knight made me consider going further underground. A pen name for the pen name. A whole new identity, unknown and untraceable, under which I could publish the thing I actually wrote without anyone I know in real life ever connecting it to me. I spent real time on this plan. It is, in retrospect, a completely unhinged response to finishing a book.

The problem is not the readers who follow Harlo. The problem is everyone else who followed me before Harlo existed.

Here’s the shape of it: the people on Threads, who found me as a writer and chose to sta, they’re fine. They know what they signed up for. It’s the Facebook and Instagram followers, the ones who knew me first as a person and follow my writing the way you follow a friend’s hobby: supportively, occasionally, without necessarily wanting to read anything that would make eye contact at Christmas feel complicated.

My mother is on Facebook. My college friends are on Instagram. There is a coworker from three jobs ago who I have never unfollowed out of sheer social inertia, which is its own problem I’ll address eventually. When I post something here, I share it there, and then everyone who knew me before I was a writer gets to read it too.

This is fine when I’m writing about writing sprints. It is less fine when the book in question involves a homicide detective returning to New Orleans, a vampire turned without her consent, explicit content that is specific and honest and very much intended and two women I love completely working out what it means to become something they didn’t choose.

That last part is the real problem, actually. Not the explicit content, though that’s in there and I stand by it. It’s that I care about these characters more than is comfortable, more than I can easily explain to someone who knows me as a person first and a writer second. The heat in this book exists because the story requires intimacy to mean something. Victoria and Nicola are working through a genuinely thorny question about consent and desire and what’s real when magic is involved, and none of that works if I keep them at arm’s length. So I didn’t. And now it’s visible how much I didn’t, and that’s the exposure I wasn’t entirely prepared for.

· · ·

Since the sprint, things have gotten more complicated rather than less. A scene I wrote at 3am shifted what the book is actually about in ways I’m still catching up to. Some things in my own life have been throwing the themes into uncomfortable relief. And I’ve been living with the knowledge that I told several hundred people this book exists, which means I’ve created accountability for myself entirely by accident — not a strategy I would recommend, but apparently one I keep using.

The second pen name idea died the way bad plans usually do: I thought it through to the end. It would mean maintaining a separate identity indefinitely, treating the work as something to be hidden, and deciding that the most honest writing I’ve done is also the writing I’m least willing to stand behind. That’s not a line I want to draw. I’ve written things smaller than they wanted to be. I know what that costs, and what it looks like when it’s done — like something that almost got there.

The Last Knight is not almost. So Harlo is finishing it, and Harlo is publishing it, and the Facebook followers are going to have to decide for themselves whether to keep reading.

I’m not brave yet. I’m just further along than I was, which is honestly how bravery works, not a switch you flip but a direction you keep choosing, one slightly-too-honest Substack post at a time.

And if you’re one of the people I specifically hoped would close the tab at the beginning of this… well. Now you know. Harlo did this. I hope the turkey isn’t too dry this year.

Have you ever written something that made you want to invent a whole new identity just to publish it? Comments are open. I’m apparently in the business of making things difficult for myself and I’d love the company.

Leave a comment

This weekend I did something I’ve been turning over in my mind since I signed up for it: I joined the London Writer’s Salon’s 24-Hour Writing Sprint, wrote through the night without sleeping, and came out the other side with four manuscripts in various states of completion and a very specific kind of tired that I don’t have a better word for than earned.

This is my attempt to write it down before the feeling fades.

What the London Writers’ Salon Is

Before I get into the sprint itself, I want to talk about the organization behind it, because I think it matters.

The is a global writing community built around one core idea: that writing, especially when done in community, makes for a healthier and more meaningful life. They offer live author interviews and masterclasses, a private member community, and courses. But the heartbeat of LWS is something called Writers’ Hour.

Writers’ Hour is a free daily writing session, open to everyone. Four sessions run every weekday: 8am London, 8am New York City, 8am Los Angeles, and 8am Melbourne or Wellington depending on the time of year. There is also a Saturday morning session at 9am London. You show up, you write for an hour alongside other writers around the world, and you leave. That is it. They offer a free seven-day trial, and if you cannot afford the suggested monthly membership after that, they will give you free access with no questions asked.

I have found a steadiness in those sessions that I did not expect. The 24-Hour Sprint, which only happens once a year, is a different creature entirely. It is the Writers’ Hour format taken to its most extreme form: a full day and night of structured writing sessions with breaks between each hour block, held globally and open to all.

I have been going to Writers’ Hour long enough to trust the LWS structure. That trust is a big part of why I signed up for the sprint.

What the Sprint Actually Is

The 24-Hour Writing Sprint runs as a free global event. Structured sessions with built-in breaks keep you from just staring into the void alone. There is something about knowing hundreds of other writers are also awake somewhere, also fighting their sentences at 3am, that does something to your resolve. I leaned on that more than I expected.

I went in with a plan: four manuscripts, roughly six hours each. What actually happened was messier, more interesting, and more revealing than the plan.

The Four Projects

I have been carrying all four of these manuscripts for a while. Some of them longer than I want to admit. Going into the sprint, I wanted to either finish a first draft or complete a full edit pass on each one. Here is the honest account.

Manuscript #1: The Immortal Record

Time spent: Approximately 6 hours

Status going in: Unfinished first draft

Status coming out: Complete first draft

This one went the way I hoped it would. The Immortal Record follows Bailey Hallowell, a burned-out archaeologist who arrives in the Shenandoah Valley two years after a professional failure that taught her exactly the wrong lesson. What she finds there is a colleague’s abandoned research and a woman named Corinna Blackwood, who has been signing her name to land records in this valley, under different names, since before the United States was a country.

Corinna is not a vampire or a ghost. She is a woman who formed a bond with the land five centuries ago and has been held by it ever since, carrying the accumulated weight of everyone she has ever loved and everything the valley has ever recorded. The land itself is a living archive. And when Bailey arrives, someone is trying to extract it.

