This Week on the Balcony...

My regular newsletter thingy, with news, thoughts, and an excerpt from my WIP

Hey there, everyone!

First off, I wanted to do a quick check-in with everyone on here. A subscriber let me know that they were having trouble unsubscribing from the fan fiction email notifications––I deliberately set those up in a separate “section” on this blog, so that you could unsubscribe from those and still get the newsletter, and everything else if you wanted. Has anyone else had this problem? If so, please let me know with either an email or a note in the comments! If this is a widespread problem, I’ll stop sending emails that notify people about new chapters, and just mention them as part of this weekly newsletter. I’ll still put up new ones 2X a week, and people who want to check them out can read them on here whenever they want.

Please weigh in if you have feelings about this! Or if you want me to put anything else in a “section” so you can unsubscribe, let me know that, too! I really don’t want to be spamming people with unwanted emails. I know we ALL get too much of that crap these days, and I never want to do that to anyone else.

Elsewhere in news, I admit I’m pretty sad about the big fires in Los Angeles. I only lived there for about two years, but I absolutely loved it, and was planning to go back. I also have a lot of friends there still, so to see these beautiful neighborhoods get devastated by what looks like wind tunnels from a hellscape infernal is both terrifying and depressing. All of my friends are safe so far, thank goodness, but a handful have been evacuated and some have already lost their homes. Some lost childhood homes they grew up in, and whole neighborhoods, which is just heartbreaking. Anyway, I really hope everyone on here is safe and that they get those awful fires under control soon. If you live in L.A. and are experiencing this, you’re definitely in my thoughts.

Otherwise, I’m still avoiding a fair bit of the news, to be honest, and mostly working on writing and writing-related work, with occasional walks and errands and talks with friends thrown in. We had a pretty amazing sunset the other night. It barely looked real, to be honest, and the photo really doesn’t do it justice.

Otherwise, it’s been really green and lovely if cold here. A friend of mine remarked on Bluesky that it looks like The Shire, and I had to laugh, mostly because I know what it’s like the rest of the year. But she’s right, you’d never know it’s close to a desert here in the summer. If you squint and ignore the mountains in the background, it could almost look like the English countryside, or New England, at least.

The weird collection of ducks we get every winter as they escape the cold of the north for a few months is back, too, most of them squabbling over rights to the pond, and likely looking for a little feathery squeeze in preparation for spring.

So yes, the ducks and the Shire and the walking and the yoga and the spending time with my parents is relaxing and grounding and feels healthy, and it’s good for me to focus on staying relaxed right now, because frankly, the world feels more than a little crazy and chaotic at the moment, and there’s a lot of evidence it will get worse.

That said, I’m sure some of my subconscious thoughts around this are leaking into my fiction in one form or another. It’s inevitable, really, as people can only create with the instrument they have, which is their own mind and who they are as a person, and there’s no divorcing the art from the person in any real sense, however much people might want to debate that point.

So… that brings me to the writing itself.

I don’t know if I mentioned this last week, but I ended up chucking out a bunch of what I’d originally written for the current Quentin Black, but I ended up being glad I did. Not because the writing was bad, but just because there was something about that initial storyline that flat-out wasn’t working for me. This new thread feels much cleaner, so despite the frustration of starting over in a lot of ways (I went down about 25K words, sadly), I feel I made the right choice. I’m still hoping to have it finished, if not by my birthday, then by the end of the month.

Just for fun, here’s a tiny bit from an early chapter (it’s mostly unedited, so rough):

“Where?” I asked. “Travel where?”

“I was told France. Possibly.”

“Which part of France?” My eyebrow quirked, although I knew he wouldn’t see it.

“The southern-ish part. And possibly Paris.”

“How far south are we talking?” I asked, a faint suspicion in my voice.

“Possibly the part with water,” he admitted.

“So this ‘job’ requires me to put off my own work for a few weeks, go with you to hang out in Paris and on the Mediterranean in the South of France?” I clarified. Remembering what I’d just been thinking about needing time away, just the two of us, I stifled a smile. “How… convenient.”

“I thought so.” I heard him smile back, but his voice turned serious right after. “We’ll start here, though, Miriam. And if you’re going to do this, I’d like you to come back to the building. Now, preferably. Well, as soon as possible. There’s a time element. You, me, and Nick have something we need to go do right away.”

“Nick?” I frowned for real that time. “It’s daytime.”

