In Her Place is submitted. It'll be live once it clears moderation, a few hours, maybe a day. Then it's all there, start to finish. Go read it.
I've pitched this one a couple of times already, so I'll keep it short: a daughter who barely knew her dead mother teaches herself to become her, and walks into her grieving father's dark as the wife he lost. Three people who can't survive one woman's absence, each reaching for her through the others, and not one of them able to stop.
A word before you start, so you go in calibrated. This is the outlier in what I do, the warmest book I've got in a catalog that mostly runs cold and cruel. It's nothing like a Prison Daddy or a Father's Weekend, those are built to disturb you, this one is built to move you. It's the one with real tenderness in it, people who reach each other instead of only using each other, and something close to grace by the end. It carries more feeling than most of what I write. That doesn't make it a fairy tale, there's no tidy happy ending here or anywhere under my name, I don't write those. But the ache in it is the ache of people finding something real in the last place on earth they should have found it.
There's an afterword at the end, Chapter 28. It's me stepping out from behind the book to talk about how it got made, and it's meant for after you've finished, not before. It changes nothing in the story and there's no twist hiding in it, so if you'd rather keep the book whole and never hear the writer explain himself, you lose nothing skipping it. If you're the other kind of reader, it's waiting.
This is the one I've said is me reaching for whatever Raw Prose had. Whether it gets there isn't mine to decide, it's yours. That's the whole reason I hand these over.
One thing while I've got you: keep sending me ideas. I almost never take a premise straight, these come out of my own head, but a good idea leaves a residue, and it shifts the shape of what I reach for next in ways even I can't trace. A strong premise can carry a story further than careful writing ever will, so I don't take a single one for granted, even the ones it looks like I do nothing with. Nothing here lands in a void.
One more thing before I go. This book closes out a strange, lucky stretch. The last few weeks the ideas came faster than I could get them down, and I'm sitting on a handful of them now, each with a hook I can't stop picking at. One is the coldest thing I've built in a long time, all horror where this book had a heart. A couple of the others go places I haven't taken this pen before. I'm not naming them and I'm not dating them, and that part's deliberate. The fun for me is not knowing which one takes hold until I'm already inside it, and a deadline is the fastest way to smother that. When one's ready, you'll hear it here.
But that's all for later. The finished book is the one right in front of you. Go read In Her Place. The rest is just me getting ahead of myself.
— Kinjite
PS, one unrelated question while I have you. How much does cover art actually matter to you? I put real hours into the covers, and I honestly can't tell whether they pull anyone in or whether I'm making them mostly for myself. Is a cover what makes you click, a nice bonus you'd read past anyway, or something you barely notice? Let me know, blunt is welcome.