What drew me to this story and what kept me writing through the fatigue is that it is fundamentally a love story between two women who have both, for very different reasons, learned not to want things they cannot keep. Watching that break open over the course of the draft was worth the sleeplessness.

I have a full first draft now. I get to revise it. I have been waiting to say that for a year.

Manuscript #2: The Museum of Ephemeral Arts

Time spent: Shorter than planned, as time was borrowed for manuscript #3

Status going in: Existing draft (third or fourth)

Status coming out: Touched the chapters that needed it, but not the full pass I had planned

This one I feel tenderness and mild guilt about in equal measure. The Museum of Ephemeral Arts is a ghost story and a love story, and it centers on Mel Malone, who has spent thirty-two years quietly finding the people who died with something unfinished. She keeps forty-four notebooks in a shorthand no one else can read. One month into her job at a museum that collects almost-lost things (dying trades, vanishing skills), she knows something is in the east corridor. Standard practice: she has not told anyone yet.

What she finds is Bette Heron, a Romani muralist who painted something extraordinary in that corridor in 1937 and 1938, and was murdered before she could see it finished. The murder was covered up cleanly. The mural was painted over. Eighty-six years later, Bette is still there, bound by an object in the basement that has been quietly holding the unresolved dead of the building since 1899.

It is a book about institutional memory and chosen family and the specific cost of being the kind of person who can hear what most people cannot. It deserved more hours than I gave it. Next time.

Manuscript #3: The Last Knight

Time spent: More than planned. I borrowed time from both manuscripts #2 and #4 to give it what it needed.

Status going in: Sitting mostly untouched for over a year

Status coming out: Significantly further along

I will be honest: this is the spicy one. I have been sitting on it partly because of nerves. It is extra, it is extra extra, and I have half-joked with myself about publishing it under a pen name so that certain people in my life cannot find it. (Hi, if you somehow found this. Please close the tab.)

The Last Knight is an urban fantasy set in New Orleans. Nicola Knight is a homicide detective returning to the city after three years away, following the death of her wife. She walks into a body in the garden of romance novelist Grace Broadchurch and within hours, everything she thought she understood about her life, her family history, and the nature of the world begins to come apart.

Nicola’s bloodline has guarded a supernatural threshold for centuries. The sigil her grandmother carved into her at seven years old was not a family tradition. Grace, meanwhile, was turned into a vampire without her consent while dying of a brain tumor, forced to reckon with a survival that cost her the death she had chosen and the life she had built.

The question at the heart of this book is what it means to be asked to become something you did not choose to be. I love that question. I love these women. I have been afraid to let people read them, which probably means I have to.

The New Orleans setting does real work throughout: a city built on layers of buried and occasionally escaping history, which is exactly what the book is about. The sprint broke something loose in this manuscript that I had been stuck behind. That alone was worth the whole night.

Manuscript #4: Shadow Pine Lodge

Time spent: Got through chapter 4 of 17

Status going in: Needed editing

Status coming out: Partially edited, with significant work remaining

Shadow Pine Lodge follows Vera Montgomery, a three hundred year old vampire who has spent the last two years working as a public library archivist, managing her nature the way she manages everything: carefully, precisely, and at considerable personal cost. Her colleagues do not know what she is. The woman she has been quietly, catastrophically falling in love with does not know what she is.

When the four of them take a weekend trip to a supernatural lodge deep in old growth pines, a neutrality zone that sounds safe and turns out to be the opposite, everything Vera has spent three centuries holding together comes apart at the boundary line.

This book has real darkness in it and I did not write around any of it. Vera and Avery’s relationship is physical and specific and earned, and the horror and the heat come from the same place. I only made it to chapter 4, but those four chapters are cleaner and more honest than they were before I started.

Seventeen chapters is a long way from four, but I will get there.

What I Learned

The plan is a fiction you tell yourself to start. I went in with four equal blocks of six hours. By hour fourteen I had redistributed everything in ways I could not have predicted. That is fine. The sprint is not about executing the plan. It is about doing the work.

Fatigue is clarifying in a specific way. Somewhere around 2am, the part of my brain that second-guesses goes quiet. What is left is just the story and what it needs. Some of my best sentences from the weekend came from that window. I do not recommend running on no sleep as a lifestyle, but as a tool, it has a strange integrity to it.

The community matters more than I thought it would. The structured breaks, knowing other people were in it too: that scaffolding held me up more than I expected. Writing is lonely by nature. A 24-hour sprint where you are genuinely not alone is a different experience than writing alone for 24 hours. It sounds like a small distinction. It is not.

I was more afraid of these manuscripts than I realized. Especially The Last Knight. Putting hours into it, real hours, middle-of-the-night hours, forced a kind of commitment I had been avoiding. I cannot un-love it now. That is probably what I needed.

What’s Next

I have a first draft of The Immortal Record to revise. I have chapters of The Museum of Ephemeral Arts that need more time. I have a manuscript that terrifies me and that I now have to finish because I have already told you about it. And I have thirteen more chapters of Shadow Pine Lodge to edit.

None of this is small. All of it is mine.

If you have been thinking about building a more consistent writing practice, I genuinely recommend starting with the London Writer’s Salon’s Writers’ Hour. It runs every weekday morning across four time zones and it is the kind of quiet accountability that adds up over time. The 24-Hour Sprint only comes around once a year, but the daily sessions are there whenever you are ready for them. You can find out more at londonwriterssalon.com.

I went into the sprint hoping to make progress. I came out having moved something I had not been able to move alone.

That is what this is for.

Have you done a writing sprint or marathon session? I would love to know what broke loose for you. Drop it in the comments.

Hello, hello, hello,

I’ve spent the last few weeks submerged in two different worlds that are beginning to bleed into one another in ways I didn’t entirely expect. If you’ve been following along, you know I have a soft spot for dusty basements and things that shouldn’t be there. These two new projects have both in spades.