“This is indoors.”

“We’d still need to drive there––”

“It’s fine, Miri. Nick will be fine.”

My skepticism rose, and he must have felt it, because he exhaled in frustration. “You could be halfway here by now.”

“I could be halfway to my car by now,” I corrected.

“But on your way. You could be on your way, doc. And I could explain everything to you that much faster when you got here.”

That was fair. Why was I arguing with him?

“Okay,” I conceded. “Should I grab Angel?”

“Angel’s on her way, too.”

I let out an open snort.

I’d lost, though. I could feel that I’d lost.

Whether he’d specifically meant to or not, he’d managed to intrigue me.

It was more than that, though. I felt my lips twitch. I also felt a pleasurable and slightly achey warmth in my chest.

I wanted to do this, I realized.

Maybe this was exactly what I needed. Maybe I needed it more than a vacation, more than some voyeuristic tour through my normal-seeming, more “human” life before I met Black. Maybe I didn’t need normalcy at all, whatever normal even looked like now. Maybe what I really needed was something to do. Maybe I needed to exercise my mind. And maybe it was pathetic, but it’s possible all I needed was to feel useful again.

Like I was doing something that actually mattered.

Whatever the exact truth, I realized I wanted to do this job with Black.

I wanted to work on his crazy, bizarrely-secret case with him.

And he wanted me on that case, too.

And I’ll be writing more today, most definitely, as that’s pretty much all that’s on the schedule today, apart from a walk, if I can tear myself away. The beginning of a new novel for me is always the slow part, and I had to rewrite a good chunk of it, given a few missteps, but I’m getting past the rewriting now and sinking my teeth into the mystery itself. It’s funny the things that tripped me up ended up being really small once I figured them out, but they were key to getting into the characters’ heads, so they mattered.

Anyway, so that’s where I’m at right now. I didn’t get to tinker much with audiobooks last weekend since it was my niece’s last weekend before returning to college, but I’ll be doing that this weekend, too.

I’ve got a few more things for you below, but have a lovely rest of your week, a fantastic weekend, if you’re able… and stay safe, at least, if that’s the best you can manage. 🌻

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JC ANDRIJESKI’S Latest Release:

Click the image below to go straight to the sales page, or to read for free on Kindle Unlimited. Or you can scroll down on here for the novel and series blurb.

Gods above, not another war. Not again. Not now.

River comes out of her weeks-long memory hole slowly at first, then all at once. She recognizes Valek, but not their marriage. She knows, somehow, that the house in Pacific Palisades isn’t right, not for her, and not for her friend, Malcolm. She knows the story told to her about why she can’t remember isn’t right, either.

Slowly, she transforms into someone new.

The changes are bigger than her half-bonded and emotionally-volatile husband, Valek, can deal with at first. She turns alien to him overnight, a warrior from the past ready to fight a war he can’t remember.

In an attempt to learn more about her, and what The Eye did to her to change her into someone else, Valek travels to Eureka, California, with Dante, the team’s young organics expert. Meanwhile Jon and Wreg spend time with River herself, and try to come to grips with this “new” version… only to find she increasingly thinks and acts disturbingly like the person they knew during the last apocalyptic war.

The problem is, that person’s been dead for over two thousand years. Now she’s back and ready to fight, but the rest of the team isn’t sure they’re ready to fight with her.

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This Week’s Bookfunnel Sale:

Click the image below to check out the books and authors currently on offer!

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FREE BOOK OF THE MONTH!

As a special treat in 2025, I’m going to be featuring a free book every month for the next twelve months, from an author friend. Here is this month’s free book!

Jesi never wanted a power, but now it might be the coven’s best chance to locate the kidnapped children.

With kids from the coven disappearing, Jesi’s power to see anyone’s past with a touch puts her on the front lines and in the path of a man immune to her power. Trusting her gut, she agrees to work with him.

Chuck’s attempts to solve his current case are fruitless until a beautiful woman walks into his precinct. Now he’s knee deep in magic and wondering if he’s lost his mind, but he can’t walk away when the case turns personal.

Will Chuck be able to accept the supernatural? Will Jesi learn to control her magic in time to find the children? Will their attraction to one another distract them from the case?

Two worlds collide in this thrilling new novel full of secrets, magic, and a romance that will leave you wanting more!

**18+ This novel contains sex and profanity.

Thanks so much for reading! I appreciate you all so much! :)