In one corner: Shadow Pine Lodge

Meet Vera. She’s a librarian who prefers the five-in-the-morning silence of a library basement—a place that “belongs to you completely” before the world wakes up. Vera is meticulous, cautious, and has been “careful” for about three hundred years. She carries a silver amulet that allows her to move through the daylight unnoticed, but a newly discovered journal from 1749 New Orleans is about to make her quiet life a lot more complicated.

In the other corner: The Museum of Ephemeral Arts

Then there’s Mel. Mel has been filling notebooks with a language nobody else speaks since she was nine years old. Now, she’s working at a museum that specializes in the temporary—aroma archives and “signals” in the walls. But the Museum has collected more than just exhibits over the last century; it’s collected people, too. And something is surfacing through the floorboards of the East Corridor that even Mel’s forty-four volumes of notes haven’t quite prepared her for.

The Intersection

The most exciting part of this process has been watching these two women—one who hides from time and one who tracks its echoes, finally cross paths. When a “Casket of Echoes” is discovered in the museum’s basement, it turns out that a certain librarian with an 18th, century ledger might be the only person who knows what they’re actually dealing with.

The Big Push: 24 Hours of Writing

To get these two worlds fully onto the page, I’m doing something slightly mid century madness: I’m joining the London Writers’ Salon for their annual 24 Hour Writing Sprint this Friday, April 24th.

It’s exactly what it sounds like, writers chasing the 8:00 AM hour across every time zone from Tokyo to London to Los Angeles. I’ll be caffeinated, probably slightly delirious by hour eighteen, and determined to see exactly how Vera and Mel handle the “Casket of Echoes.”

I’m currently deep in the “rigorous probablys” of the editing phase, as Mel would say, I’m building the picture first.

I’d love to hear from you: Are you more drawn to the quiet, centuries old secrets of a library archive, or the flickering, high tech hauntings of a modern museum? Let me know in the comments while I go stock up on espresso.

More soon,

Harlo

The Static is out.

It came out March 26th, which means by the time you’re reading this, it has officially existed in the world for a little while, and I am still in the phase where I refresh my dashboard more than I’d like to admit and then feel vaguely embarrassed about refreshing my dashboard more than I’d like to admit.

Here’s the honest version of where I’m at: I’m not selling a lot. The Static is out, A Haunting Before I Do is out, and the numbers are small. Not catastrophic, not heartbreaking — just small. And I have to keep reminding myself, in the way you have to remind yourself of things you already intellectually know but can’t quite feel yet, that this is new. I am new at this. These books are new. The audience hasn’t found me yet, and that’s a different thing than not existing.

Still, I find myself reassessing the first book more than I’d like — going back to A Haunting Before I Do with a different kind of eye now that I have a second one out. Is it the right entry point? Is it doing what I need it to do? I don’t have clean answers yet. I’m sitting with the questions instead, which feels appropriately uncomfortable and probably correct.

What I do know is that I’m proud of both of them. I meant them. That has to count.

Meanwhile, in the other room of my brain:

The Museum of Ephemeral Arts is officially with my editor.

She is also, full disclosure, one of my closest friends. Which is either a completely brilliant arrangement or a spectacular way to ruin a friendship, and I genuinely don’t know which yet. What I do know is that she’s one of the smartest, most thoughtful readers I’ve encountered — which is exactly why I wanted her eyes on this manuscript — and I trust that if something isn’t working between us, we’d have a real conversation about it instead of letting it quietly curdle. She’s not the type to let things curdle. Neither am I.

So I’m curious. And a little nervous. But mostly curious.

And now: a question I’d genuinely love your thoughts on.

I’ve been thinking about a second pen name.

I write a range, as it turns out. There’s the Harlo Malone stuff — the supernatural fiction, the cozies, the found families navigating haunted houses and complicated feelings. And then there’s the other stuff. Spicier. More explicit. The kind of content that probably deserves its own home so nobody accidentally picks up a cozy mystery and gets a very different story than they bargained for.

So here’s the actual question: do you think dual pen names are worth the work?

Because it is work. Maintaining two distinct author identities means two sets of social media, two websites, two subscriber lists, two brand voices you have to keep from bleeding together. It means answering to two names, building two audiences from scratch, and hoping that neither one undermines the other. The upside is clean reader expectations — people know exactly what they’re getting, and you get to write in entirely different registers without anyone feeling misled. The separation can be freeing, creatively. It can also be exhausting.

I’m genuinely undecided, and I’d love to hear from you. Have you ever maintained separate identities for different kinds of work? Do you care, as a reader, whether an author’s spicy content lives under a different name? Does it feel authentic or does it feel like a mask?

Tell me. I’m reading everything.

— Harlo

So. It’s done. The Static — Book 2 of the Inconveniently Haunted series — is officially a real object that exists in the world and can be purchased by people who are not related to me. This is either a triumph or a cry for help. Possibly both.

What’s it about (the short version)

Dani Wallace is back, the found family is messier than ever, and it turns out the supernatural governing body that’s been making everyone’s lives difficult is even worse than previously advertised. There’s a spreading threat called the Static, a sanctuary that may not hold, and some legacy plot threads that have been quietly waiting since Book 1 to absolutely ruin your day. It’s cozy-adjacent until it isn’t.

For the newcomers

If you’ve wandered in here without reading A Haunting Before I Do — welcome, no notes, but you should probably start there. It’s Book 1. It’s also available wherever you’re about to buy this one. Think of it as the setup for everything that goes wrong in Book 2, which is a selling point, I promise.

How we got here (the honest version)

I will not pretend this book was easy. There was a draft. There were several drafts after that draft. There was a period where I genuinely questioned every choice I’d made, including the choice to write a second book. And then somehow it became this — something I’m actually proud of, with characters I love and a story I think earns its emotional moments. Jolene supervised the final edits. I don’t know if that helped.

Where to find it

• Ebook + paperback wide (Kobo, Apple Books, B&N, and more) via Draft2Digital: https://books2read.com/u/3RAqyB

• Also on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0iN7PCJg

If you read it, I’d genuinely love a review wherever you bought it. Even a short one. Especially a short one, honestly — they count just as much and take four minutes.

Thanks for being here.

— Harlo

Hi, hello, I’m back. Did you miss me? Don’t answer that. I’ve been gone approximately one week and I have emerged from the other side looking like someone who has been staring at a manuscript in a state of barely-controlled mania, because that is exactly what I have been doing.

Here’s the thing about putting final touches on a book: you think you’re almost done. Then you find one more thing. Then another. Then you’re rereading a scene at midnight wondering if a character would actually say that or if past-you was just tired and needed to move on. Past-you was tired. Present-you is also tired, but present-you is done, and that makes all the difference.

The Static is coming out March 26th.

I know. I KNOW. Book 2 of the Inconveniently Haunted series is actually, genuinely, for-real happening in just a few days. Dani and the whole found family — the ones who’ve been navigating the supernatural politics of Charleston, contending with a governing body that is deeply corrupt in that specifically infuriating way corrupt institutions tend to be, and generally trying to survive things that should not exist — they are coming back. The Static is spreading. Marlowe’s bakery is still standing (for now). And the legacy plot involving Dani’s biological mother Margaret is finally getting its due.

It’s a book I am proud of in a way that feels a little terrifying to admit out loud.

You can pre-order the ebook right now on Amazon. The link is : https://a.co/d/0iN7PCJg

You can pre-order the ebook on Draft2Digital. The link is: https://books2read.com/u/3RAqyB (But the process of rolling it out to other retailers — Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and the rest — take a little time to propagate. If you have a preferred retailer that isn’t showing it yet, sit tight. It’s coming.

One thing I want to be transparent about: The Static will not have an Amazon paperback. I know some of you like a physical copy, and I want to address that directly rather than just let it be a mystery. I was not happy with the quality I got through KDP print — and after putting this much care into a book, I want the physical version to actually feel worthy of it. The paperback will be available through Draft2Digital’s print distribution, which has been a genuinely better experience. (I’m also eyeing IngramSpark for future projects once I actually understand their interface and pricing structure — one new thing at a time, this is how I survive.) So: physical copy, yes. Just not from Amazon.

Meanwhile, on the other side of my creative brain...

The Museum of Ephemeral Arts — the first book of a cozy mystery novella about Mel, a tour guide at a haunted Victorian Charleston museum who can perceive the dead, and the suppressed history of a WPA muralist named Bette Heron — is officially in the hands of my editor.

My editor, who I will simply describe as a freaking genius.

She is a scholar. A teacher. One of the most genuinely interesting people I know, and someone I have been lucky enough to become close to over a shared understanding of what it means to have a brain that works the way ours do. We’re both ADHD. We’ve both navigated the particular joys and complications of mental health, and we’ve bonded over that in the way you can only really bond with someone who gets it — not theoretically, but in the bone-deep way that comes from living it. She brings that same depth of attention and care to everything she does.

I am so excited about what she’s going to do with this manuscript that I almost can’t talk about it calmly. I’m going to try anyway: I’m stoked. She’s going to make it better in ways I probably can’t even anticipate yet, and that’s exactly what a good editor does.

Museum doesn’t have a release date yet — we’ll get there once it’s been through her hands. But it’s in good ones.

That’s the update. Two books in motion, one week of manuscript-brain successfully survived, and a cup of coffee I’ve reheated approximately four times while writing this.

More soon. March 26th. The Static is almost here.

— Harlo

There’s a thing that happens with sequels that nobody warns you about.

You write your first book and somewhere in the middle of it — not at the beginning, not at the end, but in the messy middle where you stop performing and start just writing — you find the voice. The real one. The one that sounds like you and nobody else. By the time you finish, it’s so embedded in the work that you can’t see it anymore. It’s just the way the story sounds.

Then you start the sequel.

And the voice is gone.

Not because you forgot how to write. Not because the story got harder (though it did). But because the first time, you found the voice by accident, through sheer volume of work and necessity and not knowing any better. The second time, you’re trying to find it on purpose. And trying to find a voice on purpose is like trying to fall asleep by really concentrating on it.

This is what happened to me with The Static, the sequel to A Haunting Before I Do.

A Haunting Before I Do has a particular sound. Short sentences. Warm and direct. Humor that comes from situation and character, not from the narrator winking at you. Supernatural things treated as matter-of-fact, because the characters have accepted them and so should you. Emotions shown through what people do and notice, not explained. It trusts the reader completely.

The Static had all the right ingredients. Same characters. Same city. Higher stakes, more history, a plot I genuinely loved. But the prose had drifted. Not catastrophically — a reader might not have been able to name it — but I could feel it. The sentences were longer and more accumulated. The narrator had started explaining things the scene was already showing. Characters would have a difficult moment and then the text would label what had just happened: and that was the moment she understood. Internal monologues translated their own metaphors. The book was working harder than it needed to and landing softer than it should have.

I knew something was off. I didn’t know exactly what.

So I went back to Book One and I read it like a problem to be solved rather than a book to be enjoyed. I made myself articulate the rules — not the content rules, but the sound rules. What this prose does and doesn’t do. How it handles silence. When it uses a long sentence and when it stops. What it never explains.

The diagnosis was useful. It named what had gone wrong in the sequel: the narrator had gotten anxious. Under pressure — more plot, more stakes, more history to convey — the prose had started hedging. Padding. Translating. Doing the reader’s work for them because some part of me wasn’t sure the work was landing.

The fix, once named, was simple to state and hard to execute: cut the anxiety. Trust the scene. Let the dialogue carry what the dialogue can carry. Let the silence mean what the silence means. Stop explaining.

Twenty-one chapters. Every one of them revised with those rules in front of me.

What I found, doing that work, is that the voice had never actually left. It was there in the original draft, in flashes — a line here, a scene there, whole sections that had found the register. The drift wasn’t uniform. Some chapters barely needed touching. Others had accumulated so many anxious habits that the real prose was buried under several layers of well-intentioned narration.

The scenes that needed the most work were, predictably, the most emotionally difficult ones. A bad fight between two characters who love each other. A revelation about a dead parent. A climactic moment that the whole book had been building toward. These were the places where I’d felt the most pressure to make sure the reader felt the right things, and feeling that pressure had made me reach for the wrong tools.

The scenes that needed the least work were the action sequences, the quiet character moments, the places where I’d trusted the story and not thought too hard about whether it was working. Unsurprisingly, those were the ones that were already working.

There’s a lesson in that I’m still sitting with.

The manuscript is done now — all twenty-one chapters, plus a scene I had to write from scratch to fill a gap I found in the continuity review. (A separate adventure. The kinds of things you find when you read your own work carefully: a character who knows something in Chapter 11 that she couldn’t possibly know yet, a title collision between two chapters, a subplot that gets introduced and quietly never resolved.)

It sounds, now, like the book it was always supposed to be. Like A Haunting Before I Do‘s sequel, not like a different author’s attempt at one.

The voice was there the whole time. I just had to stop being so worried about it long enough to let it out.

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I started pulling on that thread and ended up with Maxine, a woman suffocating in a life that fits like a shoe that’s almost the right size, and Veronica, who made an impossible bargain to keep her words alive and has been paying for it ever since. And a library that, it turns out, has opinions about both of them.

This is a short story — around 5,000 words, so settle in. There’s magic, there’s a slow-burn romance, and there’s a ritual that cost me some sleep to write. I hope it costs you a little something too.

The library where Maxine worked smelled like carpet cleaner and other people’s ambitions, and on the Tuesday she decided to leave, she was shelving large-print romances in the wrong order on purpose just to see if anyone would notice. No one did.

Her boss found her in the stacks at noon and asked if she’d be willing to lead the community book club again. He had the soft, apologetic look of a man delivering news he already knew she’d accept. She had been leading the book club for three years. She said yes. She went back to shelving.

Lunch with her mother was at the same diner, the same booth, the same chicken salad, the same conversation arranged in slightly different order. Her mother mentioned a young man from church — kind eyes, good job, recently divorced. “People deserve second chances,” her mother said, in the tone of someone who was not really talking about him.

Maxine drove home after, past the hardware store, up the back stairs to her apartment, and stood in the center of her living room surrounded by travel books she had never used. There were thirty-one of them. She had counted.

She found the journal under her bed that night, the one from when she was sixteen, the cover illustrated with stickers from national parks she hadn’t visited. I will see the world, she had written in handwriting that slanted with urgency. I will live a thousand lives.

She was sitting with that in her hands when she opened her phone and saw the notification: her ex Derek, grinning in a mountain somewhere, arm around a woman in a fleece vest, newly engaged. The caption said she said yes! with three exclamation points. The woman was an adventure guide. Of course she was.

Maxine bought the plane ticket before she could reason herself out of it. One-way to Paris. Departure in twelve days.

She gave notice in the morning. Her boss’s disappointment lasted about four seconds before he said he wasn’t surprised. She had coffee with her best friend Riley, who cycled through excitement and worry so quickly it looked like a single expression. “What are you running from?” Riley asked, and then immediately: “No — what are you running toward?” Maxine said she didn’t know yet. Riley seemed to find this both troubling and correct.

The dinner with her parents was hard in the specific way that comes from too much love and not enough understanding. Her mother cried. Her father was quiet for most of it. But in the driveway afterward, he pressed a folded envelope into her hand. “Your grandmother would have done the same thing,” he said. “She always said you had her spirit.”

Maxine cried in the car, then on the plane. Then the plane lifted, and the town fell away below her, and she opened a novel she’d found in the airport — The Geography of Lost Things — and read the first line three times because it felt, improbably, like a message.

She did not have the romantic Paris experience she had imagined, which is to say she had it exactly, and it wasn’t enough.

She arrived exhausted and oversaturated, checked into a hotel in the Latin Quarter that was cheap in the way that requires forgiveness, and spent her first real day getting lost trying to find the Eiffel Tower. She never made it. She got distracted by a bookshop down a narrow street — Librairie des Oubliés, the sign read, Library of the Forgotten — and went in.

The man behind the counter was ancient and unhurried. His name was Monsieur Laurent. He spoke to her in careful English laced with riddles, watching her with the mild satisfaction of someone watching a familiar play. When she lingered too long over a small volume of Eastern European folktales, he took it from her hands, examined it, and gave it back. “For later in your journey,” he said. Not you might like this. For later.

She tried to ask what he meant. He had already turned away.

She sat by the Seine that evening with the folktale book in her bag and her journal open and felt genuinely, thrillingly alive, and also lonelier than she had felt in years. She called Riley, who asked how it was, and Maxine said, “Good. Strange. I don’t know what I’m doing.” Riley said that was probably the point.

She dreamed that night of a library with green walls and a woman with green eyes who looked at her as though she had been waiting.

A week later she met Julien, a French artist, charming and aesthetically correct in every way. They kissed on a bridge, which she had always wanted. It was nice and completely hollow. She left his apartment in the middle of the night and walked back to her hotel understanding, with sudden clarity, that she wasn’t looking for a romance. She was looking for something she didn’t have a word for yet.

Rome was next. On the train she read the folktale book — stories about shapeshifters, cursed places, impossible bargains — and one kept stopping her: a library that appeared to those who needed it most, guarded by someone who had sacrificed everything to keep its stories alive.

In Rome she met Isabella, an archaeologist, who walked her through the Forum and talked about forgotten histories. “Every stone here is a story someone lived,” Isabella said. “Most are forgotten. Does that make them less real?” Maxine felt something shift in her chest, quiet but irreversible. She was more interested in the forgotten stories than the famous ones. She thought she always had been.

She moved through Scotland after, and Barcelona after that, collecting strangers who said things that felt like directions. A local historian named Agnes, over whisky, told her about thin places and people who were called toward them. You’re being called somewhere. Can you feel it? A storyteller named Catalina told a story about a traveler who found meaning by accident. “The best stories start when you stop planning and start trusting.”

By Barcelona the pull was undeniable — eastward, specific, patient. She stopped planning routes and started following instinct, which involved a train through southern France, a bus through Slovenia, and a long ride in a lorry with a truck driver who asked no questions and offered her half his sandwich.

The town she arrived in had no name on the map she was using. Cobblestones, a quiet square, an elderly woman at the guesthouse who looked at her and said, “You have the look of someone expected.”

“Expected by whom?” Maxine asked.

“By whatever brought you here.”

That night she dreamed of green eyes again. In the morning she knew, in the wordless way that some things are simply known, that she had arrived.

A note: I keep thinking about all the Veronicas. The ones who made the bargain and the ones who didn’t. The ones whose manuscripts are still under someone’s bed, in an attic, in a storage unit somewhere, waiting. This part is for them.

The sign appeared on her third night, after too much wine at a small bar where the locals had been warm and generous and evasive every time she asked about bookshops. She left late, turned around in a tangle of streets she’d walked before, and saw it: The Lost & Forgotten Library. In English, which was strange. The door was ajar. Warm light. Music she couldn’t quite place.

She pushed the door open and fell in.

This was not metaphorical. She caught the edge of the step wrong, stumbled forward, and sent a stack of books into the air. The sound they made when they hit the floor was enormous, operatic, completely disproportionate to the act.

“Are you alright?”

The voice came from the shadows between shelves. Then the woman herself emerged, and Maxine — flat on the floor, surrounded by scattered books, trying to locate her dignity — understood in an instant that this was the woman from her dreams.

She was perhaps thirty, or perhaps ageless in the way that certain people are ageless, wearing a dark suit that belonged to a different decade and watching Maxine with an expression that was equal parts surprise and recognition. Her eyes were green. Of course they were.

“I’m fine,” Maxine said, from the floor. “I’m not always like this.”

“I didn’t assume you were.” The woman extended her hand. “I’m Veronica.”

The library was impossible in the way that the best rooms are impossible — larger inside than out, with shelves that climbed past the reach of the lamplight, and the kind of silence that isn’t empty but full. Maxine stood in the entrance and felt the hair on her arms rise.

Veronica made tea. Maxine, sobering slowly, sat across from her in an office behind the main floor, and they talked until the night shifted toward morning. By the time Veronica offered her the couch, Maxine was warm and strange-feeling and completely unable to leave. She fell asleep to the sound of pages turning somewhere in the dark.

The library in daylight was something else again.

The shelves extended into rooms that hadn’t been visible the night before. There was a hall lined with novels that ended mid-sentence, pages stopping at turning points, full of all the things the author had never gotten to say. There was a garden — indoors, impossibly — where poetry grew between the shelving like it had taken root. There was a children’s wing that Veronica walked her through in silence, and Maxine didn’t ask questions because the silence said enough.

Veronica had prepared breakfast from ingredients Maxine couldn’t account for and answered her questions the way people answer questions they’ve been waiting decades to be asked.

She had been a writer, once. Working-class. Queer. Writing in the 1930s about female desire and autonomy—

“The 1930s,” Maxine said.

“Yes.”

Maxine looked at her. The suit. The ageless quality she’d noticed the night before and filed away without examining. “How long have you been here?”

Veronica met her eyes steadily. “Seventy years, roughly. I stopped counting with precision after the first decade.”

Maxine set down her fork. There was a long pause in which she tried to locate a response that was adequate to this information and failed. “You died,” she finally said.

“Tuberculosis. Alone. Manuscripts under my bed.” Said plainly, the way old grief goes when it’s been turned over so many times it’s worn smooth. “The library appeared to me as a choice. Die forgotten, or serve forever remembered.“

“I didn’t care about the cost,” Veronica said. “I just didn’t want to disappear.”

She couldn’t leave. She couldn’t age. She couldn’t stop. The library was alive, in its way, and she was bound to it — its guardian, its prisoner, its keeper.

Maxine stayed another night. And another. She fell into the rhythm of the place — mornings with Veronica, afternoons exploring, evenings reading by the fireplace while Veronica cataloged and tended. She found the section of authors who had died young, and Veronica showed her the work of Elena Petrovič, a Serbian poet, twenty-four years old, dead in 1915. Maxine read her poems aloud and felt the room change — temperature, quality of light — and saw, briefly, a woman who looked at her with an expression of pure relief before dissolving back into the air.

“When someone reads with real attention, real care,” Veronica explained, “they wake up. Briefly.”

“What happens if no one reads them?”

“They fade.” A pause. “That’s why I’m here.”

One evening Maxine asked about Veronica’s own books. Veronica went quiet in a way that meant yes but not easily. She let Maxine into her private study the next day — sparse and careful, a narrow bed, a desk, shelves of handwritten manuscripts — and stood in the doorway while Maxine read.

The writing was extraordinary. Modernist, raw, precise, decades ahead of its time. Maxine turned pages with a rising feeling she recognized eventually as outrage.

“These should be studied in universities,” she said.

“Wrong gender, wrong time, wrong connections.” Veronica said it without bitterness, which was somehow worse. “The usual story.”

“You wrote about love like you’d never experienced it.”

“I was waiting for it.” Veronica looked at her steadily. “I think I’m still waiting.”

The silence that followed had weight and warmth and the specific quality of something that both of them already knew but neither was ready to say.

Maxine had been there two weeks when she found the diary.

It was tucked in a section of cautionary tales — stories about bargains and their costs — and it belonged to a man named Thomas, a librarian from the 1800s who had been bound here for fifty years. He had fallen in love with a visitor. He had tried to leave with her. The library had trapped him in a book for a decade. When he was released, she was gone.

His final entry: Do not love if you are bound. Do not hope if you are trapped. The library feeds on longing.

She brought it to Veronica, who read it without expression.

“I know,” Veronica said. “I’ve read it a hundred times.”

“Then why did you let me stay? Why did you—”

“Because I’m selfish.” She said it plainly. “Because for the first time in seventy years, I felt alive.”

They argued. Maxine said there had to be a way to break the binding. Veronica said she had spent seventy years looking. Maxine said maybe it took two people. Veronica said maybe it would get them both trapped. Maxine said that was her risk to take. Veronica said she couldn’t watch Maxine sacrifice herself. Maxine said then don’t watch, help me.

They stood in the Reference Room at midnight, pulling books, their hands brushing over spines in the dark.

They found it over several days — fragments from ancient texts on binding spells, folklore about guardians, magical theory about energy exchange. Every binding required three elements: the bound, the anchor, the beneficiary. To break it, they needed to either destroy the anchor (Veronica would die with it), find a replacement (someone willing to take her place), or convince the library to release her.

The library, apparently, could be negotiated with.

But it was the replacement the texts kept returning to. A willing guardian. Someone worthy. Someone who would choose this.

Late one night, exhausted, sharing a bottle of wine that had appeared on the table with no explanation, Veronica told her about Catherine — her first love, her father’s rejection, the boarding house where she died. Maxine told her about a life lived on the surface of itself, and her fear that she was incapable of going any deeper. “Until I met you,” she said. “You’re the first person who’s felt real in years.”

They were very close. The library shook gently, like a warning or a blessing, and a book appeared on the table: The Mirror of Forgotten Reflections. Instructions for its use printed on the inside cover.

The mirror was in a hidden room at the library’s heart, ornately framed, its surface moving like water. Maxine looked first and saw herself at thirty in a life she hadn’t chosen, bitter and small. Then she saw herself here — with Veronica, both of them free, both of them whole. Writing. Traveling. Alive in the full sense of the word.

Veronica looked and saw seventy years of loneliness and then — freedom, sunlight, Maxine’s hand. But also: both of them trapped, fading, the library consuming them both.

“I saw both,” Veronica said, and her voice was very small. “I don’t know which is real.”

Maxine held her. “The mirror shows possibilities. We choose.”

“What if my freedom costs yours?”

“What if staying costs mine? I’m already bound to you, Veronica. The library didn’t do that — I chose it.”

They kissed. The library shook again, and this time it felt like something settling into place.

When they finally pulled apart, a book had fallen open on the table beside them. A spell of unbinding. The requirements were listed clearly: a willing replacement, a ritual of transfer, true love to anchor both souls.

They looked at each other.

“We need to find someone,” Maxine said.

The hardest thing to write in this story wasn’t the ritual. It was William. Because the story needed someone who would genuinely choose this — not out of desperation or obligation, but because it was exactly right for him. I’ve met people like that in real life. The ones who finally find the shape of the thing they were made for. They have a particular look about them. I tried to get it on the page.

She found William in the town square on a Tuesday, which felt right.

He was impossible to miss — a tall man in layered clothing hung with travel patches from every country Maxine had been through and several she hadn’t. He carried an enormous pack and was asking Marta at the café about places of power in the region, which Marta was answering with the careful vagueness the town reserved for strangers who asked the right questions wrong.

Maxine sat down across from him before she’d decided to.

“You’re looking for something specific,” she said.

He studied her. He had a traveler’s face — weathered, open, perpetually interested. “I collect stories,” he said. “Impossible ones. I heard there’s a library here that appears and disappears.”

Her heart moved. “What if I said I could take you there?”

“I’d say you look like someone who’s already found what they were looking for.”

She bought him coffee and told him everything. The library, Veronica, the binding, the mirror, the spell. He listened without interrupting, without disbelief, without the particular expression people used when they were deciding whether to be polite about the fact that they thought you were unwell. When she finished, he was quiet for a moment.

“You want me to take her place,” he said.

“I want you to meet her, see the library, and decide if this is a story you want to be part of.”

“Why would I agree to be imprisoned?”

“Is it imprisonment,” Maxine said, “if it’s the thing you’ve been searching for all along?”

He went quiet again. Then: “Show me.”

The library recognized William before he said a word.

Maxine felt it — a subtle shift in the air, like the building exhaling. William walked through the entrance and stopped and turned in a slow circle with an expression of such complete and particular wonder that Veronica, watching from the doorway of her office, seemed to see something in it she had been waiting to see.

He spent hours exploring. He touched the spines of books the way someone touches the hand of a person they love. In the hall of unfinished novels he stood for a long time, head bowed. In the poetry garden he sat down on the floor among the impossible flowers and read until Maxine had to come and find him.

He witnessed an author manifestation in the evening — a man in Victorian dress who appeared briefly between the shelves, looked at William with gratitude, and dissolved. William sat down on the nearest chair and covered his face with his hands, and when he lowered them his eyes were bright.

“These stories deserve to live,” he said.

Veronica made dinner. The three of them sat together in the firelight, and William told them about himself — a life spent looking for something he’d never been able to name, collecting stories because it was the closest he could get to a purpose that fit. “I’ve always felt like I was meant to be a guardian of something greater than myself,” he said. “But I need to be sure. This is a forever decision.”

Veronica said: take your time. Stay a few days. The library will tell you if it’s right.

After a week, it had told him.

He knew the filing system. He could feel when an author needed attention, a low pull in the chest like a sound just below hearing. He repaired damaged books with a steadiness that Veronica watched with something approaching recognition. The library gave him things it had never offered before — rooms revealed themselves to him, books arrived on his desk without explanation, addressed to his particular questions.

He asked the hard questions honestly. Will I age here? No. Can I ever leave? Not without finding your own replacement. What if I fail? Veronica looked at him and said, “I haven’t failed yet.”

He spent one night alone in the library. In the morning he came out calm and settled, the way a person looks when they’ve made a decision that has made itself.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “But I need one month. To go back, say my goodbyes, settle things. Then I’ll return.”

Veronica said: one month.

He left the next morning with his enormous pack, and the library was quieter without him in a way that felt like proof.

The month was long.

Veronica was afraid he wouldn’t come back — afraid in the thin, careful way of someone who has learned not to want too much. Maxine said he would come back. She said it every morning and believed it, mostly.

They used the time to prepare. They researched the exact ritual requirements, gathered what was needed — salt, candles, the central book at the library’s heart. Veronica wrote William a document, decades of knowledge condensed into a guide: how to listen, how to repair, how to speak to the authors, how to bear it when one finally faded. She spent an afternoon in each of her favorite sections, saying something private to each.

She told Maxine about dying. About the tuberculosis, the rejection, the boarding house with its single window. The library had appeared to her in fever, she thought now, though she’d never been sure if it was real or delirium, and she had said yes before she understood the cost and had not regretted it, exactly. “I thought I’d have no regrets,” she said. “But I do. I regret the life I didn’t live.”

“You’ll live it now,” Maxine said.

Three days before the month was up, William returned.

He was calmer, lighter, carrying only a small bag. He had said his goodbyes. He was ready.

The ritual room was deep in the library’s heart, reached through a passage that had not been there before the night they needed it. The walls were lined with the first books ever written, and the air was ancient and attentive and very still.

At the center, on a stone pedestal, was the library’s heart: a massive book, leather-bound, no title on the cover. Veronica had explained it in her quiet, factual way — it contained the true name of every book, every author, every story the library held. Her own name was written there, bound to it in the ink of whatever agreement she had made in her final fever.

They stood in formation. Veronica at the book. William across from her. Maxine between them, holding both their hands.

Veronica opened the book and the pages glowed, pale gold, and she found her name, still shifting slightly, still tethered.

She spoke the words of release — thanking the library for the years, acknowledging the stories preserved, releasing her claim. Her voice was very steady. Maxine could feel her hand trembling.

William stepped forward. The quill appeared from the air beside him. He wrote his name below Veronica’s and spoke his oath:

I pledge my time to these forgotten stories. I give my life to their preservation. I accept the binding willingly. I become the guardian.

The library answered.

Wind moved through a closed room. Pages fluttered through walls. Voices whispered just below comprehension — all the authors, Maxine thought, all at once. Veronica’s name began to lift from the page, the letters thinning, seventy years of connection pulling free. She gasped. Dropped to her knees. Maxine caught her, both arms around her, saying I’ve got you, I’ve got you.

The threads of light that tore from Veronica’s chest were not metaphorical, or if they were, they were visible anyway — pale filaments unwinding from somewhere behind her sternum, curling upward toward William, who stood with his arms slightly open, his face tilted up, receiving them with the expression of someone walking into a room they have been trying to find their whole life.

Veronica screamed, once, when the final thread broke.

Then silence.

Then William said, from a great and settled distance: “I am the guardian. I am the keeper. I am the library’s heart.”

The book shut. The candles extinguished. In the dark, the library’s voice moved through the room — felt in the chest rather than heard — and said: The exchange is accepted. The guardian is chosen. The bound is freed.

Light returned.

William stood transformed, his bearing changed, his eyes reflecting the shelves the way a pond reflects the sky. Faint script had appeared on the backs of his hands, curling around his knuckles — the names of books, Maxine thought, or the names of authors. Or his own name, written in the language the library used.

Veronica was trembling in Maxine’s arms. Maxine helped her up, slowly, carefully, and they walked together toward the door. The threshold.

Seventy years of threshold.

Veronica’s hand reached it and did not stop.

She stepped through, and kept going, and came out on the other side into a room she had tended for seven decades, and now stood in as a visitor, and then she stopped and pressed both hands to her face and wept — deep, unguarded sobs that Maxine had never heard from her, sounds from a person who had not allowed herself to fall apart in a very long time.

Maxine held her and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and sometimes the kindest thing is just to stay.

Behind them, William had already turned toward the shelves. His hand moved along a row of spines with the focused tenderness of someone beginning work they have been meant to do. He paused once, and looked back, and smiled at them.

“Go,” he said. “I have work to do.”

Veronica lifted her head. She looked at the library — her library, not her library, both things true — and then she looked at Maxine.

“Okay,” she said.

They walked out together, into the town, into the late afternoon light that fell across the cobblestones and the quiet square and the ordinary extraordinary world, and Veronica stopped on the threshold of the building and tipped her face up toward the sky and stood there for a long moment, eyes closed, breathing.

“What does it feel like?” Maxine asked.

Veronica opened her eyes. She considered the question seriously, the way she considered all questions.

“Like a story beginning,” she said.

Maxine took her hand.

They walked.

finis

If you made it this far — thank you. Genuinely. Writing a short story is a strange act of trust; you hand someone five thousand words and hope they follow you all the way to the last line. I’m glad you did.

A note before you go: this story is meant to end here, with Veronica stepping into the light and Maxine taking her hand. But I’ll be honest — I’ve been sitting with these two for a while now, and there’s more story in them than five thousand words can hold. The European travels. Veronica learning what freedom actually feels like after seventy years. The book she might write. The life they might build.

So I’m asking directly: would you want this as a novella?

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If the answer is yes, hit the heart, leave a comment, reply to this email — any of it counts. If there’s enough of you, I’ll write it. Maxine and Veronica deserve the full story, and so do you.